Peter's

The owner of this dump is Peter, who thinks he is Sonny Corleone from The Godfather movie. Peter is a walking stereotype of a 1950s gangster. He talks with a thick Brooklyn type of accent, and he walks around like a rooster, always ready to verbally abuse people or push them around.

His father is probably the real owner. He named the restaurant after his son, but his daughter is the only one that does any work. In one scene when Peter is yelling at, pushing, and punching a bill collector, he knocks down his own father into the front of a moving car. What a total loser Peter is. Sad to see the poor old guy getting knocked around by his own son.

There is nothing positive that I can say about this episode. I was hoping Elliot Ness and the Untouchables would show up at the end to shut it down. It was a disaster, and the place closed soon after Gordon Ramsay's visit. Peter's father died a year later.

The description above says it was filmed in West Babylon, but it's actually just Babylon

I've been a fan of the original "Kitchen Nightmares" since the beginning, but hadn't realized that the new episodes were solely filmed in the United States. But it dawned on me very fast when I heard the narration (that somehow always sounds like an over-eager used-cars-salesman), the rapid editing, commercial breaks, censoring of profanities (since nobody uses them outside of television) and nerve-wrecking music. None of it forebode well.

But the format wasn't the worst part. Compared to the "real deal": in the UK-version we had real people, obviously struggling with keeping their restaurant alive but never-the-less often interesting, even colorful characters. In the US-variation, it's a completely different ballgame. That starts right from the first episode: the "main-character" (aside from chef Ramsay himself) is some character, that obviously is trying to confirm every American-Italian cliché, who not only likes to hear himself talk but desperately wants to be in front of the camera. Indeed, production even treats this person like an antagonist-figure, that the viewer is essentially goaded into disliking. Not that this isn't partly his own fault. Picking fights with bill-collectors, treating his co-workers as if he had just climbed out of some "Godfather"-movie, caring more about his suits than his kitchen - I dare say, had this been a British episode, Ramsay might probably walked out before the show was finished.

It got worst. Ask me what dishes were served on this episode and I'll answer honestly, "I cannot remember". Sure, Ramsay was disgusted by the gunk served to the customers but food had taken second place. From now on, we'd watch this show not for the food or the cooking, but for Ramsay's reaction to it (generally disgusted, though he cannot be blamed for that), the tantrums thrown by all involved, wait for the cockroaches to crawl out of the freezers, etc. Indeed, from now on the show was on it's way to become somewhat of a freak-show.

And yet the worst of all: By the first episode Chef Ramsay seems to have stopped caring. Think of the man what you want, but he in the UK-editions he had always been passionate about the food, passionate about the art and perhaps most important, caring about the people he is supposed to help get through dire straits. Here he merely goes through the motions.

3/10