Kitchen Nightmares Finale: The Secret Garden

Welcome to the season finale of Kitchen Nightmares, the show where each week Chef Gordon Ramsay descends upon a restaurant that has fallen on hard times and helps the owners restore the place to its former glory and maybe beyond. He will do that in less than one week. You can read my recap of last week’s episode here, but it is not necessary, since each episode is its own complete story.

This week finds us at the Secret Garden, a nice little restaurant in Moorpark, California, up in wine country. While this is a great town in which to open a restaurant, the Secret Garden is not doing too well.

We first met Michel, who is the owner of the restaurant and one of the chefs. He tells us that he thinks that he is a good chef. Sammy, one of the waitresses, says that Michel’s problem is that he is French and is a bit arrogant. Another waitress, Jane, echoes those comments. Michel confirms this and says, “When I lose my temper, it is time to run.” We see a short montage of him yelling and shouting at his staff. I can’t wait to see him shout at Gordon Ramsay.

Devon, one of the cooks, agrees and says that Michel has an ego the size of France. Devon also explains that another problem with the restaurant is that they have somehow developed a geriatric crowd and is a nice place to take grandma for dinner. He says that it just isn’t a happenin’ spot on a Saturday night.

And for this and other reasons, Michel finds himself $320,000 in debt. He totals up the night’s tabs and sees that he has brought in a little over $200. “That’s not going to pay the bills, is it?” he remarks to Jane. He tells the camera that he needs help.

And where, oh, where will that help come from? You guessed it. It is our knight in gleaming apron, Chef Gordon Ramsay. He steps off the Amtrak train and, after a brisk hike, finds himself at the restaurant.

For the record, I’ll note that the Amtrak Coast Starlight route to Moorpark would get him there at 10:45 at night, not during the day like was shown. Plus, he would actually have had to take a bus connection to get to Moorpark.

Anyway, Ramsay steps up to the door and finds it locked. That’s a bad sign. He tries several more doors before he finds one labeled “restrooms.” That is the entrance. He steps in and cannot find anyone to seat him. It is 12:45 in the afternoon.

He wanders into the kitchen looking for people and finds Jane and Michel. He chews them out about the awful layout of the place. Michel says that the entrance is actually off the parking lot, rather than the side facing the street.

He goes back into the dining area and sits down. He immediately notices a dirty wine glass. This is not going well. Jane brings out a basket of rolls. Well, one roll, really. She has this huge basket with one lonely roll at the bottom. Ramsay shakes his head sadly.

He looks at the menus and can’t find any normal food; everything has several lines of prose in it. He asks whether the crab is fresh and Jane says that it is canned. Ick. It is not even frozen!

He does select a salad with a very long description but that appears to have both strawberries and shrimp in it. The salad arrives and he calls it disgusting. Additionally, the shrimp is undercooked and cold.

The next course is Roquefort-stuffed filet of beef. He says the meat was tough, like an old boot, the veggies were uncooked, and it was topped with what appeared to be deep-fried shoestring potatoes. The serving plate was greasy and chipped. He doesn’t like it at all.

Ramsay has had enough and goes into the kitchen to talk to Michel. He says, “Don’t take this personally, but your food was crap. It was bizarre, long-winded, and badly done.” Other than that, I suppose, it wasn’t too bad.

Jane tries to stick up for Michel and says that she never gets complaints, except sometimes when the food is cold. Ramsay tells her not to blow smoke up Michel’s bum. She shuts up.

Ramsay asks Michel about the tinned crab meat. He says that since business is so slow, he can’t afford to buy fresh crab since it will go bad quickly. They exchange a few tense words and then Ramsay leaves.

We then get a fun little montage of Michel inside the restaurant calling Ramsay arrogant and Ramsay outside calling Michel arrogant. All I can say is, “Pot, kettle, black.”

The second phase starts a little bit later. It is an inspection of the kitchen. It is not good. Ramsay finds nasty grease traps with years of gunk in them. In the cooler, he finds trays and buckets of unidentified and rotting food. He finds mold everywhere, even on the surfaces and walls of the cooler. Ramsay then finds maggots in the potatoes and rushes off to the bathroom to throw up.

Again I am left to wonder just how restaurant kitchen can get this bad without a health inspector finding it or a staff member insisting it be cleaned up. That is about six out of ten restaurants in episodes I’ve recapped that have been just huge and nasty towers of rotting food. I mean, I used to work at a bad restaurant and we were never even close to this bad.

Michel returns from a nice walk down the street and Ramsay asks him when the last time the place was cleaned. He says, “Yesterday.” Ramsay shows him all the mold and maggots. He also shows him a cake that appears to have finger marks in it (for the record, Ramsay himself put his fingers in that cake earlier in the inspection).