Kitchen Nightmares, Season 2, Episode 11: Café 36

Welcome to the eleventh episode in the second season of Kitchen Nightmares. This is the show where professional chef and entertainer Gordon Ramsay drops in on various failing restaurants across the United States and shows them how to shape up and fix all of their problems. He leaves them with a high class menu, better cooks, and hopefully a legacy of success.

Tonight, we find ourselves in LaGrange, Illinois, near Chicago. Terry and Carol were high-school sweethearts in the area, got married, and two years ago fulfilled their lifelong dream and opened Café 36. It is an upscale American bistro.

But the place isn’t doing so well. One possible problem, as Carol tells us, is that Terry won’t delegate anything and tries to do everything himself, from the vacuuming to the toilet scrubbing to taking reservations. Meanwhile, his staff stands around doing nothing, then taking smoke breaks when the pressure of doing nothing gets to be too much.

Pinto is the head chef and seems like a good guy. He declares the food to be very tasty and Terry agrees. Doug, the server, is not so sure about that. He notes that Pinto doesn’t really run a clean kitchen. We see a couple of shots of Pinto tasting the food with his finger and then, without washing, dipping his finger into someone else’s food. Ick. The running joke among the servers is to ask customers if they want a side of saliva with their food.

Two of the other staff members echo those comments, and say that the café would be much better off without Pinto. The staff worry that Terry and Carol continually rave about Pinto, and maybe they are misplacing their confidence in him.

Pinto tells us that the customers love his cooking. Then, in delicious irony, we see a montage of people complaining about their food and sending it back to the kitchen.

Terry can’t figure out what is going wrong with the restaurant. He says that some nights they will only have six people for the dinner service. He notes that he and Carol haven’t taken a paycheck since they’ve opened the place. The bills are piling up fast and if something doesn’t happen quick to save things, all will be lost. Who in the world can save them?

Yup. You guessed it. It’s our knight in gleaming apron to the rescue! We see Chef Gordon Ramsay step off the train at the LaGrange station. For some reason the name of the train is blurred out. I always thought that public transportation was okay to show on TV. But no matter.

Ramsay soon arrives at the restaurant to have a look around. Terry greets him, sits him down, and hands him a menu. Ramsay asks how many people are booked for lunch today. Terry says there are eleven people in the place.

Now, that seems a bit unfair. This is a commuter town for Chicago, and I can’t imagine that there are a whole lot of people in town for lunch during a weekday. And certainly there wouldn’t be enough to “book” seats. It would be a matter of seating people as they arrive.

Anyway, Ramsay orders a few items from the menu. Doug, the server, isn’t giving the restaurant a boost when he confides to Ramsay that the specials he is ordering aren’t really that good. Oh, and the service is slow.

What Doug doesn’t realize is that the producers have already checked out the place and probably tasted every item on the menu. They already know which items suck, and they’ve told Ramsay to specifically order the worst items on the menu. So Doug telling Ramsay not to order certain items is not going to change his mind, since he is there to order those items specifically.

With only eleven customers in the restaurant, it is rather shocking that 40 minutes pass before Ramsay gets any food at all. But it finally arrives.

Ramsay starts with the wild mushroom risotto. Well, if you’ve watched Hell’s Kitchen, you know that Ramsay is a fanatic about perfect risotto. Predictably, he doesn’t like it. It is mushy and too salty.

Next Ramsay digs into the strawberry duck salad with candied walnuts. He is disgusted by that, and declares it way too sweet.

Finally, Ramsay gets the salmon crepes that Doug warned him about earlier. Ramsay looks at the dish, and it looks like a plate of mush, not the soft flakey pastry that you’d expect from a fresh crepe. Doug shrugs and say that’s what you should expect from store-bought crepes.

Back in the kitchen, Barney the sous chef is ecstatic that Ramsay didn’t like the food. He says that he’s been complaining about Pinto’s cooking for many months now, and nobody listens to him.

Carol is shocked. She says that Pinto’s food is beyond excellent, and she has no idea why Ramsay didn’t like it.

Ramsay gathers everyone in the kitchen to explain the problems. Pinto defends himself by saying that he learned to cook in Italy. Ramsay sniffs at that, and points out that he can’t even cook risotto.

Ramsay finds the pan of risotto and the date on the container indicates that it was prepared eight days ago. Pinto verifies that, and Ramsay is disgusted. Risotto should not be cooked more than a week ahead of time! It should be cooked fresh on the spot.