A few years later, Masterchef comes out and my mom and sisters talked me into watching
it. I liked it. Ramsay was not the only judge and he really
didn’t yell all that much. In fact, he
was quite pleasant. That, and when they
got into the final twelve, I started seeing that these judges were doing more
than seeing who could reach the top. Two
of the home cooks who didn’t make it were offered jobs at two of the judges’
restaurants, Ramsay being one of them.
And he even gave his phone number to another of the home cooks to keep
in touch and for mentoring purposes.
These small gifts put this above most other game shows; it wasn’t just
about the money or prestige, but the contestants, even the failed ones could
still be given opportunities to make more out of their lives than the currently
had.
But where I became a fan of Gordon Ramsay was his
documentary show, Kitchen Nightmares. With a title like that, I expected this to be
another train wreck like Hell’s Kitchen,
as the commercials I saw included him yelling, cussing, and getting in peoples’
faces and seeing disgusting nightmares happen in restaurants that should be
shut down.
The commercials were deceptive, because this is the
best show on television since Extreme
Makeover: Home Edition went off the air.
Extreme Makeover was the best
thing television did in the last decade; certainly, it was the most
inspiring. The team would find a family
whose home was trash either because of time, economic misfortune, or natural
disaster, send that family on a paid vacation, tear down the house and build
them a new one in one week. Isn’t that
astounding? The Home Makeover team would
build entire homes, gorgeous homes,
in one week, and they did it two hundred times, and on their final episode,
they built seven houses in one week’s
time.
That is an incredible mission these people
volunteered for. I mean, roughly 200
weeks is little less than four years of their life invested in just that
labor. Considering that this show ran
nine years, that was nearly half of their lives dedicated to that, time spent
away from their families so that they could give such a wonderful gift to other
families in need. I was really sad that
it had to end.
Gordon Ramsay has picked up that baton in a
sense. Instead of fixing homes, he is
fixing businesses, but this is nearly as important as the place you live. Many restaurants are family owned and run and
in so many cases, if the restaurants fail, that’s their livelihood. If they lose, they’re on the streets.
And Kitchen
Nightmares focuses on the hopeless cases.
Each episode, Ramsay devotes three days to see what’s happening at the
restaurants, identify the problems, give the restaurant a makeover and new
menu, provide training as needed, and puts the ball back in their court so that
when the restaurant’s succeed, it’s not Ramsay’s success, it’s their victory.
He does get in peoples’ face a lot, but in every
case, they have deserved it. Many are in
denial about how bad things really are and part of Ramsay’s function is to wake
the owners up and take responsibility.
Occasionally, there are marital, parental, and family problems, and he
will take time to tackle those issues before even trying to get the restaurant
moving forward. In fact, these always
get top priority since no success in their business will accommodate for
failure in their homes.
Some of my favorite episodes are when he goes back
to revisit restaurants he’d helped prior and see how they’re doing. And I’m pleased to see that most of them are
still on track since his coming in to give them a hand.
Which brings me to his latest television project, Hotel Hell. It’s the same premise as Kitchen Nightmares, only he spends an entire week staying in a
hotel, and he goes over every aspect of the hotels, from reception to the
cleaning standards, the restaurant and bars, and community outreach.
What astounds me is how much he has to push the
owners to wake up to their problems. And
some of them are maddening. The first
episode, the owners were constantly not writing the checks to their staff on
time. One of their staff waited five weeks
once for a check and she made less money than I make in a week as a part-time bookseller. That blew me away because I know I don’t work
a tenth as hard or put in nearly as many hours as they do. That was infuriating.
That’s where I gained a whole lot of respect for
Ramsay. He understands so much the value
of the people who work for you and he will go down to their level and treat
them like people of worth.
He’s also incredibly tenacious. He stays on when most others would quit,
because he came to help and giving nothing less than everything he’s got will
satisfy. In the above episode I talked
about, he made sure above all else that the employees got paid.
My favorite so far, though, is in the third episode,
where one cook in the kitchen is a college kid with horrible health issues (two
heart surgeries and two back surgeries) has dreams of becoming a chef and
opening up his own bakery. At the end of
the show, Ramsay gives the kid his e-mail address and tells him that he will
pay for the young man’s entire college education. No expectation of being paid back. “All I want from you is a loaf of bread. And God help you if you fail your
classes.” That is one of the most
generous things I’ve ever seen; it nearly brought me to tears (I have a heart
of stone; the fact that my eyes watered is huge.)
I can tell you that these shows proves to me that
Ramsay knows what life is all about.
Success in life is not about what you achieve. It’s about taking the talents, the qualities,
the resources, and the time that you have, and use those to better the lives of
others and help them succeed. It’s about
paying it forward. It’s about
charity. I believe he’s among those rare
individuals that lives it. And I’d like
to thank his family for being patient with the time he’s sacrificed from them
to help others. It means a lot to the
world to let him try and make this a better place to live in.
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