The Fishtown eatery, with its fondness for serving weeks-old frozen fodder and lack of adequate leadership, was in desperate need of a Ramsey overhaul. It was the recipe for a perfect Nightmare story: bad food, a family operation with three inexperienced owners (who produced almost as many bleeps as Ramsey), and to seal the deal, a poor review in the local paper that had soiled their reputation. The headline of the review had read: ”Spuddy Hell.”
But Ramsey soon found out that three-week-old, sans-potato potato skins were the least of the restaurant’s problems. At the helm of the kitchen catastrophe was a 21-year-old head chef, niece of the owners, who had only signed on for the job so she could help her family. As Ramsey put it, the restaurant had been using a menu that was ”passed down from a bad chef to an inexperienced chef.”
Watching the story unfold, I became angry. The weight of a fledgling quarter-million dollar effort (according to one of the sisters) was resting on a clearly overwhelmed girl who didn’t even want to be a chef – at least at the beginning of the episode. She was taking on more than she could handle, but it seemed as though her aunts neither noticed nor attempted to help ease her burden. Ramsey noticed this too, making it a point to give the girl words of encouragement throughout the episode. In the end, he even arranged for a local chef to mentor her. The gesture moved the girl to tears and ignited her passion for cooking. Ramsey’s heart grew three sizes.
But before the tears of joy, there had been tears of desperation. After witnessing one particularly disastrous night of service, Ramsey angrily asked for their reflection on the evening. Instead of a response, he was met with blank stares from the owners, who looked more like kindergarteners who’d been caught awake during nap time. ”I honestly don’t have the passion or the drive to take it through,” he said rather emotionally, before calling it quits and storming out.
The owners followed after him and confessed that they had lost hope and needed him to save the day. The speech swayed Ramsey to give it one last shot. A cooking lesson, a new menu, and one short segment of Extreme Makeover: Restaurant Edition later, they re-launched the restaurant and even invited back the critic who’d ruined them before.
My mind immediately went to Ratatouille. I expected a high-brow critic with an icy stare and attitude to boot. The intense background score had me preparing for the worst. Instead, we got a man who used terms like ”potato-rific” to describe the newly revamped hot potato soup. Pfft.
Armed with a positive review, a new outlook, and a fresh take on food, the ladies from Hot Potato were ready for their second go at entrepreneurship. Ramsey summed up his experience with an awkward ”long live the power of women!” declaration.
Now it’s your turn PopWatchers. What did you think of the premiere of Kitchen Nightmares? Did you feel as bad as I did for the 21-year-old head chef? Did the Hans Zimmer-esque background score build up the anticipation for the critic’s appearance for you too? Sound off below!
We at the Daily News are proud of our letters page. Many of our readers are as scrappy and opinionated as we are, and we are proud of the fact that the page shows that. Our letters pages embody our mission as "the People Paper," and we publish about 2,000 letters a year. We see the pages as a town square where everyone has a right to speak. And we make sure that people without e-mail and Internet access have as much speech as those who do.
In fact, that's why newspapers are so important. That the Ellie Light letter got so much attention in a world where so much online commentary is anonymous speaks to the power of newspapers. Our brand of democracy requires only 75 cents to enter, not a computer or Internet access. We believe the conversation on our pages are richer because of it.
This wasn't the first time a paper used the scandal as a chance to brag about its own popularity: the Los Angeles Times spun that same yarn on Monday.
The growing consensus in the media is that the little people should be happy for a chance to speak at all. And when this process is corrupted by deception? According to the News, you should look for some cheese to go with that whine:
THE BOTTOM line: Having your say is a precious privilege we have in this society. Ellie Light took advantage of this privilege, while taking advantage of the newspapers in question. We'll continue to verify basic facts, but we'll also continue to rely on the good faith of our readers. If a few readers of less-than-good faith get through, to us, it's a price worth paying.
So you see, these professional editors get paid to act more like bystanders and less like security guards. The privilege of getting published is such a "precious" thing that anyone can do it. Free speech is so sacred, so special, so important, that common liars are granted access without anyone caring.
Perhaps this lackadaisical approach to editing, coupled with the arrogant assumption that they're doing the public a favor, has something to do with the News's struggling profits, which forced the owner into bankruptcy protection less than a year ago.
Only in the liberal media can a newspaper exist on life support while lecturing others about "a price worth paying."
Meanwhile, the Cleveland Plain Dealer has been handsomely rewarded for providing honest coverage of the scandal. The article that broke the story earned more than half a million hits in just three days and resulted in the paper claiming ownership of an internet wildfire.
But no matter. The News is content to pay a more noble price of printing bogus spam letters as a service to society.
As to an explanation for why Light's letter was chosen, it offered exactly eight words: "it was short and made its points well."
Too bad the News didn't feel that way when dealing with George Bush. When the Philadelphia Inquirer sought to hire a Bush attorney in May 2009, the News complained about free speech being so freely available:
Will Bunch of the rival Philadelphia Daily News wrote, "It's not about muzzling John Yoo from expressing his far-out-of-the-mainstream opinion in the many venues that are available to him, but whether a major American newspaper should give Yoo, his actions, and the notion of torture advocacy its implied endorsement by handing him a megaphone."
Criticizing a newspaper for "handing him a megaphone" sounds a lot like muzzling, but hey, that was a Bush supporter. Ellie Light was a brilliant defender of Democrats who kinda sorta lied about her identity - an "implied endorsement" of her was just fine.
Not to be outdone, the Lebanon Daily News, just a few miles west in Lebanon, PA, also published an angry screed against its own critics that began with - wait for it - congratulating itself on printing letters from the little people:
Space in any newspaper is always at a premium, and we try to provide as much as possible for the people's voices, particularly on the editorial page. So when Light responded to our inquiry and said she was from Cornwall, that was good enough for us, and we rolled with it.
We usually have to write a variation of this editorial at least once a year. The titillating idea of "gotcha" is too much to pass up for some folks. Fine. We have a liberal - and we mean in the sense of what we allow, not the political leaning - policy on what's allowed on our editorial page. We always have. We welcome conventional views, opposing views, third-party views (especially those, frankly), alternate views and even the occasional skewed view. We provide a significant chunk of real estate for one to bring one's message. Most news papers don't allow upwards of 400 words for letters. We do.
How kind of these papers to welcome a variety of opinions from the very readers who patronize them. It's almost like they're starting to realize normal citizens pay their salaries.
In the middle of a hard recession that's caused newspaper profits to plummet, perhaps it would be wise of these editors to humbly apologize for making a mistake. Instead, readers are given snarky rants about "gotcha" scandals and warnings to be thankful for a paper that prints any letters at all.
If predictions about the future hold true, the newspaper industry might eventually find itself completely out of business...and Ellie Light will be remembered as a big reason why.
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