Reports that big shouty Gordon Ramsay is being sued in New York by one of the restaurants featured in the American version of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares are titillating, but hardly surprising. This has nothing to do with the virtue of the claim against him: that he, and the production team, faked certain scenes in the show to make the restaurant involved look worse than it actually is. Ramsay has faced claims like this before. He sued over those claims and he won.
It does, I think, have far more to do with American litigiousness, and the tendency in the US to get affronted when people cut up rough. But, of course, the restaurant may be successful in its claim, we await the outcome of the case.
A few years back I interviewed Ramsay in Los Angeles while he was shooting the first series of the US Hell's Kitchen. (I also ate the food, god help me.) It was made clear to me that in the US there are stringent labour laws about how staff should be treated, and that he couldn't just bully them as he pleased. Lo and behold a few weeks later money was paid out to settle a claim that there had been scuffle on set.
So this may or may not be more of the same. Let's leave it to the lawyers to work it out. Certainly though it's more of the difficult time he's had in New York, since he opened his restaurant there, Gordon Ramsay at the London. A major profile in the New Yorker, later published in the Guardian, portrayed a frayed and irritable chef desperately trying to catch up. Then the feared Frank Bruni of the New York Times weighed in with a mediocre review which described the food as well executed but dull.
Has this had an effect? Not really. I ate there a few weeks back, during a trip to New York, and it was full. Mind you, it was full of British people. Perhaps it's the newspaper headlines which keep them coming. In which case Ramsay's organisation would be well advised to regard headlines like the ones they are receiving now, and the legal fees involved, as simply a below the line marketing cost.
