Andy DehnartThe couple who will be featured on Friday’s edition of Kitchen Nightmares only interacted with Gordon Ramsay on camera, and detailed the way the production creates drama.
Paul and Leslie Bazzini, who own a restaurant called Bazzini, said that Ramsay didn’t really help.
Paul told the New Jersey Record, “you have no interaction with Ramsay at all. He comes with a very big machine of assistants and helpers. The only time that I ever spent any time with him was on camera.”
Also on camera, producers asked Leslie questions such as, “If this fails now, how can you stay with your husband?”, which are clearly designed to create drama.
It’s hard to have a lot of sympathy for their surprise at the way television works, especially since, as the paper notes, the “crew ultimately set their Ridgewood restaurant up for long-term success, with a sharper focus, a streamlined menu and a kitchen full of new equipment.”
But the manipulation is disappointing, especially because it seems like producers deliberately attempted to set up dinner service for failure, which is very evident on the over-produced Fox version.
As the paper reports:
What the couple had hoped for was a free, high-powered consultation into what they knew were problems at their storefront restaurant, named Bazzini. They got a little of that, but soon realized that they were mostly there to be characters in a television show.
Paul Bazzini said he was dismayed to spend hours of the taping waiting off-site, only to be led into his reorganized kitchen shortly before he was to start service with a brand-new menu and 100 people in the dining room. “It wasn’t run in the way that any restaurant would run for [dinner] service,” Paul Bazzini said. And, “you have no interaction with Ramsay at all. He comes with a very big machine of assistants and helpers. The only time that I ever spent any time with him was on camera.”And, they said, the “Kitchen Nightmares” crew seemed to want to create friction where none existed, particularly in the couple’s relationship, asking Leslie Bazzini questions like, “If this fails now, how can you stay with your husband?”