The Gordon Ramsay Approach to Eating Out & Everything Else

Back during the pandemic I had many guilty YouTube pleasures. Nothing weird or anything, just certain shows I binge-watched or channels I ended up getting a little addicted to. I’d heard of Gordon Ramsay prior to the pandemic, I knew he was fire in the kitchen and that he was easy to ignite. I watched a couple episodes of Kitchen Nightmares and couldn’t stop.

As a Mystic I’ve always seen things for how I can learn from them. I could take about anything and turn it into a path to self improvement and a way to do better, my friends give me grief about it all the time.

To that end, I present:
The Gordon Ramsey Kitchen Nightmares Approach to Eating Out and Everything Else

NOT an idiot sammich

THE PROCESS

A) Assessment: For this part Gordon sits down in the dining room and is served a meal. He is generally nice to the servers who he seems to think of as hapless victims of poor management, as the majority of the time that is exactly what they end up proving to be. He always finds faults even if he has to crawl around on the floor, climb the curtains or scrape gum off the bottom of his own table.

1. Ramsay is always overly critical during the meal. He deconstructs the food, breaking it all the way down to its barest elements.
2. Ramsay also looks in all the nooks and crannies for anything from dusty knick-knacks to carpet stains. He also does a critical assessment of the overall décor. Applied in life this is how you present. No one is saying to always over-do it, but are you at least taking pride on yourself? If not, it shows.
3. The response from the chef is generally rage and defensiveness and overall denial. When you start to feel anger and defensiveness, you know you’re being honest with yourself.

B) The Breakdown: By this I don’t mean a friendly breakdown of his findings. Gordon breaks down the problems one by one, including the people, and he is rarely gentle about it.

1. The Walk In- What’s out of date? Abandon out of date food/habits to move forward.
2. Nooks and crannies of the kitchen like grease traps and stove hoods etc. Look deeper, in all the places you haven’t in a long while.
3. Moral- When you hit rock bottom there’s nowhere to go but up. Any idiot sandwich can tell you this is true.

*At this point there is often a “set up for failure” dinner service to turn things around which usually becomes a transformative turn around where people and the business itself rise like a phoenix from the ashes they drilled it into before setting it aflame.

C) The Buildup: After a defeated night (there is always at least one), Ramsay has broken it all down and now gets the people involved ready to empower themselves by building it back up.

1. The restaurant gets a remodel. Often the kitchen does too. For a person this could be simply physical and that isn’t shallow, it’s honest.
2. Again, getting rid of outdated systems that are no longer of service. It can be really simple. For example, the POS system functioning properly can turn a restaurant around overnight.
3. Front of the House, another area that often gets some focus. Are you paying attention to what’s coming in? What you’re allowing in?
4. Management; are people stepping up and taking on their roles? Are managers (most specifically) managing? Who are they for you? Friends? Family? Do they really have your back.
5. Moral. How is it? Are there people lifting others up while others just sit back and “f*ck all?”

D) The Re-Launch: Where with a fresh restaurant, a fresh approach and a fresh overall attitude, a new plan is implemented and committed to.

E) Livin’ the Dream: G.R. Doesn’t accept people not realizing how awesome they can be. I can’t imagine what it must be like to see through his eyes but with his brain attached, his thoughts to process.

He looks where others don’t look so he sees what others don’t see. Most of all, he is relentlessly honest. I’ve been like that my whole life but I’m not a master chef so I don’t get away with it.

The idea is to go forward having learned and balancing it with an open enough mind to continue to change, for the better, always putting your best foot forward.

TODO…following the Recipe.

Refresh the Menu: The advice is to refresh that menu every so often. As this relates to diet it would be contingent upon a lot of variables. As it applies to living life, 6 months is good. Every six months challenge yourself to take a big step instead of all the little ones forward and back

Parts of the Restaurant, Parts of the Psyche and How it’s all Connected

• The Restaurant: The thing as a whole. This represents the physical. The body, the physical world and interacting in it in a balanced and productive way.
• Management/Owners: Communication between these two is vital, as are their communications with the rest of their staff. Mostly, are people in these positions delegating/doing enough? This represents the mental, hopefully, the brains of the operation.
• Staff: In context of the staff as a whole, when everyone is connected and there is no ego things run in balance. Ruminate on the definition of Namaste’ in that in this context everyone is equal and has a common goal, like a hive.
• This is the spiritual aspect. Qi flows through the body, knows just where it’s needed most and goes there without question. That energy equates to the whole staff all working together symbiotically.

*Of course this is all just an outline, it’s expanded in my mind since I originally wrote it.

At any rate, this is why I’ve never owned a television and never had cable, I tend to over-think. All of this can be applied as a means to improve not just a nightmare kitchen, but anything else one might choose to apply it to.

Thanks Gordon Ramsey