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The Dillon’s / Purnim Lawsuit Controversy
I guess the big news is that I spent an hour on the phone today with Carl Person, the lawyer for Martin Hyde who is suing Gordon Ramsay the production company in a lawsuit that’s made news around the world over the Dillon’s / Purnima episode that I talked about in a previous post.
I said I thought Hyde was ‘batshit crazy’ if he thought he could win a lawsuit but after my conversation with Hyde’s attorney, I retract that statement. I’m not saying he can win. I have no idea about the legal issues involved but now I do at least understand the case from Mr. Hyde’s perspective and it’s not completely crazy. It might be right, might be wrong but it’s not crazy.
Person’s conversation with me echoed a lot of things that are in the initial legal documents filed in the case. Reading through the documents, there’s some stuff that doesn’t seem correct to me – for instance, they list Ramsay’s salary as $1,000,000 an episode which sounds wildly high to me. Also the ‘assault’ stuff seems overblown.
Although…
Some scenes mentioned in Mr. Hyde’s lawsuit never made it on air; most notably, an alleged incident in which Mr. Ramsay forced him to crawl “on his hands and knees†in search of his phone, which the celebrity chef had supposedly tossed out onto the street.“I was relieved the most degrading part was cut out,†Mr. Hyde said. “But, at the same time, there’s so much humiliation anyway, it doesn’t make much difference.â€An employment agency warned him that notoriety would probably follow him wherever he goes, he said.
There’s some fairly important information that was left out of the Dillon’s / Purnima episode. According to Person, Martin Hyde’s main job was to book acts for the cabaret and that he didn’t hire kitchen staff or run the kitchen.
Kitchen Nightmares didn’t mention any of this in the show. Nothing about the cabaret or what Hyde’s job responsibilites were.. Hyde’s lawyer said that one of the first things the production did was shut down the theater and didn’t want any mention of it.
But some quick research shows that, in fact, the cabaret in the back room was a big part of the appeal of Dillon’s. Here’s aTime Out review, pre-Kitchen Nightmares.
You can have a happy-hour drink in the narrow front bar, eat dinner until midnight in the rear on the left, or catch a cabaret act in the back-room theater, but, really, Dillon’s is at its best in the early-morning hours. That’s when a late-night service-industry crowd (no strangers to show business) delivers a boost of energy, and you realize that you’re in it for the long haul.
Time Out New York: Bars & clubs: Dillon’s
And the producers didn’t exactly issue the strongest denial I’ve ever seen.
Andrew Blackmore, a manager at Dillons, would not elaborate on the lawsuit yesterday, insisting he had signed a legal form stating that he could not discuss the show. Jennifer Sprague, a Fox Broadcasting spokeswoman in Los Angeles, would not comment either, but Ramsay’s position was made clear by his spokesman, James Curich. Asked about the suggestion that scenes had been fabricated, he said: “It is a reality show and as far as I know it’s not something they do.”
Ramsay’s US courtroom nightmare Independent, The (London) – Find Articles
One interesting irony is that Hyde was the apparently the one who did the work to get Dillon’s / Purnima on Kitchen Nightmares in the first place.
I don’t have any stake at all in the legal battle but as a viewer I wish Fox didn’t screw up a great show (the U.K. Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares) with a bunch of what Amy Winehouse might refer to as ‘fuckery’. Fox and the U.S. producers seem to think that the U.K. show didn’t have enough drama or conflict or happy endings and that American audiences need a nice tasty layer of TV bullshit in addition to the real drama of a smart chef trying to help real people save a business.
Tonight Show
Chef Gordon Ramsay will be on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno this Thursday. He was on the show a couple of months ago, so it’s interesting they are having him back so soon. I should have some pictures up on Friday.
Kitchen Nightmares This Week : Seascapes
This week’s episode will feature Seascapes – the third restaurant on Long Island that the show has visited in the first four episodes.
Seascapes is located at 116 Main Street in Islip.
The Seascapes episode seems to be one of the first one taped. It has a lot of shots that were straight from the UK show that I haven’t really seen in other episoes, like the ‘Gordon putting on his shirt’ shot. Also, the wrap-up indicates that it was shot 5 months ago.
A New York Times review a few weeks ago mentioned the Seascapes episode…
At Seascape, in Islip, Mr. Ramsay meets more resistance, but easily overrides it, enforcing a top-down management system on a wimpy owner who blames an unsupportive father for his lack of leadership. Mr. Ramsay plays therapist, life coach and ogre here, getting the owner to take down an apathetic chef who defends his filthy kitchen on the grounds that he is “just not a throwaway person.â€
The subtext of “Kitchen Nightmares†is that ordinary middle-class business owners need brash and brilliant moguls to save them from a sad reliance on their own mediocrity. It is an ugly message that Mr. Ramsay makes undeniably hypnotic.
Kitchen Nightmares – TV – Review – New York Times
Oh, that last paragraph pisses me off because I understand why someone watching the U.S. version would think that. Contrast that with someone writing about the U.K. version of Kitchen Nightmares a year ago.
That’s exactly the Gordon Ramsay that I wish Fox would be showing every week.Wow, fantastic episode. I needed the reminder of how charming and even sexy a bastard Gordon Ramsay can be after watching Hell’s Kitchen. There’s nothing hotter than a man who can teach you something.
Whoever said he was acting as a mentor to the young chef, hit the nail on the head. Clearly, he is a great mentor….look at Marcus Wareing’s career to see how a chef can flourish under Gordon Ramsay’s tutaluge. What I loved was seeing GR take all of the lessons he learned from Amaryllis to help La Riveria/Abstract because a restaurant worthy of a Michelin star. He was so unselfish with his advice. And the best part….he was right. He pinpointed exactly what was wrong with the mostly excellent restaurant. He used everything he learned from his own failed restaurant venture in Scotland to help these guys go from good to great. How inspirational is that? He knew the chef was hard-headed and the owner was a wimp but he came up with creative ways to get his point across.
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I also prefer the British version, though the American is getting better (see “The Secret Garden”). In the UK version, there was less control over what happened; the US version seems structured around a blowup between GR and an owner or chef, with a final reconciliation. The show is more heavily formated. (It would be fine with me if every episode had the section where GR takes his shirt off.) But the essence is the same: GR is the white knight who comes in to save the restaurateur from him- or herself, and we learn a lot about running a restaurant in particular and a business in general.