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LIVE BLOGGING The Lela’s Episode at 9east, 6West
This week’s restaurant will be Lela’s Fine Dining in Pomona, California.
But Lela’s is gone. Closed, vanished. Website down, phone numbers out of service.
If you live in Southern California you know Pomona for one reason, probably – it’s the home of the Pomona Fairplex, where the L.A. County Fair is held. When you think Pomona and food, you think kettle corn and funnel cake.
Now, I’ll highlight two items from their menu that I was able to find on their long defunct MySpace page…
Filet Mignon with Pepper Corn Sauce…………………………………………………..24.95
Fire grilled filet served with a black peppercorn and rosemary reduction
Roasted Rack of Lam in Chocolate Mint Sauce………………………………………24.95
Oven roasted rack of lamb served with tempered chocolate and fresh mint sauce
I think I see a lot of the problem already. Pretentious, weird sounding overpriced food in Pomona. And the menu is all over the place – shrimp nachos and Italian salads and Lamb with chocolate sauce. I’d be completely looking forward to this episode if this were the U.K. version of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares because I know Ramsay could and would really dig into the menu. And – as this article from the local college newspaper from back in February shows, he DID…
According to the restaurant’s Web site, the goal of Lela’s was to serve international cuisine at American prices. Ramsey’s first order of business was to change the mission of the small café.
“I had to come in here and say, ‘Look, no one is going to spend $27.50 on a meal in Pomona. You want to have people who come in here once a week for a hamburger rather than once a month on special occasions,’” said Ramsey.
Ramsey worked with the owner Lela Guillen and her staff for one week. He revamped everything from the artwork hanging on walls to the menu.
The new menu has nachos and burgers to appeal to a younger, hipper crowd. With 21 simple items, the menu is no longer intimidating to the target audience, college students. The crowning achievement of Ramsey’s reconstructed menu is the homegrown Pomona salad and the Pomona burger. The salad consists of butter spinach, beans, and fried chicken, foods that Guillen and Ramsey deemed culturally and agriculturally important to the region.
Yup – local produce, fresh ingredients. That’s Ramsay. I wonder how much of it will make it on the show.
Lela’s has vanished but luckily – there’s Brian, who used to work at Lela’s. He’s posted some videos at YouTube (nearly a year ago) but even the way he describes what is going makes me think we’re in for more fake outs….he calls this a re-enactment of someone named ‘Buzzard’ stealing. And just saying, since the US version of Kitchen Nightmares loves racial stereotypes…this is being promoted as a chef ‘from the hood’ (i.e., ‘brown skinned’) and also is being promoted as having someone stealing.
PART TWO of this preview is now posted…
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I am not surprised, needless to say.
Back in June, I was walking around the area before a concert at the glasshouse looking for something to eat, and I found this place. It looked alright, seemed to have some sort of cafe-style ambiance going on. I looked at the menu – it was rather small and from what I remember featured mostly appetizers, salads, soups, sandwiches, and one dessert (?) ( I guess it will be known on Weds. if this was close to what Gordon suggested or not )
However, I must note that when I walked by Lela’s ( around 5:30-6pm if I recall correctly ) it was DEAD. Literally. No one really around ( can’t have been a good sign, lol ) A little while later a couple of people walked up and knocked on the door and someone answered; they asked whether the restaurant was open or not. Yeah, definitely weird.
Again, I’m not that surprised considering the demographics of the area that they are closed ( plus, there seems to be a similar restaurant across the street ) Haven’t spent that much time in the neighborhood though – I’ve only been there a few times for the antique district and concerts at the aforementioned Glasshouse.
Thanks for the report…
My Dad lived for a number of years in San Dimas, right next to Pomona and stayed with him for a few months. San Dimas is a really dead town where they roll up the streets at around 9pm. Even the 24 Hour Fitness closes early. Seriously. I only went to downtown Pomona one time and it seemed less than happening, too.
Unfortunately, you could see this coming as soon within a minute of viewing that episode. The combination of an experienced owner, too many bad apples along with the lack of intervention until it was too late sealed the fate of this place.
Even though the “chef” came around at the end of the show, he was primarily responsible for the failure. This guy allowed his kitchen coworkers to steal the place blind, all the while looking the other way. (which is the best case scenario)
Watching that show truly disgusted me. I feel bad for the lady that started the place. I sincerely hope that this episode is used in culinary schools all over the nation as an example of “letting the inmates run the asylum”… and the results of allowing such.
I talk about this over at http://www.stranahan.com/discussion/ but I wonder whether Buzzard was really an employee or just someone brought in for the week at the producer’s suggestion.
And it took five months to close – to me, that means that Gordon’s suggestions didn’t work.
I am also very skeptical of the chef ‘coming around’. A total guess on my part, but I am betting that Chef Ricky had applied for Hell’s Kitchen and the producers suggested he go on KN….he was a Cordon Bleu trained chef, something never mentioned on the show.
Cordon Bleu is probably quite happy not to be mentioned having “trained” Chef Ricky. I imagine they wouldn’t be too proud having one of their alumni serving frozen food and instant mashed potatoes. Oh I forgot, he put butter and flavorings into the mashed potatoes. Was that what he learned to do at Cordon Bleu?
But this was quite common on the UK Nightmares – a well trained chef loses ‘their passion’ and ends up using a lot of off the shelf stuff.
And if you’ve ever read a restaurant industry trade publication, there’s a constant drumbeat of ads to cut corners and use pre-made sauces, chicken wings and everything else. Cut food costs! Cut labor costs!
Abd all of this assumes that what we saw was accurate, which at this point I can pretty much assure you it wasn’t.
Cordon Bleu is a catch phrase used to promote low-level cooking schools around the USA. The Chef-teachers are a who’s who of mediocre cooks that never established full careers of their own. The real success of Cordon Bleu is in the selling of an old name that was once associated with quality. Now it’s all about getting the money from kids that think kitchen work is what they see a celebrity doing on the TV. Coupling that with the fact that Cordon Bleu academic credits are non transferable means a culinary degree from this academy (and its associates) is useless for anyone but the lowly prep drone.
You are quite mistaken that credits are not transferable from Le Cordon Bleu. I attend Texas Culinary Academy which is associated with Le Cordon Bleu, and I have transferred credits here and have been able to transfer them to a different school as well.
As far as the chef instructors are concerned, it depends on the school that you attend. The chef instructors that currently teach at my school are extremely knowledgeable and have been chefs for Wolfgang Puck and even Thomas Keller, and have graduated from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and CIA. I worked as a “cook” for 10 years prior to attending culinary school, and the amount of information that I have learned is extraordinary. They do not teach you to be a “show off” chef like you see on T.V. They teach you to apply French techniques that were discovered by famous French chefs Escoffier and Carem.
While some Le Cordon Bleu schools may be mediocre, it takes ignorance to assume that every single one is as mindless and useless as you seem to think.