The Foul-Mouthed Chef
Alright, this isn't very newsy--everyone needs a break from wonky liberal news nuggets from time to time--but if you have BBC America on your cable system, you have to check out one of my new favourite programmes, Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares, which gets a review in today's Slate. It's the best piece of TV food-porn since Jamie's Kitchen, where Brit celeb chef Jamie Oliver took on 15 youths (16 to 24) who had never worked in a professional kitchen before and tried to transform them into proper cooks. At times it was a bit of a train wreck, and even though Oliver was very committed to seeing his trainees succeed, you also got to look under the veneer of celebrity to see he could be a bit of a cock as well.

Gordon Ramsay is another Brit celeb chef, and his show takes him to failing restaurants where he's given a week to turn things around. It's fascinating to watch the workings of actual kitchens and restaurant staff and see how much work and sweat goes into it all. But the best part of the show is Ramsay, with his foul mouth and incredulous and painfully truthful reactions to the awful scenes he finds at these restaurants.

In the process, he swears—a lot. Once Ramsay gets rolling, chewing out a lazy chef or a noisy dishwasher, the show features about as many bleeps as a radio version of Lil' Jon's "What You Gon' Do."

The restaurants are fantastically screwed up. Man-on-the-street interviews show former customers sniffing about poor service and exorbitant prices. The kitchens are fouled with the odor of ancient fryer oil. There are furry potatoes and rancid meat in the refrigerators. Most of all, the restaurants serve bad food: sandy seafood stew, nuked vegetables, and frozen deep-fried camembert.

It's refreshing to see, especially since the Food Network (as the Slate article notes) has become so sanitized lately with the awful Rachel Ray and her Home Economics clones.

Oh, and since we're on the subject of great British imports, the great spy show MI-5 (titled Spooks in the UK) is returning for its third season this Saturday on A&E (we're very excited about it here at the LemonDrop). If you've not seen it, you can catch up on previous episodes during Saturday.