Gordan Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares Research

Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares

Research

Kitchen Nightmares is a show based around helping restaurants that are in the industry grow from strength to strength. This is based mainly around their food sector, which Ramsey will take full control of through his personal expertise.

However research is necessary for each restaurant before he even steps foot on their premises. We need to evaluate each applicant and decided whether they are suitable for the show, looking into their background history, finances, problems that they have had to go through, or currently undergoing. These are all vital statistics that will help the overall development of the programme when it comes to filming and producing the end product.

Other areas that will need to be researched are the locations of the restaurant, the occupants that Ramsey will be working with and the type of place they are. For example, a classic pub located in the North West of England would be a completely different to a 5-star restaurant located in the heart of London. We will need to research what type of foods that are popular in the restaurants specific area, so that Ramsey and the team have an idea of what they have to work with when they get there.

Plus, traditions could come into play as a classic pub for example would serve meals such as roasts and hot pots, where as a 5-star restaurant would be serving three course meals which cost in excess of hundreds of pounds per head. So if we were to go to one of these places and try and introduce something that isn’t custom in that location, it would not go down well for the programme and even more so for the business itself.

The staff and owners of each restaurant will also have to be researched so that we know who we will all be working along side with. If for example a kitchen staff member has been working at a certain restaurant for 40-50 years, he or she will be much more likely to disagree with Ramsey and not be very co-operative, compared to a younger member of staff. This isn’t too much of a problem as confrontation would make for an interesting programme, however as we only have one week to film at each restaurant, constant arguments and disagreement could limit the amount of footage and headway that is to be made.

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The background of each restaurant involved in the show will have to be heavily researched as well, looking back into the archives of any busy can be extremely important as it will tell us what has been going on there. Take a restaurant that has been running for 30 years or so, it will have a history of past achievement, failures, ups and downs. It will tell us when it was most popular and what made it popular at that time, and how it has gone down hill since. This will enable us to come up with a suitable strategy to improving the business simply and quickly with the best possible results. The programme will work off progress that is being made through the period of time that Ramsey is there, which in the end will hopefully be a happy ending. With background history we will have more chance of researching possible areas that could have affected the business and ways in which we can correct this.

The current finances for each applicant will have to be looked at and researched too. This is a personally matter and the information that we manage to receive will have to be kept an extreme secret simply because it is a personal matter for the owners, however it will allow us and Ramsey to understand the situation that they are currently in. A business thousands in the minus which has been so for many years has obvious problems that when researched into using the background history as well, will allow us to come up with a suitable strategy to improving the restaurant the most appropriate way.

Any of the applicants could be going through other major problems at this current time as well; these need to be looked into because yet again, it will let us know which route to take when trying to help them. If the owners are old they could be ill in some sort of way, and their business could be putting them under immense stress and pressure. This means that the immediate problem to resolve is this, instead of going straight head deep into the kitchen and creating some dishes, the stress management should be looked into a resolved so that the owners feel easier with what’s going to happen. Once this has been initially taken care of by the production team, Ramsey can then move in and work with them to sort out their restaurant.

Recces

Before any potential applicants are chosen we will need to perform a Recce on the locations of the restaurants that have made the initial cut. We will visit the locations to see whether or not they are suitable for shooting, we will need to take into account all of our previous research and possibly come up with some sort of questionnaire to present to the applicants to find out even further information.

Auditions

After the recces have been completed we may need to further audition potential candidates for the programme. This will enable us to get a better understanding of who we could be working with in the near future, we can ask more personal questions if need be and find out how far their willing to go in the programme, whether they have applied for just some advice and guidance or whether they really need to us to turn their restaurant around.

Having an audition will also be a good chance to inform the applicants of what they have got themselves into. Not that the programme will be a bad publicity stunt or anything of sort, but to fill them in on what we will be wanting them to do and what to expect if and when Ramsey shows up.

Schedules

Schedules are an important part of the research as we can put together the stages in which we have to do procedures way in advance to actually doing them. This will enable the researchers to work out a time period and how long they are going to need up until the day filming begins. They will need to research how long it will take to research other factors or pre-production so that we can set ourselves an understandable and do-able time limit in which to undertake all of this.

Any problems or off dates will also have to be incorporated into this schedule so that everyone on the team knows exactly what is expected from them. If the team has an incorrect schedule then this could slow down a number of other areas of the production.

Research Lengths/Times

Research will take different lengths of times depending on what tasks have to be completed. For Kitchen Nightmares there will be two researchers devoted to researching for the programme. They will firstly look into the type of programme that it is going to be, what is needed to make the programme and to research the genre and the people that it is going to appeal too.

Researching into the programme itself is pretty self explanatory as a brief would have been given to the researchers before they started, however they would need to look into past work which Ramsey has been involved in to get an idea of how they can make the most out of this collaboration for the programme. This could take a matter of days to research at most however this is only initial research, after this the full research for the programme begins.

This consists of sifting through applicants for the show, getting in contact with them and then researching the possible applicants. The will also have to go to, or somehow see the location of the restaurants, check out the business itself to see if they are having problems of any kind. This type of research for the show would take around 4-6 weeks to do before filming actually began.

Actually choosing initial people to be on the programme itself wouldn’t exactly be very hard work, at all, however depending on the sheer amount of applicants it could take sometime. However, if someone’s not suitable, they would just not take a second glance and just discard their application, this would speed up the initial search, however if they meet the preferred criteria for the programme, this criteria being the one they have previously researched, then they would possibly get in touch with them. This would start off with something as simple as a making a phone call, all the way through to physically going to meet them in person.

Once they have selected a certain amount of applicants they would have to visit them, research them individually getting really in depth information about them before then making their final decisions of who to choose.

To split the work up then, I believe the researchers would need to go on the strategy of allowing themselves about 2 weeks at the maximum to go through all the applications that have been received, this would then allow them anywhere between 2-4 weeks to really plug into every fine detail that is needed for the show.