Gordon Ramsay's new show visited historic Mrs. White's in Phoenix. It's brutal
I took particular interest in the episode of “Gordon Ramsay’s Secret Service” that aired on Wednesday, June 4, because the show descended upon Mrs. White’s Golden Rule Cafe.
It’s a legendary soul-food place in Phoenix, just iconic.
Or so I thought. Watching this show, it would appear that the restaurant had descended into a wreck, serving inedible food to unsuspecting customers. One of Ramsay’s spies says of the smothered chicken, “It tastes like mop water.” The rest of the customers seemed happy enough. I realized I hadn’t eaten at the place in years. Could it really be as bad as all that?
Gordon Ramsay with the restaurant owner in the Mrs. White's Golden Rule Cafe episode of "Gordon Ramsay's Secret Service."
Does it matter? What matters, for the purposes of this show, is that Ramsay be portrayed as the tough-love savior who is going to right all the wrongs and get your failing restaurant back on track again. The rest? Just details.
What happens in 'Gordon Ramsay's Secret Service'?
I find Ramsay fascinating.
That doesn’t mean I like him. Or dislike him, really. I think it’s interesting how a classically trained chef turned a bad temper into an absolute entertainment empire. He can cook, really cook, but he’s better known for yelling at people.
Nice work if you can get it.
“Secret Service” is his latest show, and it’s as dumb as any of the others, a knock-off of his own “Kitchen Nightmares,” only incorporating what he treats like James Bond-type high-tech surveillance gadgets, but what actually seems more like something out of “Get Smart.” It’s all silly and a lot of it seems staged, but this particular show is not about yelling. This is about a hero.
And in the show’s telling, Ramsay is it.
The villain is just as clear: Larry, the son of Mrs. White herself. In the first half of the episode, he is portrayed as basically the root of all the problems. He leaves three boxes of frozen catfish in his car for a few hours, won’t allow anyone to question his authority and is shown cleaning his fingernails and sleeping in the restaurant. Ramsay dubs it “Larry’s No Rule Cafe.”
It’s truly brutal.
'Secret Service' follows a familiar pattern
The show follows a pattern. An “insider” has tipped Ramsay off that things aren’t going well. So he basically breaks into the restaurant in the middle of the night, with the help of the insider, to check things out. In this case, there’s no lock. He uses a screwdriver to jimmy the door open.
Really?
Once inside he uses a black light to snoop around and finds nightmarish things, like chicken sitting out in bags, sludge in ovens — and ovens that don’t have knobs so they aren’t turned off. It’s like “CSI: Culinary Division.”
The gist of the show is that Ramsay is so famous that the mere sight of him when he shows up to inspect your restaurant terrorizes the employees so much they immediately start trying to cover up their sins. So in this show, Ramsay, after his clandestine, middle-of-the-night “inspection,” records the staff and customers, under the guise that they’re participating in a restaurant-reconstruction reality show. He sits at a video control board in a disguised truck in the parking lot.
Thus, we get interviews with Mrs. White, Larry and Larry’s daughter, Kianna, who is eager to take over the restaurant but Larry won’t allow it. He won’t even let her use the company credit card — though, as it turns out, there’s a story behind that.
There’s a story behind the whole thing, which I won’t reveal, obviously, and it’s a sad one. The entire show turns on a dime at the halfway point, when Ramsay sits down for a talk with Larry. Let the healing begin! Or something.
You have seen shows like this a million times. Or it seems like a million. Ramsay modernizes the menu (are sliders really what you go to Mrs. White’s for?), and they fix up the booths and tables and install a whole new kitchen. The twist here is that Ramsay reveals the “insider” who tipped him off in the first place, and praises the person like they were working counterintelligence against the Nazis or something. (The identity isn’t too hard to figure out.)
It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out months from now, with Ramsay off on another hero quest. If this is what it takes to get people to come to Mrs. White’s and keep the business healthy, so be it. But a reality-show exorcism seems like a steep price to pay.
