Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares/D PLACE

D PLACE
Season 2, Episode 2
Airdate	May 31, 2005
← 2x01 La Lanterna	2x03 → Momma Cherri's Soul Food Shack
Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares — Season Two

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D PLACE is the second episode of the second season of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, and the sixth episode overall.

With: Gordon Ramsay

Episode Overview

D PLACE was once a trendy fusion restaurant in Essex owned by Mexican immigrant Israel. When the restaurant was first opened, it was frequently busy and was a moderate success for the owners. But now, they've found themselves in quite a rut. Their French head chef, Phillipe Blaze, is a 25-year veteran of cooking and is incredibly arrogant as a result. Meanwhile, the restaurant maitre d' comes off is ignorant to the restaurant's menu. If the restaurant goes under, Israel and Tara don't own the building and would be ruined by the debt they owe to the brewery they've taken a half-million pound loan from.

Ramsay samples to cuisine and finds much of it undercooked and his creme brule runny, although he hopes aloud that the special Valentines Day menu was throwing the chef off of his game. However, 70% of the restaurant's food is brought in ready-made and the size of the very international menu means that they're buying into a false economy. Meanwhile, the sous chefs are young and inexperienced who are being done no service by Phillipe's warped sense of cooking, which consists mainly of prepackaged goo and bells. Even when most of the food is premade, customers frequently send their food back for being undercooked. Among the other mistakes Phillipe is making in the kitchen, he makes hamburgers during lunch in order to be reheated for dinner or even for the next day's lunch.

In order to clean up the attitudes in the kitchen, Ramsay employs some marriage counseling tactics on Phillipe and restaurant manager Dave by having them say exactly what they think over each other to their faces. He also opens up the communication channels with everyone in the restaurant and continues to work with the staff to reset the relationships to amiable. This is short lived, however, and is wrecked when Phillipe starts to lie to both Israel and Ramsay about whether or not his potatoes are deep fried.

Ramsay comes to the conclusion that in order to cut the nonsense out of the restaurant, they need to close down D PLACE for two days in order to clean the kitchen, fix the ovens, reconfigure the menu and redecorate the dining room. The restaurant also gets a new name, from D PLACE to Saracen's Cafe Bar.

When the restaurant reopens, the chefs buckle under the pressure of a whopping three customers. An operation that should have been clockwork is fumbled and borders on collapse due to ticket confusion and a broken deep fryer burner. Despite the 30 minute benchmark set by Ramsay, food takes much longer to get out and customers complain about having to return to work late. After little over an hour, Israel has been forced to give away over 100 pounds in comped food and, to prevent more loss, he shut down the kitchen. Ramsay tries to turn things around, but leaves before he can see any visible change in the restaurant's practices.

Six weeks later, Ramsay returns to Saracen's Cafe Bar and discovers that the restaurant is no longer there. The space has gone into receivership and the brewery has completely repossessed the restaurant. A mere 4 weeks after Ramsay helped fix up the place, Israel and Tara were thrown out on their asses. Shockingly, Ramsay does find Chef Phillipe lurking about and explains that even though food sales were up and that a comeback was being mounted, it was too little too late as far as the debtors are concerned.

In a post-credit epilogue, it's said that Israel has signed a new deal on a café-bar in Colchester and the new owners have given manager Dave back his old job.