"Kitchen nightmares" news and stories

The body of a man found floating in the Hudson River last Friday afternoon was identified as 39-year-old New Jersey chef Joseph Cerniglia, a 2007 participant in Gordon Ramsay's reality TV show "Kitchen Nightmares."

Cerniglia, owner of Campania, an Italian restaurant in Fair Lawn, N.J., was pulled from the river around 3 p.m. on Friday when police responded to a 911 call that a body was floating in the river, the New York Daily News reported.

Police still don't know how Cerniglia wound up in the river, but the department is conducting an open investigation, a New York City Police Department spokesman told Slashfood on Monday.

Gordon Ramsay's BBC show "Kitchen Nightmares" is a classic; permanent proof that Ramsay is one of the best chef-lebrities working and cooking on television. The UK version of "Kitchen Nightmares" might be old news, but it's good news to certain hack writers bedeviled with pestilence. So, if you're ever marooned on a couch because of the flu, re-watch any of the episodes of this show on BBC America On Demand. Ramsay is combustible, passionate, and a man clearly in control of his talents. He's the rare personality on air: a guy who obviously knows what he's doing, and is not afraid of showing that fact off. Rarely do we see experts on television who literally look like they can easily walk the talk.

Photo: Stephane De Sakutin, AFP/Getty Images

Hot-headed celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay is finally waking up from his kitchen nightmare.

The reality show "Kitchen Nightmares" put Ramsay in failing restaurants across America for one week so the tell-it-like-it-is chef can try to turn the struggling businesses around. But the show proved too troublesome for the salty U.K. chef, who says he's through with it.

The foul-mouthed Brit admits the show's title is a little too fitting: "If the restaurants succeed, there's no praise," Ramsay told The Sun. "If they're screwed, we're blamed and get lawyers' letters."

More than two-thirds of the restaurants Ramsay "helped" ending up being sold or shut down, the paper said.

Slashfood attempted to contact the production company, Granada Entertainment, to clarify if both the American and British versions of the "Kitchen Nightmares" are canceled -- our calls were not returned.

[Via The Sun]

For fans of Gordon Ramsay's reality TV shows on Fox, there's some good news. According to Grub Street, Fox has just renewed both Hell's Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares for two more seasons. But wait- there's more!

The media empire that is Gordon Ramsay is also going to adapt another of his BBC shows for American audiences. The show is called Man Camp, which will be sort of a boot camp where Gordon will make men more manly at least in part by teaching them to cook. I can not wait to see this.

Fox has also signed Mr. Ramsay to do a live cooking event which will be "cooking for the young, the vibrant and the tenacious." Sign me up!

I have a recurring nightmare in which I am quickly chopping up a whole bunch of veggies for a quick stir fry when I realize that I haven't been being particularly careful and accidentally cut into a finger instead of a carrot. Thankfully, during my waking hours I've never had that happen, but the thought of it made me work on improving my knife skills to further protect my precious digits.

Sadly, British TV chef Gordon Ramsay recently experienced one of those moments you think could only happen in the worst of anxiety dreams. He set his crotch on fire. While going commando. It adds a whole other level to taking precautions while in the kitchen, now doesn't it.

Via Food for Thought