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Private Notes
Gordon takes on a nightmare restaurant abroad - La Parra de Burriana in Nerja on the Spanish Costa del Sol. Nestling among the cafes lining the seafront offering all-day English breakfast and chipsEx-nightclub manager Laurence set himself up in business 18 months ago with a loan from his dad and, although he's not an experienced chef he mans the kitchen on his own determined to offer something better than chips.Laurence's menu has 72 dishes including his signature dish: prawns in garlic with chocolate sauce. Running front-of-house is Laurence's mate, Alex and sous-chef, Norman, is on the barbecue serving kebabs and steaks cooked by torchlight. The kebabs are raw, the dining room is a mess and anyone who does turn up for diner faces a interminable wait. Laurence lost £22k last year but still resists Gordon's attempts to introduce a simple menu that will bring customers back.
Gordon tackles a pub for the first time time - The Fenwick Arms in rural Lancashire. Landlord Brian who has been running the business for over 30 years but despite his best efforts Brian and his partner Elaine are £250k in debt, losing £1,500 a week and facing bankruptcy in three months.
In this third helping, Gordon finds a chef caught in a time warp when he tackles a picturesque but largely unfrequented upmarket restaurant in King's Lynn, a traditional market town on the Norfolk coast. For the last eighteen months, ex-Michelin-starred chef, Nick, has owned and run Rococo but his past success is now eluding him. The menu is past its sell-by date, the service is stuffy, the food is over-priced and the only thing being fed is his ego.
Yet, despite debts of £100k and the prospect of putting his home at risk and his young family on the streets, Nick continues to cook comatose in a 1990s fantasy land of his own making. Gordon forces him to face his failures, strips down the menu and dismantles the claustrophobic dining room.
But when he discovers the depths of Nick's stubbornness - and that he's locked him out of the restaurant (a Kitchen Nightmares' first), even Gordon is forced to face the prospect of failure. Will Nick ever get up to speed and recapture his glory days, or will he carry on sleep-walking his way to disaster?
In this fourth helping, Gordon grapples with girl power when he takes on an intimate family-run restaurant in the heart of WAG territory near Liverpool. For the last three years Morgan's has been run by antiques dealer-turned-restaurateur, Sandy and her two daughters, Helen and Laura. The beautifully-designed dining room has a prime high street location and should be the perfect eatery for the trendy local clientele.
But head chef Phil is grappling with an eclectic menu that includes mashed potato with apricots and his cooking's just not up to it. Meanwhile owner Sandy can't keep the books straight, the all-female front-of-house team lacks any clear line of command and they're £100k in debt. At this rate of loss they are facing the prospect of no punters and closure within six months.
It's handbags at dawn as Gordon imposes some drastic changes, only to discover that when he turns up for the launch of a Sunday lunch menu, he's the only one who's bothered to get out of bed. Will the ladies that lunch carry on treating their business as an expensive hobby, or can they lure the WAG glitterati of Woolton through the door for a make-or-break celebrity relaunch?
In the penultimate programme, Gordon returns to La Riviera - now renamed Abstract - a fine dining restaurant in Inverness. Owned by multi-millionaire Barry Larson and costing £8,000 a week to run, the place boasted top French chef Loic LeFebvre and an impeccably-trained kitchen staff, all of them on a mission to bring sophisticated French cooking to the home of the haggis.
In the final programme, Gordon returns to Momma Cherri's Soul Food Shack, an intimate 40-seater in Brighton where he oversaw one of the most spectacular changes of fortune at a single venue. Owner Charita Jones was producing a menu of irresistible unique classics from the Deep South, but at the same facing financial disaster. The punters were missing, and so was her business acumen. But Gordon succeeded in shutting her out of the kitchen, getting the chef back on the boil and putting the soul back into the business.
Today Charita is fully-booked round the clock and bursting out of the Soul Shack to take on the 110-seater Momma Cherri's Big House. But expansion brings a different set of challenges, and she's still struggling to control her staff and manage her success. Has she got what it takes to make the next step up, or will she be forced to rethink her grand plans?
