A New Orleans restaurant is suing Gordon Ramsay after a video of him vomiting in their restaurant resurfaced on Facebook.
Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares has never really been known for its positive attitude to restaurants around the US.
Most of the time, the show consisted of Gordon bulldozing into restaurants and whipping the staff into shape, and if one thing is for sure, he didn’t exactly use a gentle approach.
The programme is a fan favourite, and despite it not being aired since 2023, clips still resurface on their social media accounts.
And a restaurant in New Orleans was not happy, after a video resurfaced on Facebook in 2018 depicting Gordon vomiting in their restaurant, after smelling a container filled with shrimp.
According to Oceana Grill, the clip was over-dramatised for the show, and it didn’t state that this happened seven years ago.
The video was taken from a season finale which aired in 2011, but was made available to watch on Facebook for 24 hours before it was taken down.
It was viewed by 1.5 million people, and Oceana Grill is now suing Gordon after they branded the clip misleading.
Gordon also filmed discovering three dead mice in the restaurant as part of the episode.
Cajun Conti, the company that owns Oceana Grill, have stated: “None of the above-described events were real, but were contrived and orchestrated by defendants to manufacture drama for their show.”
TV network Fox also reportedly broke an agreement they made with the restaurant, which said that the company would be paid $10,000 every time the Oceana Grill episode was aired in the future, and that any rerun of the episode would include an update about what the restaurant is doing now.
The lawsuit states that the show depicted the restaurant in a ‘negative light’, which in all fairness, was to be expected by taking part in a programme called Kitchen Nightmares.
The lawsuit reads: “During the episode’s filming, defendants went to great lengths to over-dramatise and even fabricate problems with the restaurant in order to increase ratings.
“The footage intentionally portrayed Oceana and its employees in a patently false and negative light, as it depicted the appealing restaurant as an unsuccessful, unsanitary and mismanaged restaurant.”
The clip now appears to be deleted from the Kitchen Nightmares page, and the restaurant is still thriving years later.
