KEY POINTS:
Gordon Ramsay seems to have been storming into crappy kitchens and putting them right by swearing and despairing since cavefolk started ruining steaks by chucking them on the barbie.
Now we have our own version of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares - it's called The Kitchen Job (TV3, last night) in which the milder mannered John Palino finds crappy restaurants and shows up as the foodie world's Mr Fixit. He has a nice manner, which is to say that he doesn't swear. At worst he does mildly worried.
At best he has a decent turn of phrase when it comes to describing disgusting-looking food. You can judge a crappy restaurant by the size of its stack: the worse the food, the higher the chef piles it on the plate. Tall is not good.
Tall, at the Riverview in Helensville, was a stacked-to-the-heavens mess of ranch and reef which looked like "someone threw up on it. To think a cow and five prawns had to die to make this dish. What a waste".
Palino looked a little green. Would he throw up on the thrown-up offerings? No, that wouldn't be couth.
There is surveillance cam. Palino goes to the restaurant undercover (not if there's a second series) and orders some muck and finds it to be muck. He waited 45 minutes for his meal in a deserted restaurant. His coffee was "like dirty dishwater". The signs made the place look "like a strip joint".
The menu was one of those which make you think the chef has taken a culinary dictionary, torn it up, thrown the words in the air and constructed a dish out of 32 ingredients which should never share a page on a menu let alone fight on a plate.
The owner Andrew was a candidate for therapy, but pseudo-therapy is what these shows offer. He is a trained chef but was working front of house and had the charisma of tripe. His wife had left him, his chef seemed to think he was a Beat poet (those menus were bad poetry).
"The Riverview is almost down the river," the narrator told us, a line worthy of inclusion on that menu.
Palino's solution? Turn the joint into a steak house. Bring back the sizzle platter. Bring in the sponsors with some new kitchen gear and insert a bit of tension in the form of a food critic.
The steak hadn't arrived. The steak had arrived. Phew. That was about as exciting as it got. There's nothing wrong with The Kitchen Job. It isn't indigestible, it's just that this formula is about as innovative as, say, a sizzle platter.
