Gordon Ramsey Coming to The Bakehouse???

If this isn’t a match made in the restaurant version of Hollywood casting, I don’t know what is. Gordon Ramsey may be about to take on an Austin restaurant for his Kitchen Nightmare series on the Fox Network: the 30-year favorite on Manchaca, the Bakehouse. The Bakehouse is not a fine dining restaurant (the kind Ramsey normally eviscerates). It’s a south Austin emporium of comfort food that no one is likely to confuse with the Ritz Carlton. So this will mark Ramsey’s first foray into, if you will, neighborhood cuisine.

If you’ve seen Ramsey’s show, the plots are fairly simple. Ramsey takes on a restaurant that he deems to be in, how do we put this politely, disrepair. He then moves in with the cameras following his every move, assaults the ownership, cooking staff, waiters, equipment even the vendors as he attempts to retool and reboot these festering turds other wise known as restaurants. The result is a U.S. knockoff of Ramsey’s wildly popular UK show called Kitchen Nightmares. Ramsey, well known for his pit bull-like personality (does Simon Crowl on American Idol come to mind?), is also an acclaimed chef having garnered several Michelin stars. The question then becomes: how much of his bullying and brow-beating can the featured restaurant put up with?

The key is that the restaurant in question has to allow Ramsey in the door. He just doesn’t show up in the dead of night. So the Bakehouse folks have a pretty good idea of what’s coming: particularly after they filled out the 30-page background check on each employee (funny that the form seemed to dwell on any propensities toward physical violence) and looked at previous episodes of the show.

I can’t wait to see long-time Bakehouse owner Carl Zapfe, as colorful a character as we have here in Austin, go at it with the battling and thoroughly obnoxious Brit.

Short of blowing up the Bakehouse (literally) I don’t know what Ramsey’s going to do. Change the Sausage Crisps? He’d better not. Wipe out the South Austin Beef Wellington? Hell no! And he’d better not mess with the gigantic 2lb. cheeseburger where the customer gets to name if they can eat it, along with the fries, in twenty minutes or less. (Right now it’s the Dave Burger.)

The show has not yet been totally green lighted. But Zapfe tells me he is leaning in that direction. What the hell, if you subscribe to the notion that no publicity is bad publicity, this is a no-lose deal for the Bakehouse. They might even get a brand new kitchen out of it, courtesy of the show. But can Austin put up with Gordon Ramsey? We shall see, and we will keep you posted.