Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares Episode Rating Graph

Mexican-born Israel and his English partner Tara have sunk a cool £150,000 of their own money into their trendy cafe bar D-Place, which offers a vast selection of fusion cuisine. They believed they had found the WINNING FORMULA: great place, great music, great service, great food... and all at the right price. Sounds promising... but from there on it's all DOWNHILL. For the first two years, it all went swimmingly as Israel built up a mini-empire of five businesses... but the success didn't last long. Just three years later and they are all GONE - only D-Place remains and it's hanging by a thread. It's a 24-carat NIGHTMARE. The staff are at WAR, the plastic food is DIRE, the customers have evaporated, the restaurant is losing MONEY and the owners are at their WITS END. Something simply has to give or everyone is out of a job. Faced with dysfunctional staff and a disastrous menu, Gordon is about to face the LONGEST WEEK of his professional life. Can he quell the panic, banish the deep fa

The venue for the first programme is La Lanterna in Letchworth, Hertfordshire. Twenty-eight-year-old owner and head chef Alex offers modern Italian cuisine, a taste of Little Italy in England's first garden city, and the restaurant is run by his best mate, maitre d' Gavin, helped by Alex's ex-air hostess girlfriend Emily. Alex has no customers, cookers that don't work and an expensive menu that's about as authentically Italian as a Hawaiian Pizza. He re-mortgaged his house to buy the business, it's losing £1,000 a week, he hasn't slept for months but still runs round town in a flash car (number plate: A1CHEF) that's worth more than the restaurant. Running out of money, inspiration and energy, Alex is on the verge of losing EVERYTHING. It's a prime restaurant for a dose of TOUGH LOVE - Ramsay-style. But can a strict diet of brutal honesty, radical food surgery and undiluted energy turn things round, or is it only a matter of time before the lights go out at La Lanterna for good?

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 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?

Gordon travels to the seaside in aid of hotel and restaurant the Sandgate. This is happily married couple Lois and Peters' first venture into the catering industry. They used to enjoy eating in restaurants, so thought it might be fun to own one. A year and a half later their dream has turned into a nightmare - they're losing £4,000 a month. In the kitchen, their head chef Stuart is on the brink of a nervous breakdown. He's forced to cook for four restaurants, including fine dining upstairs and Japanese fare in the basement. But it's when he loses his coveted AA award that he really hits rock bottom. Eccentric, overstaffed and on the point of collapse, can Gordon bring this real life Fawlty Towers back from the edge?