Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares Nightmare kitchens - Shocking restaurant confessions

Date Published:

28/11/2007

Behind the scenes in the restaurant. What the customer doesn't see (and wouldn't want to). By Charlie Cottrell

"Beware heavy sauces" warns another chef. "I worked at a place where we served steak and chips on a Saturday a 'special value' steak on Sunday and a steak in a spicy pepper sauce on Monday. By that point the meat, which wasn't of the highest standard in the first place, was almost inedible but we'd mask it with a heavily flavoured sauce rather than bin it."

Expensive doesn't necessarily equate to good quality as some shocking hygiene reports show. A YourLondon report earlier this year noted that environmental health officers rated 80,000 London restaurants for cleanliness, which resulted in some places, such as branches of Yo Sushi and Starbucks, being given a shocking zero stars, and such celebrity chef eateries as Marco Pierre White's Le Mirabelle and Aldo Zilli's The Garrick Club gaining only one star, meaning, according to the survey - 'a poor level of compliance with food safety legislation. Much more effort required.'

And BBC news reported in November 2007 that a company supplying meat to elite hotels the Dorchester and Claridges as well as government offices, transported its goods in rancid conditions demonstrating 'potentially fatal breaches of health, safety and hygiene laws'. Raw and cooked meat were transported together with blood dripping from bags of raw meat contaminating the shelves below, vans were not disinfected for days and were thick with the stench of rotting flesh. One former employee admitted that "in the back of the van it was quite often rotten meat, even once you'd turned the fridge up to sort of chill the van out which would reduce the smell and stuff."

So next time you're in a restaurant take care when you order, be wary of highly flavoured sauces or better still, stay home and cook your own.

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