Kitchen Nightmares Keeps Me Sane

[pantryslut]

I have come to understand that one of the main reasons I enjoy Kitchen Nightmares so much is because it's all about working with big egos, defensive gestures, people seeking cookies before they'll do any real work, people who think good intentions are enough -- the whole range of bad behavior that we so often wrestle with (in very different contexts, of course) here in discussions of certain flavors. You know, like "that's just your opinion" and "but this is so much better than it used to be, why don't I get any credit for that?" and so on and so forth. And Gordon Ramsay gets to cuss and yell and tell the blunt, bald truth to people's faces -- and eventually, they all come around and try it his way and and see the results. It's a seriously cathartic show for me, in other words. A little fairy tale of interpersonal relations under stress. Plus, of course, it involves food.