Moore Place - Kitchen Nightmares Update - Open or Closed?

Kitchen Nightmares Moore Place

In this Kitchen Nightmares episode, Gordon Ramsay visits Moore Place in Esher, Surrey.

Moore Place is located in an affluent area.

It is surrounded by stockbrokers, ladies who lunch and golfers.

As soon as he arrives, Gordon observes the ghastly exterior of the restaurant.

This is due to the bizarre maroon color that the restaurant was painted.

On entering the restaurant, Gordon notices that he will be dining alone as the restaurant is completely empty.

The golf course is very busy, with more than 30,000 golf rounds played on the course.

With this many players at the club, they should be busy in the restaurant.

For a starter, Gordon tries their deep fried camembert, which was disgusting.

The wine stinks as it is sour and has corked.

The Duck a L’Orange that was served was very tough.

The next day, he meets the owners, Nick Whitehouse and Richard Hodgson.

He discovers that neither have experience in the restaurant industry.

The duo have sunk a lot of their into opening and running the restaurant and are now struggling.

The deserted restaurant costs nearly £100 an hour to run, taking into account staffing and other costs.

The restaurant used to be a successful Bernie Inn.

Back in the 1970s, steaks were considered a posh meal.

The Head Chef Hervé Foutrel was there when they took over but no one likes his cooking.

Gordon decides to meet the rest of the kitchen and wait staff, including the new Executive Chef Mark Robinson.

Mark is an experienced chef but he left the industry to study for a business degree.

Mark was brought in to try and improve things but he has only spent money on deep fat fryers and microwaves.

There are two people in the dining room, so Gordon observes the way the restaurant serves their customers.

Gordon notices that almost all of the food is deep fried.

The oil smells like it has been in the fryer for months.

The menu has not been updated despite Mark being brought in to do so.

Gordon feels the restaurant doesn’t care about customers.

This is due to the lazy cooking and poor menu.

He then changes into a chef attire to help them.

Gordon enters the restaurant but there are no customers.

Mark, the executive chef has got the day off.

Gordon learns that Mark had hired Andy Trowell, another new Head Chef.

This baffles Gordon as there are three head chefs...

Andy and Gordon go into the food storage area and are shocked to see mountains of ready made food

The packet sauces and prepared food are more expensive than cooking from scratch.

Gordon speaks with Nick and Richard about the restaurant.

He tells them that the focus of the restaurant must be on their food.

They need to focus on what they can offer to the local people.

Gordon takes Richard down to the high street to see where their customers are now eating.

Most of the public have no clue where Moore Place is located.

Others do not like the color that they painted the building.

Gordon thinks the menu should be American themed as there are many Americans living in the area.

Gordon shares his idea for a new burger and serves it to Nick and Richard.

They think it is a fantastic burger and seem invigorated about the new dishes they will be offering.

They will be serving corned beef hash, burgers, smoked haddock chowder and pecan pie.

Gordon, Andy and Kim take samples of the new food out to golfers on the Golf course.

They plan to try and get new business from the golfers.

On a Friday night, it is Andy’s night off and so Mark is running the kitchen.

Gordon wants the waiters to try and sell the new menu specials to diners.

Waiter Peter struggles hilariously with the new menu.

Customers order the camembert, which was semi-cooked and arrives still frozen in the middle.

The service was generally a disaster.

Gordon does a training exercise to work on the waiting staff to teach them the new menu.

Zack was only hired a week ago and does not know the job or the menu.

Gordon curls up in a ball on the floor when attempting to train him on the new menu.

Gordon decides to use Mother’s day as relaunch day for the restaurant.

The restaurant has 181 tables booked in for Mothers day.

Gordon wants to take pressure off the kitchen by serving roast chickens, carved at the tableside.

He gets all the staff to learn how to carve cooked chickens.

They will practice in time for the relaunch.

Gordon notices that Richard and Nick have booked too many tables, out of greediness.

He talks to them and the duo admit that they still have much to learn.

They move the furniture about to try and make the restaurant look better.

Gordon tests Richard again to see how fast he can carve a chicken.

On relaunch, the chickens are cooking and Andy cooks a ribeye of beef with all the trimmings.

Hervé is taught how to make proper Yorkshire puddings by Gordon.

Gordon changes clothes to assist the waiters as he believes the kitchen is pretty much set.

Zach has been placed on bar duty after he struggled with the new menu.

Kim, Nick, Richard and Peter are working the floor.

Andy is in charge of the kitchen with Hervé as his right-hand man.

The executive chef, Mark, is in charge of crockery.

Peter sells and carves the first chicken.

After other customers see them being carved, more chickens start flying out the kitchen.

The first sitting is a success but the second sitting suffers from the overbooking from the owners.

All the customers on the next sitting arrive and order at the same time.

This leaves the kitchen struggling with sending out the orders.

The customers are frustrated and tell Gordon that the food was nice.

It is the structure, organization and service that were poor.

The customers noticed that Richard and Nick had abandoned the service.

Instead, they were talking with their friends in the conservatory.

This left the wait staff shorthanded and Gordon is frustrated.

Gordon hopes that Nick and Richard learnt their lesson.

The service that day was a success as the majority of the customers left happily.

The chefs have some banter and are praised before Gordon leaves.



What Happened Next at Moore Place?


Gordon revisits the next month and the restaurant is still purple.

Andy is still wokring at the restaurant and tells him that the burgers are very popular.

Nick and Richard tell Gordon that sales are up 20%.

The customers love the American theme of the restaurant.

Mark had left the restaurant to run his own pub.

Most of the other kitchen staff except Herve and Andy had also left.

Gordon sends in Food Critic Matthew Ford undercover.

He wants to find out if things have changed and he liked the food.

Gordon sits down in the bar and orders off the bar menu.

He is frustated that it is mainly deep fried food so he throws the deep fat fryer into the lake.

After the show, Richard told the press that customers were travelling from all over the world to visit them.

Customers had come from Australia and America after seeing the show.

The owners have no regrets of appearing on the show.

Nick told the press that they were so busy that he was in the kitchen helping flip burgers.

Reviews suggest that they had started to go back to their old ways.

Moore Place was closed in 2006, after they sold the restaurant.

It became Esteem Bar and Restaurant.

Esteem closed and the building bought by Moore Place Holdings.

In 2009, Moore Place was to be knocked down and a new hotel was planned to be built.

In September 2011, permission was granted to tear down the hotel.

There were plans to build a care home on the plot.

The building has since been demolished and a care home has been rebuilt on the site.

Moore Place aired on May 18 2004, the episode was filmed in 2003 and is Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares UK season 1 episode 4.

12 comments:

  1. Such a shame, it was a beautiful building, regardless of the horrible paint colour!

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  2. It is a shame, I thought that it would do so well after all of the exposure and a great chef......

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  3. Just watched this episode on Netflix. It's a shame. At the end of the original episode (not the revisit) it mentioned that the Mark Robinson guy had quit, so it doesn't surprise me too much.

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    1. Haha I used to work with Mark till a few months ago. He never worked at the place so couldn't really quit, never mind to "run a pub", he works in IT as he did when the episode was filmed.
      Apparently he was bought in to "play" the part of executive chef as GR had been there a few weeks and felt there was not enough drama as there were no dis-likeable characters for him to argue with. Enter Mark he knew both the owners and had previously worked as a chef...... Apparently GR used to call him names just before takes to try and get him riled up. Apparently all the food served at the grand reopening came in already prepared from Claridges too.......

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  4. It was a beautiful buidling and last time I saw it it looked very forlorn. I remember eating there many times when it was a popular Berni Inn in the 1970s - before it was purple. I only went once under Richard Hodgson and Nick Whitehouse. Once was enough; by then there were so many better places to eat in Esher.

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  5. Zack was a terrible waiter! Still or sparkling? Fresh or.... haha

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    1. Zach describing the Smoked Haddock Chowder “ it’s a nice Beef Chowder” Hahaha Gordon’s brain is 🤯

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  6. I used to work there in 1982 and it was a really good place always full with people, even the late Charlie Drake used to come in for a drink way back then. My lodgings used to be the round house that is now a school across the car park (if the car park is still there)

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  7. I genuinely enjoyed this episode because the two owners said outright, they weren't used to the restaurant industry and so were happy to take on any changes, plus both had good personalities, so it was more enjoying to watch. The UK episodes are a lot better then the US ones.

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  9. The way Zack launches into ‘a nice beef chowder’ is so hopeless yet so endearing. One of the best lines in the whole series

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  10. Hehe, I just found this episode on Youtube. Such a shame of the building's sad history since then, i.e. demolished, as well as this restaurant having only closed a couple years later after this episode. It was a very short success.

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