Gordon Ramsay to return to scene of Everett ‘nightmare’

EVERETT — That bleeping blasphemous Brit is coming back.

That’s right, Gordon Ramsay is returning to the scene of the culinary crime on Hewitt Avenue on Wednesday.

The Fox TV chef is checking up on the Prohibition Gastropub makeover he did last December for a “Kitchen Nightmares” show that aired April 26.

The visit is for a recap episode of his three worst nightmares of the season. And this is something to brag about?

“I’m lucky,” restaurant owner Rishi Brown said. “I’m excited for him to come.”

It was stressful last time Ramsay and his kitchen ninjas swarmed in.

“It really showed my vulnerability,” said Brown, a belly dancer-turned-restaurateur. “It’s the best thing that ever happened to me. He completely opened my eyes and changed my life.”

If you want a glimpse of Ramsay, you’ll have to join the looky-loos on the sidewalk around noon. It’s a closed set, as they say in showbiz. The restaurant will reopen to the public when the rock star chef has left the building, which should be around 3 p.m.

He and the crew won’t hang around all week like last time, when Brown and her struggling eatery both got revamped. Ramsay changed the name from Grille to Gastropub for a new menu that didn’t include Southern dishes or belly dancers.

He bought Brown some new clothes and made her promise to stop belly dancing at work. He told her to ax her chef, Rocky, who later opened his own restaurant a few blocks away, serving fried green tomatoes and Southern classics.

Her worst infraction wasn’t prancing around half-naked or lack of control in the kitchen. It was her soup of the day naivete of serving the same soup every day that made Ramsay lower his voice in a rare polite moment to let her in on a little secret.

“Soup of the day means a daily change in soup,” he informed her in a whisper in the “Soup of the Day” clip that got about 1.2 million views on YouTube.

“Oh,” Brown says in the video. “Soup. Of. The. Day. A new soup every day. OK. … I thought soup of the day meant what is our soup for the day. I’m not that stupid, it’s just that’s what I understood that meant.”

The feedback from the viral video was mixed.

“About 50 percent said, ‘That’s what I thought, too,’” she said. “The others think, ‘Oh, she’s so stupid.’”

There are now different soups for different days. That should make Ramsay proud.

Brown expects to get a heaping serving of praise this time. “I think he will feel really good about what I’m doing,” she said. “It has been a struggle to reopen a brand new business.”

She has come a long way, and so will Ramsay: The recap segment’s other two nightmares are Olde Hitching Post and La Galleria 33, both in Massachusetts.

A Fox spokeswoman said the air date has not been set. It also will contain rehashed footage from the original episode.

Andrea Brown; 425-339-3443; abrown@heraldnet.com

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