He may have had to close one of his gastropubs this week, but Gordon Ramsay should take heart that he's still a source of inspiration in America. Only it's not to the catering industry, but the film industry. In an interview in the New York Observer, Joe Maggio, the writer/director of a new horror film explains that it was former New York Times food critic's Frank Bruni's lacklustre review of Ramsay's London Hotel restaurant in Manhattan which provided the spark for the film's story.
The review in question described Ramsay's foray across the pond as conservative and uninspiring. 'His strategy for taking Manhattan turns out to be a conventional one,' wrote Bruni, 'built on familiar French ideas and techniques that have been executed with more flair, more consistency and better judgment in restaurants with less vaunted pedigrees.'
Maggio says of the review, 'There was a lassitude in Bruni's writing that gave you the sense he liked the food, but wanted to dislike it, and so he delivered this odd, middling, lazy review...It struck me that this was totally ridiculous and unfair. Then I started thinking what I would do to Frank Bruni if I were Gordon Ramsay. After many strange imaginings, I concluded that more than anything else, what Ramsay would probably want is to somehow force Bruni to live in Ramsay's shoes for a bit, to teach him empathy, to force him to care about cooking with the intensity that Ramsay cared about it, and then to randomly and arbitrarily shit all over Bruni's dreams.'
In the movie, a food blogger J.T. Franks writes a particularly nasty review of television chef Peter Grey’s food. Driven insane by the review, Grey kidnaps the writer, imprisons him in a basement and then gives the reviewer a series of cooking challenges, from frying an egg to grilling a steak. If or when Franks gets it wrong, he's brutally punished.
To judge for yourself whether restaurant reviewing makes for a good horror movie plot, you can see the trailer of Bitter Feast for yourself here.
