Clean and Organized
Gordan Ramsay Style

When you think of clean and organized what do you think of? Do you think of the military, your grandmother or an uptight neat freak?

I think of Gordan Ramsey.

I watched another episode of the Gordon Ramsay show, Kitchen Nightmares last night. He is that top chef and the show is where he goes to a restaurant that is not doing well and gets the owners to make changes to make the restaurant a success. It is quite a fantastic show.

In addition to being a famous chef, Gordan Ramsay is an organized man.

In the episode I saw the biggest changes to the restaurant had to do with it being clean and organized.

I have watched other shows of his where the restaurant was not clean. Some of them are disgustingly filthy.

This show was more about being clean and organized in the type of food, length of menu, amount and type of decor and the layout of the dining area.

He starts out the show by ordering the food and then eating it. Then he goes back in the kitchen to observe the staff, how they are working and the interactions between the staff and the owners.

The first step he insisted on was that the menu be shorter. A shorter menu is obviously simpler. He saw how the chefs could not make the meals quickly and efficiently. As a result the meals were slow to arrive and the food was not cooked perfectly.

He also insisted that the furnishings, layout and name of the restaurant be changed.

All these changes made the restaurant be more open, simple, inviting, clean and organized.

He removed an interior half wall, threw out (burned actually) the overstuffed chairs, all the garish decor, light fixture coverings and the overdone name.

He is a chef but what he really does on this show is organize a restaurant better.

The hard part was convincing the owners to do all this. The owners were an elderly retired couple who had owned successful diners over the years and now they had bought the restaurant for their daughter.

All the staff and the husband/owner were willing to do whatever was suggested. The mother and the daughter were the hard ones to convince to change to the simpler menu and simpler layout. After all, the menu and the layout was their idea.

It was what they wanted.

Chef Ramsay pointed out to them gently at first, and then more directly as the show went on, was what they wanted wasn't working. The restaurant was not a success.

So if they wanted to make it a success they needed to get on board and make the changes for a simpler restaurant.

The daughter came around about midway through the show and finally in the last 5 minutes the mother reluctantly agreed to accept it.

The show validates my ideas that the best businesses, the best of anything is always simpler. That the idea of more, more stuff, more options, more obligations and more complications does not help. What helps the most is to be clean and organized.

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