Gordon Ramsay is being sued by a restaurant that he helped turn around in an episode of Kitchen Nightmares, after it accused him of breaking a prior legal agreement and feigning illness to dramatise a scene.
Cajun Conti, the parent company of the Oceana Grill restaurant in the French Quarter, filed the suit on Wednesday in Orleans Parish Court, according to The Daily Mail.
The episode in question, which aired in 2011, sees Ramsay sniffing a container of shrimp and then retching violently into a bin – a scene the restaurant claims was staged and dramatised for added effect. During the episode, Ramsay also discovers a rodent trap with three dead mice in it.
Lawyers for Cajun Conti had tried to stop the episode from airing, filing a suit that ended in an agreement that footage from the episode couldn’t be remixed in the future without a $10,000 payment to the restaurant, along with a disclaimer saying that it didn’t represent current kitchen conditions.
However the dispute has re-emerged after the Kitchen Nightmares team posted a clip from the episode to Facebook last week, apparently in breach of its previous agreement.
“During the episode’s filming, defendants went to great lengths to over-dramatize and even fabricate problems with the restaurant in order to increase ratings,” the suit reads.
“The footage intentionally portrayed Oceana and its employees in a patently false and negative light, as it depicted the appealing restaurant as an unsuccessful, unsanitary and mismanaged restaurant.”
