Ramsay's Costa del Nightmares

Tim Gray is 21. He's the Head Chef at Bonapartes in Silsden, West Yorkshire and he specialises in 'fine dining'. He has ambitions to be a TV chef and one day hopes to open restaurants in London, Paris and New York. Unfortunately, as Gordon Ramsay discovers, Tim can't even cook an omelette and when he attempts to make dinner for his parents at home he manages to set the cooker alight. A true kitchen nightmare if ever you saw one.

Saturday night at the Glass House Restaurant in Ambleside is a nightmare. Orders in the kitchen are mixed up, food's not cooked properly and the customers are complaining. Not only is the chef in tears, but the owners on the brink as well. Neil Farrell's owned the Lake District restaurant for 3 years and he's up to this eyes in debt. The business won't survive if the restaurant's only busy on a Saturday night but with only 3,000 residents in the town, Neil has to attract the influx of visitors if he's going to fill the 90-seats every night.

Ramsay meets Francesco Mattioli, the owner of The Walnut Tree Inn in South Wales, who's broke, chef-less and desperate to restore the restaurant's former reputation.

The venue is La Lanterna in Letchworth, Hertfordshire. Twenty-eight-year-old owner and head chef Alex offers modern Italian cuisine, a taste of Little Italy in England's first garden city, and the restaurant is run by his best mate maitre d' Gavin, helped by his ex-air hostess girlfriend Emily. But Alex has no customers, cookers that don't work and an expensive menu that's about as authentically Italian as a spag bol. He re-mortgaged his house to buy the business, it's losing £1,000 a week, he hasn't slept for months but still runs round town in a flash car that's worth more than the restaurant. Running out of money, inspiration and energy, Alex is on the verge of losing everything. Gordon rolls up his sleeves and sets to work on the encrusted kitchen cookers and hapless front-of-house staff. Can a strict diet of brutal honesty, radical food surgery and undiluted energy turn things round, or is it only a matter of time before the lights go out at La Lanterna for good?