Gordon Ramsay put a North Philadelphia restaurant under the microscope. It was not pretty.
The irascible chef set up hidden cameras at Pretty Girls Cook in North Philadelphia, and helped owner Dominique Shields clean up her act.
Imagine being at work at your restaurant, minding your own business, when Gordon Ramsay walks in to tell you that your kitchen is disgusting.
And he has proof.
This scenario went down in late March at Pretty Girls Cook, Dominique Shields’ popular North Philadelphia restaurant.
A Pretty Girls Cook employee had heard that Ramsay was looking for less-than-stellar kitchens for a new show, contacted producers, and helped set up hidden cameras to allow Ramsay and a crew to document the shortcomings. (The dead mussels he found in a reach-in box: “That’s one of the most dangerous things you could ever do,” he says, clearly repulsed. “That could send you to the hospital.”)
Shields and Pretty Girls Cook are in the hot seat Wednesday at 9 p.m. on the Fox series Gordon Ramsay’s Secret Service, which visited several restaurants in the Greater Philadelphia area during a taping blitz this spring. (Episodes on Marvel Ranch in Reading and Wilson’s Secret Sauce BBQ in Upper Darby Township aired already, with Bruno’s in Lafayette Hill up for Aug. 6 and Dahlak in West Philadelphia due on Aug. 20.)
Shields, who opened Pretty Girls Cook at 1016 N. Marshall St. nearly eight years ago, called the experience “definitely surprising, shocking, overwhelming — a lot of different emotions.” She said she had no idea that Ramsay was snooping around before he walked in that day.
Sure, Shields acknowledged, there were problems. “They knew that business was slow,” Shields said. “I had some small financial issues and I just kind of felt like [her workers] were taking advantage of me. They knew that I wasn’t mentally in the space that I’m normally in, so I wasn’t really working at 100%. I was just basically letting them do whatever they wanted to do, and they knew it.”
Part of the show’s drama surrounds the disclosure of the snitching employee’s identity. That employee is still working there, Shields confirmed Tuesday. “It was already after the review, so there wasn’t anything to be angry about at that point,” she said.
Shields said the experience yielded “a whole new restaurant,” complete with new recipes and a new approach to team-building. “We talk more, we have group chats, and we have monthly meetings so that we’re all on the same page,” she said.
The rollout of new dishes is timed to the show’s premiere. The new menu includes more seafood as well as coffee-rubbed grilled rib eye steak with chimichurri; short rib with whipped potatoes and escarole; seafood fra diablo; and shrimp toast with house-made pepper jelly.
She refused to remove her customer favorites, such as the salmon grilled cheese, the “ladies love salmon” (grilled salmon filet over confetti rice), and the “perfect penne pasta” (an Alfredo dish).
Ramsay was great to work with, Shields said. “I know he’s known for being intense, but I could definitely see everything he does is because of the passion and the love that he has for food. You can tell from even the way he walks is all because he really loves what he does and he wants you to have that same passion when it comes to culinary arts.”