Start spreading the news. The bad boy of British cuisine, Gordon Ramsay, is having trouble with those argumentative New Yorkers again, and this time it might take more than two raised fingers and a stream of expletives to shrug it off.
Papers have just been logged at the US district court in Manhattan which accuse Ramsay of playing dirty on the new series of his reality TV show, Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. The programme, copied from its British equivalent, follows the Michelin-starred chef as he tries to knock struggling American restaurants into shape in just one week, and later returns to see whether they lived up to the challenge.
With Ramsay there is playing dirty, and then there is playing dirty. It is quite normal - in fact it is de rigeur - for him to browbeat his hapless victims into submission through his famous combination of foul language, inspirational leadership and plain abuse. You don't sign up to a Ramsay reality TV show in search of positive reinforcement.
Rotten burgers
But the legal action launched on Tuesday goes further than that. It alleges that while he was shooting an episode in a Manhattan restaurant he faked sequences as part of the week's makeover to portray the eatery in a particularly bad light.
The suit, issued by a former manager at Dillons, an off-Broadway restaurant in Manhattan catering primarily to theatregoers, alleges that Ramsay falsely blamed him for the difficulties of the restaurant to the extent that he was sacked on camera at the end of the week-long filming.
Martin Hyde, a Briton who once worked as a salesman at eat, also alleges that Ramsay made up claims that he found rotten hamburger meat in the refrigerator and rat droppings - both of which the manager denies.
Mr Hyde says the production team brought in an unstable chair created by Ramsay's staff to give the impression that the furniture was defective, and hired actors posing as customers to make it look as though towards the end of the makeover week Ramsay had succeeded in building business.
The lawsuit alleges that "unknown to the viewing audience, some or all of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares shows are fake and the so-called 'problems uncovered and solved' by Ramsay are, for the most part, created by Ramsay and his staff for the purpose of making it appear that Ramsay is improving the restaurant."
The legal action asks for $1m (£500,000) in damages, as well as a court injunction putting a stop to the Dillons episode which is scheduled for broadcast by Fox TV this autumn.
James Curich, who acts as spokesman for Ramsay in New York, said he was unable to comment on the allegations until he had seen the original documents. But of the allegations of faked sequences he said: "It is a reality show and as far as I know it's not something they do."
This is not the first time that Ramsay has been accused of falsifying a restaurant's performance, though on the previous occasion he thoroughly quashed the accusation. He was accused in 2005 in an article in the Evening Standard of faking scenes in an episode focusing on a restaurant in Silsden, West Yorkshire.
Ramsay subsequently sued the newspaper and won, winning £75,000 libel damages in the process. After the case he said: "I won't let people write anything they want to about me."
Given the start of the legal action against him, Ramsay might be forgiven for ruing the day he packed his bags for New York. His reception in the city since he set up his first restaurant in America last year has been patchy.
The London, as he provocatively called his restaurant, was designed to cement his reputation in the US and launch the Ramsay brand on the international scene. But it was hit by a damning review from the arbiter of culinary taste in the Big Apple, Frank Bruni, the New York Times's lead food critic.
He burst the Ramsay bubble with a few carefully chosen phrases that were every bit as piercing as the chef's notorious reliance on the F-word. "Seldom has a conquistador as bellicose as Mr Ramsay landed with such a whisper. It's not an unappealing sound, but it's nothing that's going to prick up your ears."
In reply, Ramsay told the New Yorker magazine: "When I came here, I expected to get kicked in the nuts. I have been."
Now a fresh round of nut-kicking is under way. Mr Ramsay's pain at the hands of the city that never sleeps, particularly when there's a legal action to be pursued, has perhaps only just begun.
The man who put the F in food
· Blamed his mentor, Marco Pierre White, for stealing his reservations book in 1998. However, Ramsay admitted in March this year: "I nicked it. I blamed Marco. Because I knew that would f*ck him and that it would call off the dogs ... I still have the book in a safe at home."
· Once said of his fellow celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson: "We don't see eye-to-eye - not when you come from that garden gnome syndrome and you're a squashed Bee Gee."
· Critic AA Gill and his companion Joan Collins were thrown out of Ramsay's self-titled restaurant in Chelsea in 1998. The chef was reportedly angry over Gill's description of him in a review as a failed sportsman who acts like an 11-year-old.
· In a 1999 interview, he voiced his dissatisfaction with the first woman he had sex with. "f*ck me, she was ugly," he said.
· Publicly criticised Gary Rhodes for using frozen chips in his Edinburgh restaurant, Rhodes and Co. He said: "It's sad for a chef of his calibre to resort to using frozen chips. I think it is dreadful."
· Told Jerry Springer in October 2000 that Ainsley Harriott was a "f*cking comedian" whose cooking "looks like sh*t".
· At an after-dinner speech to business people he managed to offend a host of chefs including Raymond Blanc, whom he called "a little French twat", and Sir Terence Conran, branded "a designer, not a f*cking chef".
· In May 2004, a single episode of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares contained the word "f*ck" 111 times. Sample sentence from the programme: "If you toss that f*cking cabbage once more, I'm going to f*cking stick it up your arse."
· Protesters from animal rights group Peta dressed up as horses and dumped a ton of manure outside his Claridge's restaurant last month in protest at horse meat being featured on his Channel 4 show The F-Word.
Alan Power
