A French Quarter Restaurant Is Suing Gordon Ramsay

Oceana Grill, a French Quarter restaurant that appeared on the show Kitchen Nightmares in 2011, is suing the show’s host, Gordon Ramsay, and its producers reports The Advocate. The seafood restaurant’s parent company, Cajun Conti, is seeking damages for defamation and is asking for a specific clip from the restaurant’s episode be blocked from use.

While the Kitchen Nightmares episode that featured Oceana Grill aired some seven years ago, a clip from said episode was posted on the show’s Facebook page this week. The clip shows host Ramsay vomiting after inspecting Oceana Grill’s kitchen and smelling some of the shrimp they stored there; it’s garnered over a million views.

Cajun Conti is furious that this old clip resurfaced, arguing that it seems current and is therefore misleading. Cajun Conti also argues that Kitchen Nightmares producers fabricated scenes and deliberately upped the drama in order to make Oceana look bad. In fact, Cajun Conti says that certain scenes — the vomiting, the finding of dead mice in a rodent trap — were “contrived and orchestrated by [Ramsay and makers of the show] to manufacture drama for their show.”

Oceana Grill/Facebook

This isn’t the first legal battle between Oceana and Kitchen Nightmares: The restaurant sued back in 2011 trying to block the airing of the show. Cajun Conti claims that the settlement from that first suit only allowed producers to use footage from the episode if they paid the restaurant $10K and tacked on an “update statement” about Oceana’s current conditions.