The Reality Show That’s Tackling the Toxic Workplace

In the crowded field of TV cooking shows, Gordon Ramsay looms large. Hell’s Kitchen began airing in 2005, during the heady days of the earliest reality-competition shows, premised on the notion that the art of cooking is best achieved through the craft of bullying. The celebrity chef berated the contestants who doubled as his sous-chefs. He screamed. He mocked. He, more than anyone else, made Hell’s Kitchen hellish—and, in that, his show captured something essential about the industry it claimed to portray. Food preparation is, traditionally, women’s work; commercial kitchens, hectic and hierarchical and male, tend to elide that fact. They take a restaurant’s most basic marketing proposition—it sells stuff you need in order to stay alive—and coat it in thick layers of machismo.

A year after premiered on Fox, another cooking competition hit the air. Bravo’s took the older show’s conceit—a test of the skills required to succeed in high-end kitchens—and made it calmer and kinder. To serve as its head judge, the show recruited Tom Colicchio, a figure who, like Ramsay, was a respected celebrity chef, and who, unlike Ramsay, exuded charismatic affability. served as both a competitor to and a rebuke to it. means ; chefs, fundamentally, are bosses. And , fundamentally, is about the work environments they create as they go about the business of food. The tension between executives and staffers; the considers all of that in the gas-fired context of the kitchen.