We stumbled onto Kitchen Nightmares on BBC America entirely by chance, and now we can’t stop watching. The show introduced us to Chef Gordon Ramsay, who has quite the television lineup including MasterChef (teaching amateurs to cook like professional chefs), Hell’s Kitchen (a competition to choose a head chef for a prominent restaurant each season from among 16 hopefuls), and others.

In Kitchen Nightmares, Ramsay visits failing restaurants (with good backstories) and helps them turn their business around. He tastes the food, observes lunch and dinner services, and inspects the kitchen from top to bottom. Then he creates a new menu, has his team remodel the restaurant (literally overnight), and sometimes brings in a consulting chef to bring a mediocre kitchen staff up to speed.

The man is brutally honest, especially in the kitchen. There’s a lot of shouting, with more than a little of it censored out. And in all the episodes we’ve watched, he’s only ever complimented two dishes. This in some ways reduces the show to expected “reality television” standards, but in practice it’s refreshing to see some brutal honesty here.

When Ramsay calls food bland, it’s with the same experience that earned him 12 Michelin stars (once 13). When he accuses chefs of uncleanliness it’s when he’s found moldy food. And when he hints that a dish tastes like it was made with frozen ingredients, he’s been right every time.

Ramsay’s formula is pretty easy to follow. First, get the kitchen clean. He’s a stickler for cleanliness and food safety, and it’s wonderful to see. Second, reduce the size of the menu. More dishes means more preparation, less consistency, and ultimately lower quality. Finally, use only fresh ingredients. Nobody wants to pay for frozen food they could have made at home, and with a smaller menu it’s easy to keep fresh ingredients flowing through the kitchen without wasting them.

This show has completely changed our attitudes on dining out and on cooking at home. We’ve stopped patronizing some questionable restaurants in town, one of which we now know earned an “Unacceptable” rating in its last health inspection. At home, we’ve stopped buying pounds of meat at a time to freeze and have started making quick trips to the store for fresh meat and produce as we need it. I’m looking forward to the farmer’s market in town this summer. We’re not gourmet cooks or fine diners, but we can appreciate the value of a homemade pasta sauce.

My only real complaint about the show is that it plays every restaurant as a success. Sometimes it’s clear that even by the end the kitchen didn’t really have itself put together, and predictably the restaurant ended up closing soon after. But on television, even the disasters are played as triumphs easily enough with a little editing, and it’s the first place the show seems a bit fictional.