Austin’s El Greco restaurant apparently didn’t survive the wrath of in-your-face celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay.
The Greek restaurant, where Ramsay taped a still-unaired episode of restaurant-rescue show “Kitchen Nightmares” in late August and early September, has been closed since mid-December. El Greco is at 3016 Guadalupe St. in central Austin, near the University of Texas campus.
Around lunchtime on New Year’s Eve, the doors of the restaurant were locked and the lights were out. Uneaten food (what looked like rolls) was seen on at least two tables inside the restaurant. In one of El Greco’s nearly empty glass cases sat some lonely looking baked goods.
Wedged between the two front doors was a piece of mail dated Dec. 21 from Pyramid Properties Inc., the landlord of Guadalupe 31, the mixed-used building where El Greco rents space. A bright yellow sticker slapped on one of the glass doors indicated that a linen service had some of its linens and uniforms locked inside the eatery.
On New Year’s Eve, El Greco’s website was still up and running. However, nothing was posted about the restaurant being closed.
A Dec. 16 posting on El Greco’s Facebook page from a woman named Eve Richter said: “We just went by for dinner, and the place was dark and it looked like there were days old Chronicles outside. Are you open or closed? Hard to imagine being closed on a Friday night.”
No one from El Greco ever responded to Richter’s query. The most recent Facebook posting by El Greco came earlier on Dec. 16: “Gift Certificates available for last minute gifts and stocking stuffers!” The same message was posted Dec. 16 via El Greco’s Twitter account.
On its Facebook page, El Greco said Dec. 9 that the “Kitchen Nightmares” episode featuring the restaurant was supposed to air in late October on Fox. It still hasn’t been broadcast, however.
“Hope that turns out to be a good thing,” El Greco said Dec. 9. “We’ll let you know as soon as we know something.” El Greco wrote in a Facebook posting Dec. 13: “Who follows the show? Wonder why our episode hasn't been in the line up … stay tuned.”
In October, Eater Austin reported that “internal dealings” at El Greco had gotten heated since the “Kitchen Nightmares” taping and that several staff members had quit. Meanwhile, Austin diners had been debating the quality of El Greco’s revamped menu since the “Kitchen Nightmares” intervention, according to Eater Austin.
Chef Jake Konstantinidis owns El Greco, which opened in December 2007.
In an interview in early September on Austin’s Fox affiliate, Ramsay called El Greco an “amazing place” that had “lost its way.”
“It’s a family-run business that’s going to be back on the map,” Ramsay vowed.
Konstantinidis said in the Fox interview that the biggest challenge for El Greco “was keeping it the way we had it when we started. We deviated from what we had in the beginning to what we were before Chef Ramsay came. Chef Ramsay let us see that and brought it out, and got us back to the basics and got us rolling again.”
Comments