Chef Suicide: Was it Ramsey or Debt?
The second chef to have some kind of interaction with celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay has offed themselves, choosing the less than glamorous route of plummeting from a bridge.
It's reported that Joseph Cerniglia, the chef and owner of Campania in Fair Lawn, NY, took a swan dive off the George Washington Bridge in NYC. His body washed up on shore some time later. Tragically, he leaves behind a wife and three kids, now faced with the same debt that most likely drove him to suicide.
The kicker in this story is that Cerniglia and his restaurant were featured on the first season of Ramsay's show Kitchen Nightmares. This would be the Americanized FOX version of the program, not the lower key BBC version. At the time, Cerniglia was already deep in debt and struggling to maintain his restaurant and pay his mortgage. Ramsay was brought in to rectify that situation as is the case on Kitchen Nightmares, to help a struggling restaurant become successful.
Sadly, whatever Ramsay might have done didn't seem to take. If you've ever watched an episode of Kitchen Nightmares or even Hell's Kitchen you know that Ramsay is not the friendliest fellow when it comes to coaching other chefs. He's degrading, yells and intimidates. He does this on Hell's Kitchen to break the chefs down before bringing them back up again. This is to weed out the losers. On Kitchen Nightmares he does it to bluntly point out the usually glaring issue facing the restaurant.
Cerniglia was not given special treatment by Ramsay. He was told at one point by Ramsay, "Why did you become a chef-owner if you haven't a clue how to run a business?" While this may seem harsh, it's blunt and honest. Whether or not this appearance on the show and subsequent failure of the restaurant contributed to the suicide will never be known. But it's not the first time a chef that has come into contact with Ramsay has committed suicide.
One of the contestants from the 2006 season of Hell's Kitchen, Rachel Brown, shot herself some time after appearing on the show.
While both deaths are linked by Ramsay, both are also linked by the type of suicide. Rather than suicide by self harm (such as pills or suffocation) there was a strong determination to die. What this suggests is that Ramsay really had nothing to do with it at all.
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