Kitchen Nightmares Sneak Peek: Gordon Tallies the Items on a Queens Diner’s Alarmingly Overstuffed Menu

If you have ever paged (…and paged) through a diner’s Greek epic-like menu and wondered, “How do they make so many things? And make them well?,” Gordon Ramsay is here to echo your curiosity.

In the Season 8 premiere of Fox’s Kitchen Nightmares (airing Monday, Sept, 25 at 8/7c), host Gordon Ramsay visits the Bel Aire Diner in Astoria, N.Y. — a family-run business crumbling under dysfunction. With their parents retiring from running the eatery, brothers Kal and Peter are urged by Ramsay to work through their own emotional conflicts in order to save the flailing restaurant. (if you are from the New York area and are curious, it looks like the Bel Aire’s makeover took place in late May.)

In the exclusive clip above, Ramsay gives the Bel Aire a first look-see, starting with its massive menu. When the waitress gives him a few minutes — “or an hour”! — to review the pages and pages of options, Ramsay commits to a hand-count of just how many appetizers, entrees, sides and desserts this one little diner endeavors to have at the ready. Before you press play, jot down your guess the grand total!

Whatever the exact number, Ramsay in the season premiere will go on to note that no one restaurant can possibly make that many things well. He also delves into the more haunting question: If someone (as he will do) takes a flyer on, say, the coq au vin, where in the world are the components for that rare order being stored?

Spoiler alert: You may not want to know.

But as important as giving the basement meat freezer a brutal edit, Ramsay aims to heal a rift between brothers Kal (the diligent on-site worker) and Peter (who peaces out on the regular).

Because on Kitchen Nightmares, “Everything comes back to relationships,” says EP David De Angelis. “Although this is a show about restaurants, it’s also a show about relationships. And when the restaurant isn’t running well, relationships are going to suffer; conversely, when relationships are suffering, the restaurant is not going to run well. In just about every single episode, you’re going to see that, because it was really important to us not to minimize it.

“There’s a lot of ‘Oprah moments’ from Gordon Ramsay in this new version of the show,” which has been off the air since 2014, says De Angelis. “You see these really intimate moments where Gordon is present and vulnerable, and that’s why people open up to him.”