Gordon Ramsay sued by New Orleans restaurant over Kitchen Nightmares clip

The clip shows Ramsay vomiting after smelling a container of shrimp

A restaurant in New Orleans is allegedly suing Gordon Ramsay after a clip from his show Kitchen Nightmares resurfaced on Facebook last week.

In the clip, which has since been removed from social media, Ramsay can be seen vomiting after smelling a container filled with shrimp.

Oceana Grill is claiming that the clip was over-dramatised and that the circulation of the clip on Facebook violated an agreement that had previously been made between the restaurant and the chef.

The video clip, taken from the season finale of the show in 2011, was made available to watch on the Kitchen Nightmares Facebook page for 24 hours last week and had accumulated 1.5 million views before being taken down, according to the New Orleans Advocate.

In addition to the vomiting incident, Ramsay was also filmed discovering three dead mice in the restaurant.

Cajun Conti, the company that owns Oceana Grill, claims that “none of the above-described events were real, but were contrived and orchestrated by defendants to manufacture drama for their show.”

Furthermore, in 2011 Cajun Conti supposedly came to an agreement with TV network Fox, which stated that the company would be paid $10,000 (£7,775) every time the Oceana Grill episode was aired in future, and that any rerun of the episode would include an update about the restaurant.

However, when the clip featuring Oceana Grill appeared on the Kitchen Nightmares Facebook page last week, there was no mention about how the restaurant was doing seven years later.

Cajun Conti had originally tried to stop the episode from airing at all in 2011, but to no avail.

The new lawsuit states that the programme was wrong to depict the restaurant in a “negative light”.

“During the episode’s filming, defendants went to great lengths to over-dramatise and even fabricate problems with the restaurant in order to increase ratings,” it reportedly reads.

“The footage intentionally portrayed Oceana and its employees in a patently false and negative light, as it depicted the appealing restaurant as an unsuccessful, unsanitary and mismanaged restaurant.”

Oceana Grill is situated in the French Quarter of New Orleans and has welcomed celebrity diners including Drake, John Goodman, Ludacris and Mark Wahlberg.

The Independent has contacted Oceana Grill and Gordon Ramsay for comment.