The Parthenon apparently has some diehard customers. Last night, they got quite an eyeful at the 36-year-old Chevy Chase taverna’s watch party for Gordon Ramsay’s new reality show, Secret Service, which picked the place as its first subject.
Ramsay’s producers had contacted owner Pete Gouskos’s son, Mikey Harrison, and his wife, Susie, to ask if they’d be interested in making changes for a national TV show with a celebrity host. They apparently didn’t realize it would be Kitchen Nightmares host Gordon Ramsay—or that he would secretly examine the food-prep areas.
At the restaurant during the show’s premiere, guests—mostly family and regulars—dug into Greek meatballs in the restaurant’s adjacent Chevy Chase Lounge. They watched Ramsay use a night vision camera to capture rats scurrying in the Parthenon’s basement. Whole chickens sat in a bag of congealed blood in the walk-in fridge. A dirty band saw in the basement, used to butcher meat, was crawling with bacteria—183 times the acceptable limit, according to Ramsay’s ATP test.
Later in the episode, an undercover diner said the tzatziki tasted “fermented” as Ramsay watched from a disguised truck outside. “Please do not eat that lamb,” Ramsay said into her earpiece. “I eat that lamb all the time,” one guest watching at the restaurant said, unperturbed by what he was seeing. When Ramsay’s spy spat out a piece of food, the Parthenon audience booed. “You don’t want to see how the sausage is made,” said Miriam Johnson, a Parthenon regular, as she waited for takeout while watching the show.
Soon, Secret Service moved past the food safety issues and into a Queer Eye-style self-care journey for Pete Gouskos, the owner. Not only could Ramsay help remedy the sanitation issues, he could coach Pete to tell his children he loves them more often and take more of his son Mikey’s ideas for refreshing the restaurant. Then they reached the big reveal: Ramsay led the family into a spiffier dining room, and he helped cook dishes from a new pared-down menu. Ramsay’s producers ended up spending more than $100,000 to update the place.
Mikey Harrison told me that most of the chef’s menu changes had stuck, and that Gouskos had been listening more to his family, though they had decided to add a number of old standbys back to the menu. Were the sanitation issues exaggerated for TV at all? “We’ve been here for 36 years and passed every health inspection,” he said. “It’s TV.”
A check of the DC Department of Health website confirms that the place did pass all of the health inspections that are available to look at online. But a scan of reports from the last several years shows violations like food on the floor of the walk-in, a chef handling raw and cooked foods and washing dishes without washing his hands and changing gloves, and, in the basement, rat droppings.
When the episode ended, the crowd cheered and people hugged Harrison, who then returned to bartending. Most of the guests starting filing out onto Connecticut Avenue. I looked somewhat queasily at the remnants of the meatball on my plate and decided to head home.
