India Innes, the talented young chef who joined Piccolo Teatro’s team shortly before its closure, went on to work in several well-known restaurants all over the world.
The Kitchen Nightmares franchise has certainly earned a reputation for delivering some of the most unexpected reactions in television history.
But very few of the show’s episodes compare to the absolute chaos in the “Piccolo Teatro” episode from the fifth series of the United Kingdom-based version of the show.
Not only did the celebrity chef, Gordon Ramsay, have to take things into his own hands (literally) in this episode, when he had to physically carry the former chef out of the restaurant’s door, but he also had to take up the added task of training the restaurant’s brand-new replacement chef, India Innes, halfway through his intervention.
How Gordon Ramsay helped India Inness
If you watched this episode when it first aired, you will already know that this new Piccolo Teatro replacement-chef managed to impress Ramsay right away.
And even though this Parisian vegetarian restaurant ended up closing before Ramsay even made it out of Paris, the end of this episode’s story took quite a surprising turn.
When Ramsay returned to Piccolo Teatro just a few weeks after his initial makeover, the restaurant had shut its doors for good and India was kicked to the curb despite her deal with the restaurant’s owner, Rachel.
However, Ramsay clearly saw a spark in India, and he wasted no time offering the aspiring young Scottish chef a position at his London restaurant, Boxwood.
India’s culinary journey after Kitchen Nightmares
Usually, most of the airtime in the Kitchen Nightmares series is filled with the sharp-tongued Ramsay insulting the state of the kitchens and the food of the restaurants that he visits.
And this is exactly what made his interaction with India on this episode so special.
It is not difficult to see why Ramsay developed a soft spot for this young chef.
After all, he mentions in the episode that she is the same age that he was when he first moved to Paris to try and make it in this city’s notoriously fussy restaurant scene (and they both hail from Scotland originally).
But Ramsay truly went above and beyond to set her up for success in her culinary career.
After the show, India went on to work in some of the most famous kitchens across the world, including:
| Year | Restaurant |
| 2007 | Piccolo Teatro, in Paris |
| January 2007 | Boxwood Café, in London’s Berkeley Hotel |
| November2007 | Shaw’s International Bistro, in Edinburgh |
| April 2009 | Cafe Fish, in Leith |
| August 2017 | the Kailyard Restaurant, in Tarbolton |
What really happened at Piccolo Teatro after Ramsay left
The short segment at the end of this Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares episode may have explained some of what went wrong at Piccolo Teatro, but India told deadline in 2007, that the restaurant’s closure was even worse than it appeared on the show.
She shared that she struggled to work with the restaurant’s owner once Ramsay was gone and that she would not have stayed, even if the restaurant remained open.
India also said, “It actually got so bad there that one night I left my jacket in the cellar and in the morning it had been eaten by rats. That was it for me.”
What happened to Rachel the Piccolo Teatro owner?
India was seemingly not the only former Piccolo Teatro staff member whose life took an unexpected detour.
The British tabloid, The Sun, reported in 2010 that Rachel, the restaurant’s owner, was left “penniless and on the street” after the episode was filmed and had to resort to prostitution in order to support herself and her child.
However, since these reports have never been verified and Rachel’s father seemed pretty forgiving during the actual episode, it seems like this might just be a very tall tale.
What India has been up to recently
Although India’s talents and connections to the world’s most famous Scottish chef made her well-primed to become one of television’s biggest up-and-coming chefs in the early 2000s, it seems as though she prefers to stay out of the spotlight these days.
India does not share much about her private life on social media, but from what she has posted on Facebook in the last couple of years, it seems like she has settled down away from the public eye.
And although it is evident that she still has her love for cooking and all things -food-related, it seems like she is focusing on life, at home with family, for now.
However, one snapshot from her Facebook highlights proves that she is still very grateful for the chance that Ramsay gave her years ago.
