/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/58266351/ramsay_hells_kitchen.0.jpg)
Update, January 9, 8:30p.m.: Per a Caesars Palace representative, the figures originally named the in Los Angeles Times piece were not correct: “12,000 people have booked in the last 10 days, not 50,000 reservations,” a rep says. It’s still an impressive number of bookings for the reality-show-themed restaurant.
Hell’s Kitchen, the 8,000-square-foot Las Vegas restaurant named after celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay’s long-running “reality” competition, is maybe the hottest restaurant in America. Ramsay tells the Los Angeles Times that a whopping 50,000 reservations have already been made in the 10 days books have been open; the restaurant’s currently in a walk-ins-only mode until a “grand opening” planned for January 26. “It is unprecedented,” Ramsay told LAT. “We’ve never seen this kind of demand.”
Those diners are clamoring for one of 300 seats in a restaurant that’s literally designed to mimic the set of the Fox show, complete with “Red” and “Blue” “sides” to the dining room and a ”high action” open kitchen designed to show off, as original paperwork describes it, the “sounds of a noisy kitchen.” (No word if that ambient noise will include a domineering head chef loudly berating their staff.)
Perhaps the high volume shouldn’t be a surprise for a chef who’s achieved television fame. Before it shuttered in December 2017, Guy Fieri’s Times Square restaurant appeared on annual lists ranking the country’s highest-grossing restaurants. In Oklahoma, Food Network personality Ree Drummond draws as many as 6,000 visitors a day to her sprawling restaurant/marketplace.
By comparison, it would take the new 40-seat Noma — which took just 24 hours to sell out 10 weeks’ worth of reservations — more than three years to seat 50,000 solo diners (at dinner, anyway).