On Jun 18, 1:30*pm, Michel Boucher > wrote:
> Convicts take over kitchen in Canuck reality show
>
> By Etan Vlessing, Reuters, June 16, 2009
>
> Canadian broadcaster Citytv is putting ex-cons with no culinary skills to
> work in a classy Toronto restaurant for Conviction Kitchen, a new reality
> series set to premiere in the fall.
>
> Sure, TV chef Jamie Oliver trained disadvantaged youths to staff his
> Fifteen restaurant franchise. But the Canadian series has a film crew
> follow local celebrity chef Marc Thuet and his wife and co-restaurant
> owner Biana Zorich as they whittle down 84 former bank robbers, thieves
> and petty offenders to seven waiters and six cooks. The finalists then
> endure a three-week culinary boot camp before Conviction Kitchen opens
> its doors to ordinary restaurant patrons.
>
> Thuet said the eight-part series is no media stunt to launch a new
> business.
>
> Instead, he said, Conviction Kitchen provides first-class food and second
> chances for reformed criminals newly sprung from jail.
>
> "This (TV show) will move viewers, and prove you can hire these people.
> They are grabbing this second chance and turning round their lives," he
> said.
>
> Dramatic tension? The original group of 13 trainees is now down to 10
> after one ex-con threatened Zorich when he was told to cut his hair.
>
> Another trainee, like many an ex-addict, left after he was found shooting
> up in the back of the kitchen.
>
> Thuet, a former drug and alcohol abuser now four years sober, connects on
> camera with ex-cons he wants to empower as chef trainees while they fight
> the temptation to return to destructive habits.
>
> "This is probably the most emotional show we've ever made," said Simon
> Lloyd, president of Toronto indie producer Cineflex Prods. "You've got
> someone taking heroin, who can't stay in the restaurant because he can't
> be around recovering addicts."
>
> Lloyd added that he and Thuet, a French-born chef who originally trained
> at the Dorchester in London, originally envisioned a TV show where they
> turned a prison kitchen crew into trained restaurant chefs just before
> they are released.
>
> But after they failed to secure the co-operation of Canadian prison
> authorities, Thuet and Zorich decided to close and relaunch one of their
> Toronto restaurants, Bite Me!, as an Italian restaurant.
>
> Conviction Kitchen differs from most reality TV series in that no one is
> voted off the show at the end of each episode. But Thuet and Zorich don't
> disguise their challenge to keep the new restaurant open beyond opening
> night.
>
> And once the cameras stop rolling at Conviction Kitchen, Zorich hopes the
> trainee chefs and dining room servers remain with the new restaurant
> until they've learned enough to further their new careers elsewhere, or
> even open their own restaurant.
>
> © Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
>
> --
>
> Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest
> of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest
> good of everyone. - John Maynard Keynes

Great. A bunch of convicts in a kitchen with knives!