The celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay has been accused of faking his reality television show by staging culinary disasters and hiring actors to dupe the viewers.

A former manager of an Indian restaurant in Manhattan filed a lawsuit against the Glaswegian chef yesterday. He demands millions of dollars in damages and a court order to prevent the airing of an episode from the American version of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.

The series, which was first broadcast in the UK, shows Ramsay being parachuted in to save a failing restaurant with his gastronomic and business expertise. By the end of the programme dramatic improvements have usually been seen.

The lawsuit claims that Ramsay pretended that meat he found at Dillons restaurant was rotten and that he used a defective chair to suggest that the restaurant was full of faulty furniture.

Martin Hyde, the general manager who was fired on Ramsay’s advice, says that to demonstrate the success of his advice actors were hired to make the restaurant look busy.

Mr Hyde says exaggerations about the restaurant’s conditions will destroy its reputation and the good name of the people who worked there. The lawsuit has been filed at the US District Court in Manhattan.

James Curich, a Ramsay spokesman, said that he could not comment on the lawsuit because he had not yet seen it. “It is a reality show and as far as I know it’s not something they do,” he said.

Ramsay, 40, opened his own restaurant in New York last year. The Gordon Ramsay at the London (NYC) hotel in Manhattan has received mixed reviews.

Ramsay was expecting to emulate the success of transferring Hell’s Kitchen across the Atlantic with the American series of Kitchen Nightmares due to start in September.

The programme won high ratings when it was shown on Channel 4, but it attracted a similar accusation of “gastronomic mendacity” in the UK.

Ramsay won a libel payout last year after a newspaper suggested programme makers appointed an incompetent chef and invented disasters in the kitchen in a bid to prove that Ramsay’s expertise was required.

Bonaparte's was the first restaurant to feature on Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. A month after Ramsay was broadcast choking on a rancid scallop, owners said bookings had dried up and the restaurant folded.

At the time, Ramsay celebrated his £75,000 libel payout by saying: “I won’t let people write anything they want to about me.”

Ramsay has also been threatened with a lawsuit by fellow celebrity chef Marco Pierre White this year. In April, Ramsay told New Yorker magazine that he had framed White for a robbery nine years ago.

Ramsay admitted that he stole the reservations book from Aubergine, a Michelin-starred restaurant, in order to prevent his former friend replacing him as head chef.

"I nicked it. I blamed Marco. Because I knew that would f*** him and that it would call off the dogs. I still have the book in a safe at home,” he told the magazine.

"It was my one stroke of genius, f****** somebody over without his knowing that I was the one who done it. You always eat that f****** revenge when it's cold, don't you? Trust me, this was stone cold."

White’s lawyers said they were considering a lawsuit for “malicious falsehood”.

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