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It’s 1.07am in Washington DC, and Gordon Ramsay is in a baseball cap, driving. His destination: Parthenon, once a thriving neighbourhood joint where White House power-brokers ate Greek. But 36 years after it was opened by Pete, who left Zakynthos for a new life in America when he turned 18, Parthenon is in such a state that one of its staff has contacted Ramsay and arranged for him to break in overnight.

Kitchen Nightmares was a decent runner for Channel 4 in the UK, but the US remake was a bigger hit, lasting for more than 100 episodes – so this follow-up has a lot to live up to. Gordon Ramsay’s Secret Service overreacts to the challenge by keeping the basic format (our man lovingly bullying bad restaurateurs into being good), then hurriedly throwing on garnish after garnish.

The main innovation is that, one whistleblower aside, the Parthenon team don’t know Ramsay is coming. They think they’re being filmed for a standard documentary. So the bit where Ramsay uncovers heinous negligence happens in the small hours, with the chef wielding a torch as well as a wrinkled nose. He sees fatty burnt-orange goo, the kind you might have to hunt for in the crevice below your oven door to find at home, sitting proudly on the edge of the prep surfaces. A scan of the kitchen with a black light looks like the scene of a multiple stabbing. Then we descend into the sticky horror of the basement, where a queasy Ramsay swabs the bandsaw used to slice racks of lamb into chops – it has fleshy residue on it, so it’s no surprise later when Ramsay’s bacteria boffin confirms they found tiny things wriggling – before digging into a plastic bag of raw chicken sitting in bloody ice-water. Squatting angrily to place a camera on the floor beneath the cabinets, Ramsay predicts what it will film overnight: “Rats the size of my grandmother’s …” The next word is bleeped out. “… Cat.”

The following day, Ramsay sits in a broadcast truck in front of a wall of monitors, headphones on. Team Parthenon are galumphing through another listeria-flavoured fiasco of a service, with Ramsay supposedly directing the filming from the street. “Camera 8 please!” he barks, waggling a joystick as Pete drops a pan with a clatter and his 45-year-old son, Mikey, wearily tries to cook something from Parthenon’s bloated, dated menu. The footage has special spy effects put on it: the name of the room we’re in is written at the top of the screen and there’s a green light blinking in the corner. Exciting!

Out front, punters perched on mismatched chairs audibly hate the food, but taking their word for it isn’t secret-squirrelly enough, so Ramsay sends in two young chef pals to pose as diners, wearing body-mounted cameras in a building that is already rigged with cameras. They order the bandsaw lamb, despite Ramsay having noted that Parthenon’s defrosting technique makes the meat a total health-and-safety no-go. “Don’t eat those lamb chops!” he shouts into their earpieces, before bursting from the van and jogging, in a black attack gilet, towards the restaurant.

Having swept through the kitchen (“Stop! Put that down!”) and shooed away diners, Ramsay gathers the shocked workers, including one who secretly isn’t shocked, for a Kitchen Nightmares showdown. This, though, is a hectically accelerated version of the familiar, as a discussion of Pete’s unwillingness to delegate soon gives way to tough emotional truths. Pete’s wife, Susie, calls herself a “restaurant widow” and tells her husband that, as well as being inept at running a restaurant, he is also working too hard at it. “I just want you to spend time with me. Love me!”

Sensing that this is a watershed moment in both their lives, Ramsay respectfully limits his reaction to a piercing stage whisper: “Wow!” But he’s not done. On a lads’ fishing trip, Pete tells Mikey he loves him for the first time in decades, because Gordon Ramsay has said he should. While they’re out, Ramsay’s team refit the kitchen, redecorate the front of house and implement a succinct new menu that Mikey will, at last, be in charge of – a process we hardly spend any time on because its success is taken as read.

Secret Service’s rich mash of kitchen-reality motifs and cheesy espionage frippery does not, however, dent the emotional impact of Pete, tearful and grateful, noticing that the dining-room refit features framed photos of Zakynthos. He got lost somewhere between there and here, bless him. And goddammit if the identity of the secret insider, the traitor now vindicated as a saviour, isn’t a gripping little mystery, too. Gordon Ramsay exits, gets back in his SUV and speeds off. Mission accomplished.

• Gordon Ramsay’s Secret Service is on Channel 4 now.