Fall Preview: Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares


Chef Gordon Ramsay has become a worldwide television star in large part for his readiness to berate other people with sudden, verging on spasmodic, profanity. More than his recipes, this has become his trademark. Youtube is full of clips of him ordering people, including minor celebrities, to fuck off. In one of the promos for the upcoming second season of his Kitchen Nightmares, Gordon Ramsay pretends to get annoyed with the operator of an errant boom mic, and you sense that very quickly the spot will degenerate into a farce of bleeped expletives. In his other US series, the reality show Hell’s Kitchen, very little bona fide “cookery” is seen. Rather, the point of each episode is to set up two questions in the mind of the viewer, and then to answer them by the end of its sixty minutes–which contestant will Gordon Ramsay lose his rag with this time, and how bad will the swearing be? In June, the upper house of the Australian parliament held a full inquiry into this latter, most pressing concern.

It is a shame, really, because these rabid bollockings were originally just one aspect, albeit an essential one, of a larger event: the entrance into popular culture of a giant, integrated, infallible egotism that through its own existence seemed to be advancing a totalized argument in favor of male chauvinism. In this respect, one comparison that comes to mind is to Leo Tolstoy, the dogmatic Tolstoy of The Kreutzer Sonata, the Tolstoy of “you could not tell stories to Papa, because he would immediately see through them,” of “eating meat is lying.”

The program that broadcast the Ramsay personality in its fullest potency was the UK precursor of the FOX network Kitchen Nightmares, originally screened on Channel 4 as Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Here, as in the US series, Gordon Ramsay was meant to play a sort of culinary troubleshooter, “turning around” troubled restaurants up and down the British Isles. But a more complex experience departed from this comfortable and rather secondhand premise. In reality, the five series of the show have delivered a prolonged drama of the national psyche, a serialized agon in the course of which Gordon Ramsay has unearthed and confronted virtually every known species of British male failure and disappointment.  
    Perhaps following the adage that one must break a few eggs to make an omelet, the first order of the day for each episode of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares is the emotional destruction of the head chef—the demolition of the man’s highest aspirations and ideas of himself, as reflected, with unforgiving clarity, in his abysmal, inedible dishes. It is systematic. Gordon Ramsay enters, takes a seat in the dining room, and after one or two bites of the establishment’s “signature dishes,” often spat out into a napkin, heads straight into the kitchen to inform the chef of how misconceived his ideas were, or how ineptly executed. Then he leaves for the night.

The wrestling aspect of all of this is played up in the next scene, taking place the following day, in which the ex-professional footballer Gordon Ramsay fronts the camera bare-chested as he dons his crisp, tight-fitting, short-sleeved chef’s jacket, looking a lot like a male nurse. Now suitably attired, he establishes himself squarely in the middle of the other man’s kitchen in order to observe his practices, to stare, and to notice, an unchanging expression of sadness and disgust lining his features, either with his robust forearms crossed or with one hand tightly clasping his chin, as though he were trying to hold his mouth shut; then he begins to comment, and remark, and comment again, and criticize, aggressively noticing everything that is going wrong until finally his opponent gives up and walks out, or explodes back—perhaps it would be better to say, disintegrates—at him, a confrontation that Gordon Ramsay welcomes because he knows it is unwinnable for the smaller man.

Next, the inspirational work of recreating the man begins, building him back up through a process of improvised cognitive behavioral therapy and reality testing. The man is rebuilt, on a more appropriate scale; the kitchen recovers; Gordon Ramsay leaves. It almost always works this way; his one significant failure involved a vegetarian bistrot, a woman (owner), and a Frenchman (chef).
  It must be the ambiguous aesthetic position that cooking occupies, just below the level of abstraction required of the purer arts, that allows Gordon Ramsay to do this, to take a man apart at the most fundamental level, to demonstrate to him by indisputable proof that he is not, cannot be, what he thinks he is. For there is a certain sense in which criticism of cooking, as opposed to, say, criticism of painting or poetry, can be categorically true. You just cannot get around a statement like, “the John Dory is raw,” or, “your mashed potatoes are revolting,” if you are a chef. But the crisis that prompts the intervention in the first place, this piling of quasi-artistic aspiration and native eccentricity onto slow, desperate financial suffocation: it is enabled by precisely the same sense of ambiguity, the contingent standing of cuisine as an art form. These situations of total pathos into which Gordon Ramsay is parachuted week after week are thus eminently redeemable, always containing the possibility of their own pragmatic salvage.

So in the very best moments of the show, such as the paradigmatic episode 2 of series 4, The Fenwick Arms, the viewer is treated to an ideally satisfying form of light drama: a tragedy relieved. The owner of the Arms, a roadside pub near Lancaster, is a small, rubicund, bearded eccentric working himself half to death in its kitchen, feeding his dreams with complicated sauce inventions and his verbose menu, with the cellophane-wrapped lots of nouvelle cuisine dinnerware he has stashed away all over the premises, the lumbering, redundantly industrial kitchen equipment he has bought up “on Ebay.” It is a picture of superannuation, middle-class, middle-English. When Gordon Ramsay arrives, he finds the menu board outside covered by a thick shroud of overgrown petunias. In this episode and others, it is almost as if Tolstoy himself were to have shown up during the second act of something like The Cherry Orchard, assessed the other characters, told them what he thought of them, and therefore what to think of themselves, just before the disaster became unalterable. 

– Christopher Hsu