Serving up his tender side
With ‘Uncharted’, Gordon Ramsay uses challenges as an opportunity to explore food culture
GORDON Ramsay has a new TV series Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted, and it’s clearly aiming to fill the food-travelogue void left by the late Anthony Bourdain, the chefraconteur whose signature moves no one can copy.
Announced a year ago, Uncharted was criticised when the show’s news release touted that Ramsay would be “discovering the undiscovered” and cooking against local chefs in some “friendly competition”.
Ramsay defended the project to Entertainment Weekly, saying, “God, the feeble warriors that sit in their dungeons and spout negativity without understanding what we’re doing.” He suggested people judge him after viewing Uncharted.
Uncharted presents a cuddlier, selfdeprecating version of Ramsay to the public, a Michelin-starred chef who willingly turns the tables on himself so that he’s the neophyte suffering for the sake of something to eat. It serves fewer f-bombs (all bleeped) and not a moment in which he looks like he might self-combust into rage dust, Uncharted won’t easily lend itself to YouTube collections of the chef’s greatest outbursts.
Yet Ramsay’s DNA suffuses every frame. Produced by Studio Ramsay, the chef’s production company, the series isn’t content with vignettes or mere glimpses into a country’s culture. Uncharted insists on injecting a dramatic arc into every episode, so that the narrative builds to a climax over an hour. The climax is usually a cooking challenge in which he pits himself against a local chef or cooks for a special occasion.
He uses the challenges as motivation to explore a food culture. He uses his bare hands to fish for big, freshwater eel, a speciality of Maori cuisine in New Zealand. He repels down a sheer rock face, with a waterfall showering him, to hunt for Berber mountain mushrooms. He hikes across the Andean highlands and fords streams to track down Peruvian herbs. He shows off his athleticism – and his age, 52 – as he huffs and puffs and curses his way through jungles, mountains and lakes to source ingredients.
While instructive, the Iron Man explorations underscore the artificiality of this brand of reality television. Ramsay’s pursuits focus almost exclusively on the rural, the indigenous and the pre-industrial, at the expense of a country’s more sophisticated takes on cuisine.
His decision to deal with old cooking cultures carries a whiff of Western superiority.
At the same time, there’s also something strangely vulnerable about Uncharted. Vulnerability is about the last word I’d associate with Ramsay – a guy who has made a living off his invincibility. Mostly, he acts as if he’s seeking everyone’s approval. In those moments, you feel a wave of sympathy and affection for him, as if he were allowing us a glimpse into the inner life of a poor, working-class kid who sought the approval of his alcoholic father.
For years, you could argue, Ramsay has just been redirecting the abuse he endured as a boy onto the chefs, line cooks, managers and restaurateurs naive enough to appear on his shows.
Then again, you could also argue he has been passing along his hardearned wisdom: Ramsay learnt at a young age to despise those who lied to themselves and others. He has devoted a chunk of his TV career to exposing professionals who deceive the public about the quality of their ingredients, their management and their restaurants.
“I’d reinvented myself, I suppose,” Ramsay wrote in his autobiography, Roasting in Hell’s Kitchen. “I’m not ashamed of that. I’ve never tried to pretend anything else. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be like (my father), and any time I came even close to doing so, I would put the fear of God into myself.”
If you read his memoir, you learn that Ramsay survived his childhood by keeping his head down and working hard. Working hard and putting up with the kinds of kitchen abuse that only a certain kid can.
With Uncharted, he’s working hard, perhaps unnecessarily so. No one needs to scale a mountain to appreciate the beauty and importance of the Sacred Valley in Peru.
But by keeping his head down, he developed a singular focus, which has made him a brilliant chef and a keen observer of those who would betray the cause of gastronomy.
Yet this trait doesn’t make him a great tour guide. Each of his Uncharted episodes is devoted almost wholly to food. What made Bourdain an exceptional host was his boundless curiosity, which led him to places far from the kitchen, and his humility, which graciously turned the spotlight on others.
Uncharted is the beginning of Ramsay’s professional shift. The show exhibits signs of a chef moving from the thrill of competition and the dinner-rush high of the kitchen, the stuff that has fuelled his drive. He might even be trying to shed a little of the body armour. Uncharted could make for compelling TV, all without a scream from the chef known for them. |
Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted airs on National Geographic (DStv channel 181) on Wednesday, August 7, at 9pm.