Now it’s Gordon Ramsay’s fat-shame nightmares
After radio presenter called chef’s daughter ‘chubby’...
DJ Steve Allen was condemned this week for calling Strictly Come Dancing contestant Tilly Ramsay ‘a chubby little thing’.
His comment about the 19-year-old CBBC presenter led to calls for his resignation from LBC, where he has worked for 42 years, amid accusations of ‘fat-shaming’.
Responding on Instagram, Tilly wrote: ‘I won’t tolerate people that think it’s OK to publicly scrutinise anyone’s weight.’
Embarrassingly though, the teenager has a fat-shamer close to home.
Her celebrity chef father Gordon is particularly fond of using the F-word himself – and that’s ‘F’ for ‘fat’.
From insulting professional rivals such as Jamie Oliver to contestants on his TV shows – and even a female presenter – Ramsay is no stranger to commenting on someone else’s weight.
THE AUSSIE TV HOST WHO IS ‘A PIG’
In 2009 Ramsay made the mistake of aiming misogynistic insults at Australian television host Tracy Grimshaw.
Speaking at the Melbourne Good Food and Wine show, he showed a doctored picture of a naked woman, with multiple breasts and a pig’s face, announcing that it depicted Miss Grimshaw, who had interviewed him the previous night.
‘That’s Tracy Grimshaw,’ he said. ‘I had an interview with her yesterday, holy crap. She needs to see Simon Cowell’s Botox doctor.’
Both the prime minister and deputy prime minister of Australia criticised him. Ramsay then appeared on TV to make a long apology, saying: ‘It was never a personal attack. It was done in a jokey fashion. I had my mum phone up this morning, she was disgusted. If someone had called my wife a pig I would have punched their lights out.’
THE ‘FAT COW’ RESTAURANT
In 2012 Ramsay opened a restaurant in LA called The Fat Cow. His PR team rather unconvincingly tried to deny that it was an insult, saying: ‘The cow is something we eat all the time, but don’t appreciate, so the title of the restaurant is just a nod to that.’
Only a few months earlier, Ramsay had called Hell’s Kitchen contestant Sara Horowitz a ‘fat cow’ on camera. He also called her a ‘fat-mouthed stupid little b **** ’.
THE SCARRED CHEFS
In 2012, on season ten of Hell’s Kitchen, where chefs line up to be verbally abused by him, he told contestant Clemenza Caserta that his chef’s whites ‘look like a tepee’, adding that they were so capacious that he could use them as a sail to cross the Atlantic.
At another point during the show, Ramsay called him a ‘f ****** baby rhino.’
Other contestants have been called a ‘chunky monkey’, a ‘big fat sack of p*** and wind’ and a ‘fat, useless sack of Yankee, Dankey, doodle sh***’.
MARCO PIERRE WHITE
Ramsay has a poisonous relationship with Marco Pierre White. Early in his career, he worked under White at the restaurant Harveys in Wandsworth, south-west London. White said in his autobiography that he ‘broke’ Ramsay and reduced him to tears. Years later, the two men turned up on the same day for lunch at Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck restaurant – and Ramsay criticised White’s weight.
White said Ramsay went up to him and said: ‘You fat b ****** . I’ve always wanted to call you that.’ White commented: ‘I said, “Is that the best you can do?” ’
JAMIE OLIVER
In 2017 Ramsay spent a week as the host of the short-lived The Nightly Show on ITV. At the end of his stint, he read out a spoof apology to rival Jamie Oliver. It ran: ‘I just want to say that I’m sorry. I have been hard on you this week, Jamie. ‘I’ve called you fat, I’ve criticised your restaurants, called you fat, said you enjoyed prison sex, and called you fat. ‘What I said was hurtful, Jamie. I don’t want to make you cry. The last thing I want to do is look at your cute face and think: Blubber, blubber, blubber.’
Oliver responded: ‘I was doing TV years before him, so maybe five years ago it would have bothered me. He’s got four kids and I’ve got five kids and I don’t want to be slagging off some kids’ dad on telly. It’s not nice.’
Ramsay said in 2012 that Oliver ‘needs a f ****** good wash’ and added that he wasn’t surprised that his show Food Revolution had been cancelled after two seasons on air in America.
‘You have to be very careful when you want to dictate to Americans about healthy eating,’ Ramsay said. ‘If you’re not in that best shape yourself, then you have to be very careful.’
THE ‘FAT IDIOT’ ON KITCHEN NIGHTMARES
Ramsay was invited to try to save The Granary restaurant in Fareham, Hampshire, in 2007. Owner Nigel Nieddu was called a ‘fat idiot’ by Ramsay during the show.
Mr Nieddu said: ‘It was the most stressful week of my life. If I had my time again I would not go on the programme. I have never spoken to anyone like that in my whole life. I am not happy about being humiliated. My friends call up and laugh about me being called a fat idiot but that’s how I will be known now – I’m the fat idiot from The Granary.’
THE CHEF WHO HAD THREE HEART ATTACKS
Hell’s Kitchen chef Robert Hesse dropped out of one series of the show after suffering from stress and returned the following year.
Ramsay called him a ‘fat **** ’ and Hesse, who was obese, had three heart attacks before a gastric bypass which helped him lose more than 30 stone.