Checking in with GORDON RAMSAY
Dirty working surfaces. Spoiled food. Critters.
We’ve all heard of the horrors lurking in restaurant kitchens. Gordon Ramsay knows them all too well, having worked in them all his life and is now correcting them in his Wednesday Fox series “24 Hours to Hell and Back,” in which he has exactly one day to turn around a struggling eatery. And what he encounters leaves him aghast.
“Oh my God, I’ve said it many times before,” the 51-year-old Scottish-born, England-raised Ramsay says. “Your kitchen should be like dental hygienists. They should be absolutely spotless. Do you have any idea the damage you can cause through contamination, cross-contamination, undercooked food, out-of-date food? I mean, it’s just insane. They’re highly dangerous places, so we need to be ahead of our game.”
On the whole in the series, Ramsay says he has found that the biggests problems in these restaurants were generally food quality and service. And that, he says, can start with the owner, who oftentimes tires of the rigors of running the business and stops caring about the product.
“The owners are either burnt out, lost their way or fell out of love,” Ramsay explains. “That’s the problem with this business. It’s not something that you can pick up and drop. Every day you’re open, you need to be on your game. So they fall in love with the idea of running a restaurant but they don’t have any idea what it takes to run it consistently. So they stop going out, they stop looking at competition, they stop looking at new openings and they get complacent. So a cross-sector of issues to why they start disintegrating.”
Full name: Gordon James Ramsay
Birth date: Nov. 6, 1966
Birthplace: Glasgow, Scotland (raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, England)
Family ties: He and wife Tana have three daughters and one son
Business interests: Has opened restaurants in France, Italy, Dubai, Qatar, Singapore, London, Las Vegas and Atlantic City, N.J. Also has a global partnership that produces quality home and lifestyle products and a successful mobile game “Restaurant DASH with Gordon Ramsay”
TV credits include: “Masterchef,” “Hell’s Kitchen,” “Kitchen Nightmares,” “The F Word,” “Hotel Hell,” “MasterChef Junior,” “24 Hours to Hell and Back”
Did you know: Had a promising career as an English footballer until an injury led him into the food and hospitality industry.
Favorite book: “I’m busy all the time that I rarely have time to read but back when TV screens weren’t a thing on trans-Atlantic flights, there’s no doubt that Anthony Bourdain’s ‘Kitchen Confidential’ was a must for all chefs. Being through the trenches, I knew similar stories but it’s truly one of the few books that I know of that inspired a generation of chefs.”
Favorite movie: “‘Jiro Dreams of Sushi.’ Absolutely stunning piece of documentary film that captures how beautiful food can be.”
Favorite musical artists: “Mumford & Sons is a big, upbeat album that literally gets me going in the gym. And then I would say Chris Martin and with his band Coldplay – phenomenal.”