Ramsay still reigns supreme as TV antihero
After 25 years, chef not trimming reality menu anytime soon
Gordon Ramsay insists he never wanted to be the bad boy. His image as the brash, bellicose chef and restaurateur, as the master of the culinary meltdown, was, he said, largely a matter of getting off on the wrong foot.
Ramsay was introduced to British viewers on “Boiling Point” (1999), a series on Channel 4 chronicling his turbulent efforts to open his first restaurant. At around the same time, BBC Two launched “The Naked Chef,” a breezy, upbeat cooking show starring Jamie Oliver. The two shows, and the two chefs, could hardly have seemed more different.
On the one hand, you had Ramsay, a surly perfectionist, firing a server for drinking water in view of customers. “And then literally at the same time, on another channel, there was Jamie,” he recalled in a recent interview, “this floppy-haired Essex boy, sliding down the banister doing one-pot wonders.
“The nation fell in love with him,” Ramsay said. Whereas with himself, he added, “the nation wondered what the hell was going on.”
Ramsay’s explanation may not entirely account for his enduring infamy as an explosive TV tyrant — it wasn’t Oliver, after all, who named Ramsay’s signature series “Hell’s Kitchen,” and he hardly forced Ramsay to bludgeon countless chefs and restaurant owners with colorful jeremiads for the past 25 years on air. But that Ramsay still brings up old rivalries when discussing his reputation is revealing, a glimpse of the competitive intensity that has been crucial to his continuing success.
That competitiveness is one reason that the host of roughly two dozen shows over the years, including “Next Level Chef,” now airing its third season Sundays on Fox, still devotes so much of his downtime to watching other food shows. It’s why, during the pandemic lockdown, he threw himself headlong into social media. And it’s also why, at age 57, Ramsay has no intention of calling it quits.
“When I started this career, it was nothing to do with money — it was passion and the drive to be the best,” he said. “The longevity comes down to not taking anything for granted.”
If Britain was ever truly skeptical of Ramsay, it’s safe to say that it and much of the world have come around. Today, he is one of the most recognizable