The Gastrocast

Fox just aired its reality cooking show Hell’s Kitchen where Gordon Ramsey boot camps young wannabes in a competition to win their own restaurant. It was brilliant! Love the show, love the Chef. There is a lot of whinning and whinging on the message board this morning about how mean and rude and arrogant Ramsey is–obviously most people do not know who he is, what he does, and how he does it–They do now! I can only dream of ever performing at Ramsey’s level–and I don’t mean the cussing and abuse, I can do that already. I’m after the gastronomic perfection.





Just wrote this on the message board: Google Ramsey and you’ll see he is absolutely for real. Controversial, brazen, perrfectionist. And he’s not the only British Chef whose like this. Marco Pierre White once treated Gordon the same way–seems to have worked. Sure the British press loves to play up Gordon’s worst moments, but somewhere in there is a man driven to perfection by whatever means and he’s gotten there. What US Chef makes 400K by the time they were in there early 30’s? Boiling Point, Beyond Boiling Point, Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares–all shows depicting the real Gordon and it ain’t no stunt. When people are paying over $100 for a plate it better be perfect or they don’t come back. Granted the contestent of this show had to be as bad as they are or it wouldn’t be nearly the same show–but they should have at least learned who they were up against, and studied a bit. I don’t agree with Gordons’ style 100% because having been in the same situation it breaks down–you feel it is personal even when it isn’t and then things can fall to pieces. The constant harping and poking and taunting can wear a person down. I walked off the line and out of a job because of an owner trying the same sh*t. But there it wasn’t about food or quality or customer satisfaction–it was just about whether he burnt his hand on a hot plate one too many times. . . .Todd English, Thomas Keller, and others in their march toward perfection treat their staffs similarly I ‘m sure. I’s all a matter of degrees. We Yanks don’t have the kitchen brigade history of the French or English so we watch in horror a system which works and works well for weeding out the winers on the gastonomic map.



What ticks me off about the FOX site is that they actually made me edit the word *shit* out of the post. Obviously they’re really into the bleeping thing. That was the number one complaint about the show last night–too much foul language and abuse. Boo hoo. Life isn’t pretty. 



More in a podcast later.