The Loveable Gordon Ramsay

Actually, I feel that I’ve been living in oblivion for quite a long time. I hadn’t really heard of Gordon Ramsay until I switched to satellite TV and caught him on Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on BBC America. I was instantly hooked.

Imagine my surprise when I realized that this SOB was the same chef on Hell’s Kitchen, which I had watched once and felt the chef guy was a jerk and who the hell was he anyway?

Gordon is not your kinder, gentler chef. Far from it; he’s abrasive, brusque, profane, and curt. He doesn’t suffer (cooking) fools lightly. His lack of patience is legendary. He’s often disrespectful of other professional chefs, thinks vegetarians and vegans suffer from psychoses, and holds very few people in high esteem.

I think he’s great. Why? His standards. Period.

There’s always a little part of me that’s at least faintly and uncomfortably suspicious of activities that may be going on in restaurant kitchens. I read the Health Department’s Restaurant Report in the Review Journal religiously, and some of the horror stories that are reported are enough to make you want to buy your own cookbook. So when I started watching Kitchen Nightmares, I was instantly hooked.

For those of you who are not familiar with the show, a restaurant’s owners call on Gordon to help them in their business. Some of those kitchens are horrifying. He visits for a week, does lots of swearing, and turns the businesses around. Usually. Sometimes there’s just no saving people from themselves. But he does it by giving them standards that they have to live by in order to survive in this difficult business. And those standards are what have made him a multi-Michelin star winner of international restaurants. None is located here, but a quick trip to the L.A. area will take you to his latest establishments.

There’s an American version of the show, but it somehow lacks the frankness of the British version. New episodes will be airing on Fox Reality shortly, so we’ll see if they improved the show this year.

So there you go, Las Vegas. Gordon’s a chef who is far from a charming, warm and cuddly kind of guy, and who’d cuss you out as easily as most people would greet you with a smile. Yet somehow, his fiercely protective attitude about his good name and high standards are appealing and curiously satisfying in this world of shortcuts.

Even if I can’t afford to go to his restaurants

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