The Bitter Guy Loves Gord
Aug. 8th, 2006 01:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thebitterguyGordon Ramsay has turned into a guilty summer pleasure for Cynra and me. He’s on tv for a full two hours every Monday; 9-10 on City TV as the host/star/beating heart of evil of Hell’s Kitchen, and from 10-11 on the Food Network as the host of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.
I can’t remember which one we started watching first. I think it may have been Kitchen Nightmares on a Sunday, and then we noticed that there was another one on Monday, preceded by Hell’s Kitchen.
In any case, we got in knees deep. A friend of ours who’s been jet setting around the world recently for a major corporation had mentioned HK to us, noting that the US version was not as good as the UK one due to the absence of a snooty announcer. He failed to mention the presence of a sociopath in white (Mssr. Ramsay) was a constant between the two.
The two shows are basically showcases for Ramsay’s trademark brusqueness. I had the displeasure of reading Lynn Truss’s latest whinefest "Talk to the Hand", which is essentially 150 pages of "get off my lawn, you darn kids!"![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pyat would like it. Anyway, Truss actually mentioned Kitchen Nightmares by name, although I couldn’t quite tell if she considered it a symptom of humanity’s inhumanity to humanity or the root cause.
The general cause is considered to be Ramsay’s perfectionism, which is I suppose one way of saying someone’s a double edged jerk with a spiked pommel.
Kitchen Nightmares is sort of a Holmes on Holmes/What not to Wear for eateries. Ramsay will come in to a failing eatery, observe the kitchen, eat a meal, and tell them they’re all completely incompetent. Then he goes up to his hotel room, straps himself into his chef’s jacket, and unleashes hell.
He spends a week or so at each restaurant, browbeating the owners and kitchen staff with what they’re doing wrong (IHHO) and what they should do right (ditto). Of course, the return trip a month later generally shows that A) he was right and they’ve been successful beyond their wildest dreams, or B) he was right and they were fools, FOOLS, to ignore his advice, bwah ha ha ha ha.
The show generally makes me a little hungry, the best example being when he visited a soul food restaurant. It’s a full decade since I ate soul food. And Popeye’s doesn’t count.
Hell’s Kitchen is a game show where the prize is an executive chef position at a BILLION DOLLAR LAS VEGAS CASINO. They started with some number of contestants split into two teams and have whittled them down each week, until there’s now two left. Apparently next ep is a reunion show, where they’ll direct the ejected chefs in a cook-off.
It’s not terribly addictive, other than watching the typhoon in white heap backhoes of abuse on contestants and customers alike. I swear to God, the man is like a living “duck and cover” poster. The contestants are interesting, I suppose, but the show is edited clumsily. I don’t know who we’re supposed to be cheering for, and occasionally I wonder if any of them are qualified to run the chip truck at Rama, much less run a restaurant at a BILLION DOLLAR LAS VEGAS CASINO.
The stuff we’ve learned since we started watching his shows has been interesting. Apparently he used to be a soccer player, took up cooking after his knee went bum, and was the first Scotsman to get three Michelin Stars (one will note he did not get it for Scottish cooking).
True, these are interesting facets of his background and personality. He still has the mien of something that you normally don’t see unless someone just cast Monster Summoning VII (or whatever the spell is called now).
That, and his accent is cute. I love the way he says Michelin Star (Mesh-Lin Staaah, with a funny thing on top of the i).
I can’t remember which one we started watching first. I think it may have been Kitchen Nightmares on a Sunday, and then we noticed that there was another one on Monday, preceded by Hell’s Kitchen.
In any case, we got in knees deep. A friend of ours who’s been jet setting around the world recently for a major corporation had mentioned HK to us, noting that the US version was not as good as the UK one due to the absence of a snooty announcer. He failed to mention the presence of a sociopath in white (Mssr. Ramsay) was a constant between the two.
The two shows are basically showcases for Ramsay’s trademark brusqueness. I had the displeasure of reading Lynn Truss’s latest whinefest "Talk to the Hand", which is essentially 150 pages of "get off my lawn, you darn kids!"
pyat would like it. Anyway, Truss actually mentioned Kitchen Nightmares by name, although I couldn’t quite tell if she considered it a symptom of humanity’s inhumanity to humanity or the root cause. The general cause is considered to be Ramsay’s perfectionism, which is I suppose one way of saying someone’s a double edged jerk with a spiked pommel.
Kitchen Nightmares is sort of a Holmes on Holmes/What not to Wear for eateries. Ramsay will come in to a failing eatery, observe the kitchen, eat a meal, and tell them they’re all completely incompetent. Then he goes up to his hotel room, straps himself into his chef’s jacket, and unleashes hell.
He spends a week or so at each restaurant, browbeating the owners and kitchen staff with what they’re doing wrong (IHHO) and what they should do right (ditto). Of course, the return trip a month later generally shows that A) he was right and they’ve been successful beyond their wildest dreams, or B) he was right and they were fools, FOOLS, to ignore his advice, bwah ha ha ha ha.
The show generally makes me a little hungry, the best example being when he visited a soul food restaurant. It’s a full decade since I ate soul food. And Popeye’s doesn’t count.
Hell’s Kitchen is a game show where the prize is an executive chef position at a BILLION DOLLAR LAS VEGAS CASINO. They started with some number of contestants split into two teams and have whittled them down each week, until there’s now two left. Apparently next ep is a reunion show, where they’ll direct the ejected chefs in a cook-off.
It’s not terribly addictive, other than watching the typhoon in white heap backhoes of abuse on contestants and customers alike. I swear to God, the man is like a living “duck and cover” poster. The contestants are interesting, I suppose, but the show is edited clumsily. I don’t know who we’re supposed to be cheering for, and occasionally I wonder if any of them are qualified to run the chip truck at Rama, much less run a restaurant at a BILLION DOLLAR LAS VEGAS CASINO.
The stuff we’ve learned since we started watching his shows has been interesting. Apparently he used to be a soccer player, took up cooking after his knee went bum, and was the first Scotsman to get three Michelin Stars (one will note he did not get it for Scottish cooking).
True, these are interesting facets of his background and personality. He still has the mien of something that you normally don’t see unless someone just cast Monster Summoning VII (or whatever the spell is called now).
That, and his accent is cute. I love the way he says Michelin Star (Mesh-Lin Staaah, with a funny thing on top of the i).
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no subject
Date: 2006-08-08 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-08 06:22 pm (UTC)That said, he's an entertaining complete and utter asshole who earned the right to be, within the limits of his particular field of endeavor. I'll admit, I watch HK weekly, and honestly, what goes on there is NOTHING compared to the sort of abuse that goes on in professional kitchens 365 days a year. To paraphrase a friend of mine with aspirations of chef-dom said, "Nothing, absolutely nothing, is off limits in the world of the kitchen. Race, parentage, sexual preference, it's all on the table on a daily basis and you either sink or swim."
Which is exactly why I have no aspirations towards professional cooking. I'm good. I could be that good in terms of individual dishes, but to turn them out with consistency all night long in an environment like that? No thanks.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-08 06:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-08 07:22 pm (UTC)Cooking is one thing; I'm a not bad cook. Being a chef? That's something completely different, and I don't have any plan to enter that particular minefield.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-08 06:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-08 07:07 pm (UTC)I'm kind of looking forward to next week's episode.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-08 08:39 pm (UTC)The UK HK has a much better announcer--sarcastic and actually funny--but the American version is a better reality show.
The British one has two chefs who run each team, and the chefs prepare different menus. The problem is that if one team loses, there's no way to tell if the fault was the quality of the food or just that their menu was less popular.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-15 03:45 pm (UTC)