People watch Hell’s Kitchen for Gordon Ramsay’s insults, which – while tamer than Malcolm Tucker from The Thick of It (via The Guardian) and lacking the controlled mania of Chef Gareth Blackstock from Chef! (via YouTube) have the benefit of being real, really loud, and really angry.
That makes the fact that Ramsay has never regretted a single tirade more important. As BabbleTop writes, even though he reportedly doesn’t watch his own show, Gordon Ramsay figures that if a contestant has provoked one of his swearing barrages, they have probably earned it. And if the contestant lied to him, they insulted him first and deserved their rebuke. Talking with Entertainment Weekly, Ramsay explained, “When somebody lies to you it’s worse than working with somebody who can’t cook. Because when you trust someone with your reputation and they cross that line, they want [the food] out of their sight and they tell you they finished it, and you know they’re lying, that’s the worst.”
Of course, Ramsay’s insults have drawn criticism, as exemplified by a 2018 Grub Street piece that noted the various negative reactions from chefs to a compilation of Gordon Ramsay’s meltdowns. “What a sad, inadequate man,” they quote the Observer’s restaurant critic Jay Raynor tweeting, “This is everything wrong about restaurant kitchen culture. Because he suffered violence and abuse as a young cook, Ramsay thinks it’s character building and so the cycle continues.”
The abuse is the brand, the appeal, and a bit stale
With the notes about bullying considered, we cannot dismiss the fact that the appeal of Hell’s Kitchen lies in Gordon Ramsay’s furious outbursts. Or, as TVOM more disparagingly, “For the last 15 years, millions of people have found extreme entertainment in watching Gordon Ramsay scream at anxious contestants on Hell’s Kitchen.”
The entertainment is such that sites like TheRecipe have compiled lists documenting the best insults from the series, such as the “idiot sandwich,” “There’s enough garlic in here to kill every vampire in Europe,” and “You put so much ginger in this it’s a Weasley!” Though, of course, such examples are punctuated by the repeated expletive of the F-word. Talking to CarterMatt, Jean-Philippe Susilovic described Ramsay’s relationship to swearing as follows: “That the F-word is an illness, he’s never going to stop using it!”
However, as Carey Jones points out in Serious Eats, even though Ramsay comes out with a few amusing insults, a lot of them simply consist of repeated swearing that grows old. At least Chef! and The Thick of It insulted with some ingenuity.
