Gordon Ramsay Sucks And I Hate Him

Gordon Ramsay is not a book.

The face of Donald trump, the hair of Donald Trump and the TV personality of a slightly more articulated Donald Trump. His skin is trying its hardest, but it can't get quite as orange as the real Donald Trump. Sorry, Gordon! Try a little harder.

I fucking hate Gordon Ramsay. But you know, it's hard to talk about hating Gordon Ramsay because when you talk about the man, you need to sort of specify which version of him you're talking about.

Are we talking pre-USA Gordon Ramsay? Are we talking early Hell's Kitchen Gordon Ramsay? Late Hell's Kitchen Gordon Ramsay? Post-Hell's Kitchen Gordon Ramsay? New-age tempered Gordon Ramsay? The dude has so many fake personas that he could be a fucking James Bond villain. The only thing more artificial than his personality is the amount of hair product chemicals that have, at this point, deeply embedded themselves into the skin of his scalp and have now become a part of his DNA, making him half man, half Dove (For Men).

Ramsay is probably the most infamous and noteworthy of the new-age celebrity chefs and his reputation truly proceeds him. He endeared himself to American viewers by hamming it up on his hit show, the USA adaptation of his UK show "Hell's Kitchen", where he'd scream funny swear words and give heavily scripted over-reactions to things as mundane as someone's shoes. The guy got moderately famous in the UK but it wasn't until his show appeared on a heavily gratuitous US version of Hell's Kitchen that he earned a reputation for being an asshole and shot up to true celebrity status.

If you think I'm full of shit or something and that Ramsay's persona isn't 100% fake, well, I ain't whistlin' dixie. Just watch some of the first episode of the UK Hell's Kitchen.

Jump around a little bit, Ramsay doesn't even come in until after a few minutes. Watch him. He doesn't even shout much at all, let alone insult anyone. He's a fucking dork more than anything else. He's laughing, smiling, calm, friendly. A little bit of a 'chef' (i.e. asshole), but not much. The whole show itself is more goofy and relaxed than anything else.

The UK Hell's Kitchen began in 2004. After finishing the UK show's first season, Ramsay left to launch the show in the USA starting in just 2005. In less than a year of film-time, Ramsay went from the normal average joe chef in the first video into the tool you see below, in the first episode of the US Hell's Kitchen.

Ramsay doesn't show up until about 7 minutes in, but just watch the episode. Notice how ridiculous and overblown it is compared to the UK version? I mean, to be fair the UK version is so cheesy it's almost fucking creepy (what the fuck was up with that whole dinner thing at the beginning?) but the US version is trying to hard to be EXXXTREEMEEEE TO THE MAX that it honestly makes me embarrassed to be an American. Like, when I say I watch TV this is what people in other countries think I'm talking about. It's fucking embarrassing. Ramsay is such a buttfuck in this show. At around the 7 minute mark Ramsay appears and starts ripping all the chefs to pieces, pretending their food is so awful he has to spit it out and saying uberz funniez things like "this is total dogshit". Look, I get it, it's just trying to cater to an audience and clearly it worked but holy fuck Ramsay is just such a tool, especially in the early Hell's Kitchen seasons.

It shocks me that people found this entertaining to watch. You know when you watch someone do something so stupid and embarrassing that it gives you that feeling of second-hand embarrassment? Like you're actually embarrassed for them? Yeah, that's the general vibe of Hell's Kitchen. It's like when you're having a great day and everything is going really good and you want to make yourself feel uncomfortable and slightly angry at your own nationality so you flip on a trusty episode of Gordon Ramsay(tm)'s Hell's Kitchen (tm)(c) and watch Ramsay give what is obviously a second or third take on pretending to spit out food before he spurts out a blatantly scripted insult and then waddles away, back to his den, where he must constantly monitor and control the heat of his eggs by removing or shoveling more sand onto them accordingly.

Hell's Kitchen has what I like to call two eras. The first era is the earliest seasons, what I like to call the "Pre-hyper fame" stage. The show had a smaller budget, wasn't as well produced and relied mostly on Ramsay being a phony shithead. It played on the 'shock value' of simple folk tuning in to see what kind of waaaacky swear words the funny British (he's Scottish) gay guy was going to say tonight. For as bad as early Hell's Kitchen was, though, it got worse. After a couple of early seasons the show hit very high ratings for its timeslot and entered the "Post-hyper fame" stage. This era of Hell's Kitchen upped the ante on the shit meter. It started to try forcing more drama, had way more phony stakes and Ramsay found a way to become even more vapid, shallow, fake and annoying. Worst of all, Ramsay had (at this point) become a larger name celebrity so a lot of the show became dedicated to trying to make him look good, which meant egregious and groan-inducing moments of Ramsay sucking himself off on television.

I can't recall, or find a clip of, the particular episode in question but I remember one time I'm watching the show and all the contestant chefs and Ramsay go into some restaurant and the restaurant had a photograph on the wall of Ramsay playing soccer, but the photograph was CLEARLY photoshopped. Like, we're talking it was a really awful bad photoshop job, and the picture itself was obviously just tacked up onto the wall really quick. I dunno if it was supposed to be some kind of joke or something or if the show really wanted us to believe that Ramsay still plays soccer and that the photograph was real or what, but it was so goddamn stupid that I actually, with no hyperbole, pooped my pants when I saw it.

The UK's Hell's Kitchen aired in 2004, but Ramsay actually had a second UK show that began airing in the same year: Kitchen Nightmares, or Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares as it was called in the UK. Kitchen Nightmares wouldn't get a US adaptation until 2007. Unlike with Hell's Kitchen, Ramsay stayed with Kitchen Nightmares instead of leaving after the first season. This provides the perfect mirror to show you the two faces of Gordon Ramsay.

Here's an episode (pulled from the fourth season) of the UK Kitchen Nightmares. Skim it, watch all of it, whatever. Just observe how Ramsay acts.

He's calm, composed. He's just like a normal, wrinkly-ballsack-face-looking guy. I mean, check out the heated argument between Ramsay and the Australian restaurant owner at 28 minutes in. Ramsay is almost too soft spoken if anything. None of the fake bluster or the shouting or the scripted cursing. Ramsay also begins using the "soft narration" he'd incorporate his future shows.

Now, here's an episode of the US Kitchen Nightmares, taken from season 3.

Ramsay isn't nearly as bad in Kitchen Nightmares as he is in Hell's Kitchen, and it in general isn't as insufferable of a show. But Ramsay still cranks the fake up and acts more pissy, confrontational and (ultimately) immature here than he ever does in the UK version. Also, instead of Ramsay himself providing a gentle, sensual and erotically soothing narration, it's another (more EXTREME) narrator played over fast-paced, tense music. Just in case you didn't know that this show is EXTREME. While the UK version tries to edit the shots to make things seem tense and dramatic, the US version goes way further to the point of being so hammy you can hear the fucking pigs oink. 

Outside of Kitchen Nightmare and Hell's Kitchen, Ramsay had/has yet another goddamn show. Basically sort of a ripoff of his own Kitchen Nightmares show, Hotel Hell follows Ramsay visiting various hotels/inns/etc and bitching about how ugly he thinks they are while making an intentional effort to swear as much as he can, especially when nothing should really prompt a bought of curses. As best I can tell, Hotel Hell doesn't have a UK counterpart and is wholly a USA-original/exclusive series. But I'm sure that, eventually, they'll find a way to re-adapt it for the US audience and replace the soundtrack with loud, fast drums and synth riffs and get lots of footage of Ramsay throwing plates across the kitchen and screaming a bunch of censor bleeps. 

Hotel Hell is more stomachable than either of the previous two shows. It's much more "UK Ramsay" in that he's generally more calm, the show is far less scripted and Ramsay does the narration. The soundtrack is still super forced and tense and Ramsay still swears a bunch but it's not unwatchable for me, I guess. One thing I actually hate about this show, however, is that it includes the added element of Ramsay re-decorating and renovating the places he visits. This is fine and all, but Ramsay's taste (i.e. one of the set producer's tastes) in aesthetic fucking sucks. I can't find a good clip of it to present right here, but in the episode featuring the Town's Inn (a dumpy, but quaint, little inn that needed some help), the renovation team totally rapes the inn's rooms. While the rooms before the renovation were a little dirty and old, they have a very cozy aesthetic. One room, filled with antique furniture, was the "Presidential Room" or the Presidential Suite or something like that. You know, like an old-time kind of room a past American president would've stayed in, right?

Well they renovate it and turn it into this ugly modernist design. Like yeah, that's what I think when I think "room that Andrew Jackson snorted opium and killed someone with his bare hands" in, right? Shitty minimalist furniture and accent rugs. Thank you, Gordon Ramsay, for believing that anything old is shitty and bad even though your own face looks like geriatric's butthole. Who wants warm and cozy when you can have the cold, open feeling of sitting in a doctor's office? Because it's modern! You prick.

The worst part about Hotel Hell or Kitchen Nightmares, though, is how exploitative they are. Ramsay walks in and shittalks a bunch of poor people who have nothing, while his stupid soap box of a show makes him look right and smart about everything and everyone else look stupid. Ramsay's favorite thing to do is to go into a small restaurant establishment and then RELENTLESSLY bitch and moan about frozen food. Because yeah, god forbid a small restaurant dare to keep frozen noodles on hand Ramsay, you fucking mop. 99% of people eating there are never going to care if the noodles were frozen, you dick. Like look, as someone who has worked as a chef before and has been in several restaurant settings, I get it. Fresh is better. It really is, and it's better to have small menus made with local ingredients you can get daily.

But not every restaurant can afford, or even needs, to be that type of restaurant. Small town places don't need to have an edgy and condensed eight item menu. Ramsay comes walking in like a dickhead, telling chefs and restaurant owners that their food is shit and then these restaurant owners feel all caught out and attacked and get defensive (why wouldn't they?) but they don't even get a fair chance to argue with Ramsay because it's his shitty little show and footage editing, along with years of network marketing to make people believe Ramsay is some golden god, will always make Ramsay look right. A lot of people say they've never had anyone complain about the food at their place before and I can fucking believe that. I'm not saying it's the best food or that some places featured on his shows aren't legitimately terrible and make bad food people hate, but most of the time it's just baseless posturing by Ramsay because he's a piece of shit.

Ramsay is a celebrity chef, so the shows focus heavily on his critique of food. However, most businesses are failing not because they serve subpar food. The food, normally, has nothing to do with it. It's almost always poor business management, but that's not as exciting to hear about as DA FOOD IS FAWKIN RAW!!!, and Fox believes American viewers are fucking stupid and can't go fifteen minutes without slapping their arm meat together and barking in unison at funny sweary britishy guy (sadly, Fox is actually entirely correct in this). Instead of saying "I can tell this food was cooked with frozen ingredients, I think we should move to a fresh menu- if it's obtainable and practical to sustain for your business and your location", it's "THIS FOOD IS *BLEEEPP* OH MY GAWD MAN THIS FOOD *BLEEEEEEEP* FOOD IS *BLEEEP* I JUST CAN'T *BLEEEP* COME ON MAN IT'S FROZEN, THE FOOD IS *BLEEEEEP* WHAT IS THIS THIS FOOD IS *BLEEEEEeeeeeeeee*".

So the shows exploit failing businesses, showcases the human suffering behind it, Ramsay self-righteously whines about standard small restaurants not operating on a level of quality you see in high end restaurants and ultimately the people in the show aren't even allowed to defend themselves and no matter what they do, an editor is going to make them look stupid. And I know what you might be thinking in regards to the whole 'frozen food' thing. Maybe you think "What's so wrong with Ramsay complaining about subpar food? It should be fresh because that's just better." And you're right, it should be fresh if it can be fresh, but it's almost impossible for smaller places to always have a 24/7-365-days-a-year access to sources of fresh food. Also, it costs more and the business can't afford it. Also, almost no one who ever eats there is going to give a fuck. Also, it severly limits what you're able to serve. The real issue with the food is that the chefs and cooks are giving up under pressure and work ethic has started to suck. But Ramsay looks cooler to us bumpkin Americans when he preaches self-righteously about the dangers of the frozen noodle, I guess.

If Ramsay's issues with his fake personality, self-righteous egotism and exploitive television weren't bad enough in Hotel Hell and Kitchen Nightmares, well, haha, don't worry. Because Ramsay fucking did it. He fucking did it. The limpdick, droop-faced, poof-haired cunt actually fucking did it. He made the worst TV show I have ever seen.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Gordon Ramsay's 24 Hours to Hell and Back.

Ha ha ha ha, hoooooooly shit. If the show's title alone isn't ridiculous and egregious enough on its own then I dunno what is. 24 Hours to Hell and Back is Ramsay's latest fucking show and is currently airing its first season. It follows Ramsay as he rips off Kitchen Nightmares for the second fucking time, traveling the USA while spending only 24 hours to 'completely save' struggling restaurants across the country.

Hey, Gordon Ramsay! Go fuck yourself!

This is the sixth episode of 24 Hours to Hell and Back. It'll probably be sniped by YouTube and taken down, so if the video is removed by the time you're reading this, pretend you watched something so bad and stupid that it made your stomach hurt a little bit. Yeah, you know that weird pain you kind of get in your stomach and bowls whenever you watch one of Gordon Ramsay's shows? We call that "The Ramsay Pinch".

This is the dumbest and most artificial show I've ever seen. I don't even know where to begin. So the premise is that Ramsay secretly shows up to a restaurant that his crew has picked out (and has been covertly going to and eating at for several weeks prior to Ramsay arriving). Ramsay, because he "has to get a first hand look at the restaurant" and "doesn't want anyone to know he's coming", dresses up in a bad disguise every episode and then secretly eats at the restaurant. I'm not making this shit up.

It's just so dumb. So stupid. And it gets worse. So Ramsay, totally in disguise and totally fooling the restaurant staff and owners, eats a meal that he bitches about before it's revealed to the shocked and TOTALLY oblivious restaurant crew that they've been being filmed by TOTALLY HIDDEN CAMERAS. Yeah, hidden cameras that capture crystal clear footage that magically moves to follow movement and action without any humans manipulating them, for serious! "But they could be controlling the hidden cameras remotely!" is what you might say. Yeah well, I don't care how big your fucking remote is, you can't make a "hidden camera" pan around someone in a 180 degree arc or capture a perfect close up of an angle that had no way of being filmed from a hidden location.  

Then they're given just 24 hours to renovate the business, fix the kitchen and menu and magically repair all the years of deep emotional stress and turmoil within the owners and employees (the shoehorned reason being, as Ramsay explains in the show's intro, that "because of social media, restaurants can sink or swim in only one day so it has to be only 24 hours" or something fucking stupid and not true like that). I love that the show unironically and truly wants us to believe that these people at the restaurants: Woke up in the morning, went to work, worked a full shift and then stayed all night working super hard to clean up and renovate an entire restaurant and then worked another full shift the next day. I genuinely love that this show thinks so fucking little of its audience that it expects no one to question how obviously stupid this premise is. 

Each episode clearly takes place over the course of a few days or even a week or so. There's nothing "24 hours" about it. In the episode I linked above (if it's still watchable), the show renovates this dog-friendly restaurant and part of the renovation includes a company installing a large outdoor astroturf area for dogs to play at. But the show is filmed in a way that would have you believe Gordon Ramsay only discovered the outdoor area upon visiting the restaurant, which would then suggest that he somehow got this company to come out on a moments notice and install a complicated astroturf in the timeframe of around ten hours or so. Hey, guess what! That didn't happen! Fuck yourself, Ramsay! 

The show is just soooooooOOooooo fake that it slays me. There's these parts where Ramsay takes everyone from the restaurant out to this huge truck and they have a big screen play captured footage from the kitchen showing how dirty it is or whatever, and the camera does this stupid 'freeze frame' thing and they isolate the problem with this little electronic crosshair and flashing text. I also truly, truly love that the show seriously expects us to believe Ramsay's shitty disguises really work. Especially because, when he goes into the bathroom to remove the disguise, we always see there's a whole makeup team just jammed into the bathroom to remove his costume. Yeah man, no one noticed five people go into the bathroom for forty fucking minutes before a guy in bad makeup prosthetics came in and sat down. Like, don't you hear the clearly rehearsed/planted gasps of "OH MY GOD THAT'S GORDON RAMSAY" when Gordon comes out of the bathroom while shitty upbeat rock music plays in the background? Like, it's totally real, dude!

The premise of the show alone is fucking dumb enough as it is. You have to fix a restaurant in 24 hours, Ramsay? Why? Because people will shittalk it on Twitter? I don't get it. That doesn't make sense. You're full of shit, Ramsay. But even beyond its stupid premise the show manages to be even worse than any of his other shows. Ramsay acts fairly reserved and he's the closest he is, behavior and character-wise, to his more authentic UK persona, but the show is exploitive, expects the audience to be stupid and worse than any of that it makes Ramsay out to be some kind of life changing miracle. People with years of personal issues and unresolved problems within their marriage and family, who are running their business into the ground and are tens of thousands of dollars in debt don't need professional counselling or actual business education! No, fifteen minutes of talking to Gordon Ramsay while he acts infront of a camera is, like, totally all they need. Totally. For real.

Other than that it's about as bad as Hotel Hell. Ramsay goes in, whines about how the restaurant's decor is ugly and then "renovates" it into even uglier postmodernism-styled hipster cafes. In the episode I linked here earlier, part of the renovation was to hang wooden crates upside down from the ceilings. Yeah, because those aren't going to be impossible to fucking keep clean or anything. But it's postmodern! It looks good because Ramsay eats his own shit and says so! It's his show, that's how you know he's right and everyone who disagrees with him is wrong.    

Gordon Ramsay is a product of two things: network executives thinking people are stupid and people being stupid. So many people instantly bought up this fake, artificial personality that Gordon Ramsay constructed and they clung onto his "blunt, vulgar-but-classy-British" nature. I dislike most celebrity chefs because each one of them is more "celebrity" than they are "chef", but I hate Ramsay the most. His shows are the most exploitive, the most obnoxious and the stupidest. This mostly owes to the fact that he's on Fox as opposed to the Food Network where his lesser brothers and sisters reside. Celebrity chefs as they are today were actually a very overnight phenomena to the world, and there was one single event that literally kickstarted every big name celebrity chef you know today.

That event is known as September 11th, 2001.

If you live anywhere inside the USA, or anywhere outside of it, you know what 9/11 is. Terrorists hijacked planes and flew them into the World Trade Center buildings in New York and the Pentagon building in Virginia. Following the attack, the USA was in a state of nationwide shock and mourning, blah blah blah, you all know how it happened and everyone remembers where they were and how we all felt. Anyways, we were feeling pretty down for awhile. Networks, those lovable little capitalistic scamps, decided to use the emotional turmoil to their advantage and rolled out a brand new kind of cooking show: Reality Cooking TV. 

Prior to this, "cooking shows" were almost exclusively just some guy cooking some food and talking to you while he did it. Like, that was the extent of what anyone considered "a show about cooking" unless it was one of the early 'travel and culture' shows related to eating food. In the wake of 9/11, however, we started getting all sorts of shows with more marketable personalities like Rachael Ray and Paula "If He's Black, Stay Back" Deen. It would be only a couple more years before the new era of celebrity chef fully surfaced, with Gordon Ramsay, Bobby Flay, Guy Fieri and others joining the fun and each making about a billion fucking shows each. I give Ramsay crap for having like five different shows but holy shit. Bobby Flay and Guy Fieri have so many different shows between just them alone that I think they may contain the total sum of all human knowledge and experience. 

America ate these shows up (lol get it). It's not hard to see why it works so well. Reality TV is some of the easiest TV to film and if you can host a contest or have some kind of stakes at risk, then you can get all the drama you need with very little financial investment. But in this primordial soup (lol another food joke) of newly emerging celebrity chefs, we got people who began to forget that they're supposed to be celebrity chefs and not just celebrities. And even if shows like Guy's Grocery Games or Beat Off Bobby Flay might be sort of dumb, you know what? At least they're not exploiting people and stroking their host's manufactured egos. Ramsay bitches and moans if anything in his food is artificial, but when's the last time the guy has looked in a mirror?