By Julia Gray
Ten Things I Learned From Watching Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on BBC America.
1. Gordon Ramsay is one of the few 41-year old men who can disrobe on camera and not send viewers screaming from the room or cause one’s eyes to bleed out upon seeing the body of a hard-living head chef and TV host. Shockingly, Ramsay looks pretty damn good for someone who spends most of his time sampling inedible dishes from the crappy restaurants he’s been sent to fix.
2. Gordon Ramsay is Britain’s answer to Chuck Norris minus the stumping for a presidential candidate and martial arts expertise. Just like the legendary Norris, Ramsay has scores of special powers and super-human strength that bring kitchen staffs to their knees.
3. Gordon Ramsay can magically sharpen a dull carving knife by just thinking about it.
4. Gordon Ramsay can use telepathy to train a naif chef to cook a perfect risotto.
5. By rubbing his spiky blond hair, Gordon Ramsay can find the most perfect truffles without the using the snout of a truffle-trained pig.
6. Gordon Ramsay can speed up the aging of a single-malt whiskey by 10 years by seductively whispering about it to his wife before a late-night romp.
7. Gordon Ramsay stores all of his cooking supplies in the crags in his face.
8. Gordon Ramsay can whip up a dish with ingredients that haven’t even been discovered yet and it will taste better than anything ever made in the past, present or future. Not only are foodies in awe of this achievement, but also the dish is so wonderful it will resurrect Julia Child.
9. Michelin stars are so afraid of Gordon Ramsay that they will never be taken away no matter how bad the food and service in his restaurants gets.
10. Ramsay, like most Brits, can say quirky words such as plonker and wanker and get away with it. Why? It’s all about the accent. The English accent implies a certain amount of class, sophistication and education. Getting cussed out by someone with an English accent is less unnerving as say, suffering through the same verbal barrage by folks like, say, Mayor Richard M. Daley. (But what fun it would be to hear Daley call recalcitrant aldermen “wankers” with that Bridgeport twang of his.)
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Julia Gray can turn the channel to BBC America just by thinking about it.
Posted on February 18, 2008