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Six hours of advertising yourself on Netflix and – presumably – getting paid for providing streamer content at the same time? Nice work if you can get it, and Gordon Ramsay has got it. Being Gordon Ramsay, a six part – six part – documentary, follows the chef ’n’ TV personality as he embarks on his most ambitious venture yet. It’s “A huge undertaking”, “high risk, high reward”, a “once in a lifetime opportunity” and “one of my final stakes in the ground … If it fails, I’m fucked.” It is opening seven billion (five, but it feels like seven billion) restaurants on the top floors of 22 Bishopsgate at once. There is going to be a 60-seat rooftop garden place with retractable roof, a 250-seater Asian-inflected restaurant called Lucky Cat, a Bread Street Kitchen brasserie and a culinary school.
But we begin with a family scene. The youngest of Ramsay’s six children with wife of 30 years, Tana, are having pancakes. Gordon thinks they are too thick. They’re American-style, not the crepes he thinks they should have. “Darling,” says Tana, not for the first time even that morning, you suspect, “Could you just give it a rest?”
The defining feature of Ramsay, of course, is that he cannot. No Michelin-starred chef can. They are not made that way. When he is with his children, he is fully with his children (“Megan’s 27, the twins Holly and Jack are 25, Matilda’s 23, Oscar’s six, Jessie James is 18 months. Did I miss any of them? Thank fuck for that”). Running and jumping and playing with the little ones, planning weddings and engagement parties and buying inaugural chef whites with the older ones – he is apparently inexhaustible and they, like Tana, clearly adore him, while also (in the elders’ case at least) having a firm handle on the man.
The same – at least in this extended advert for the Ramsay brand – is essentially true at work. His chefs respect him because he’s walked the walk before, talking the talk, and they all strive to do their best, both for him and – as they are all cut from the same perfectionist cloth as Ramsay – just because.
It is watching these people adhere to an abstract ideal – to the idea so unfashionable that it is rapidly becoming unfathomable – that everyone should work to the highest standard at all times because that is the right thing to do that saves Being Gordon Ramsay from being (as the man himself might put it) the absolute bollocks it could be. And then there’s just the simple pleasure of seeing them construct the most mouthwatering dishes you will ever, if you can afford it, eat – with a knowledge and skill that is almost as delicious to watch.
Six hours of the many dramas associated with getting five businesses up and running at the same time does feel like quite a lot – each of the premises needing to be designed and built from scratch and a retractable roof added to one. But it does at least allow for an appreciation of the attention to detail that must be paid to a successful launch. The menus and the tastings – you can’t make a rum baba too small or it won’t aerate properly – are only part of it. There are the pockets on the prototype aprons that must be removed because Ramsay knows wait staff naturally fill them with bits and pieces and soon look scruffy. There is the vetoing of leather seating being added to one restaurant’s design, taking up space that would cost them two covers, or £300, a night. There are a million other things and Ramsay is across them all. Does he have time to couch every decision in soft words? No. Is he needlessly rude? No and no. There’s a reason for everything he does, he gives it, he moves on. You need to have a good sense of self and plenty of confidence to deal with him, for sure, but if you don’t I am of the school of thought that says that is a you problem, not him. He is nonetheless a Marmite proposition, that’s for sure, and an entire sociology module could be written around him and people’s reactions to him.
In the meantime, there’s this fluffy nonsense with occasional nuggets of insight. Enjoy or don’t. No offence, but Ramsay’s got better fucking things to worry about.
