Salon.com > Hell's Kitchen

Did chef Gordon Ramsay drive a man to suicide?

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 15:14:00 +0000

Has Gordon Ramsay become the leading cause of death in the restaurant industry? On Friday, 39-year-old restaurateur Joseph Cerniglia, who appeared on the celebrity chef's justifiably named "Kitchen Nightmares" three years ago, leapt to his death off the George Washington Bridge. Cerniglia was the second veteran of a Ramsay show to commit suicide; in 2007, Texan chef Rachel Brown shot herself to death at her family home, one year after competing on Ramsay's "Hell's Kitchen."

Usually it takes three of anything to make a trend in the media, but why wait? As quickly as the news of Cerniglia's death broke, finger pointing about Ramsay's accountability began. The New York Post referred to Cerniglia as "at least the second chef who appeared on one of Ramsay's reality series to have killed themselves." It's not like they're flat out suggesting there may be dozens more innocent caterers and restaurateurs whom Gordon Ramsay has driven to suicide with his spiky hair and verbal abuse, but ... you never know.

“Hell’s Kitchen” recap: Eggs, people!

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 12:10:00 +0000

It started off just swell, with Andrew the Farmer reminding us he raises and butchers his own animals. He also likes to eat them raw, as he showed us last week when he served Chef Ramsay steak tartare. Ramsay thought it was disgusting however, so we're not sure if Andrew's cooking skills are up to par. Seriously, is being able to grow your own meat mean you can make it edible too? I like to raise goldfish, but I'm not going to serve them to anyone.

And so we begin with the obligatory recap/rehash of last week's episode, which leaves us dying for more, which I think is the point. This time around I even managed to get everyone's names. This isn't a high priority for understanding the show, but nice nonetheless.

We start off with everyone sound asleep, and then a loud alarm goes off at 5 am. This is so we can feel their pain as they stumble to their feet and downstairs for their first test. So sad for them. But why does everyone look so surprised?

Have any of these people ever seen this show before? This is a recurring question. It's as if they've wandered off the street into an experimental prescreening of a cartoon and were expecting to be given prizes just for showing up.

“Hell’s Kitchen” screams back to life

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 19:01:00 +0000

"Hell's Kitchen" returns with a familiar promise: "This is the one you've been waiting for."

Wasn't that what they said last year? I know they need to keep outdoing themselves in order to keep our interest -- after all, the public is fickle and easily displeased, and we want more drama, more surprises, more hysterical cooking! -- but I'll believe it when I see it. Not that I'm expecting to be disappointed. I'm sure there will be yelling this season, lots of it, and bad cooking, and maybe even some good cooking from the chef wannabes, all of them eager to prove that, despite their limited experience, they can cut the mustard.

If only that was all there was to it, cutting mustard, but, alas, risotto seems to be a major sticking point for many of them, and that's just the beginning.

We begin, as usual, with previews of fighting, screaming, temper tantrums, and one aspiring chef saying, "I like winning," as if that's news. Really? Because I'm pretty sure that no one else there does. The contestants are often quite enlightening that way. "I love to cook," one of them will say, because we might not have known that otherwise. Still, what else would they say? What would you say?

I Like to Watch

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 12:00:00 +0000

In prehistoric times -- you know, a few hours after God divided the land from the seas -- the world was our oyster. And by "our" I mean carbon-based life forms, of course. Who would rule these freshly minted wilds? Would giant amoebas tromp out of the seas on their pseudopods and slurp pineapples from the trees? Would snakes sprout wings and shoot off spores? Would monkeys learn to walk on two legs and make tacos and purchase long-term disability insurance?

Those were unpredictable times, indeed. No one knew if dinosaurs would reign supreme indefinitely, necessitating complicated accidental injury riders on caveman life-insurance policies. No one knew whether saber-tooth-cat meat would fall out of favor suddenly, bankrupting big-game hunter conglomerates and unraveling the complicated credit default swaps used to fund their exorbitantly expensive nomadic lifestyles. If paramecium colonies suddenly grew pseudo-hands and learned to type sophisticated political commentary, would the orangutan blogging community slowly disband?

In memory of Gordon Ramsay

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 11:08:00 +0000

Let's make our purpose clear from the start: This is an elegy for the lost, under-lamented British chef Gordon Ramsay. A paean to the real Ramsay, the chef behind the facade. An ode to the Ramsay who isn't a total dick.

The new season of Fox's reality show "Hell's Kitchen," starring Ramsay, kicks off Tuesday night. It's a show that seems deliberately designed to waste Ramsay's considerable talents both as a chef and as a television personality by having him send inexperienced, talentless cooks through a particularly dull meat grinder. Ramsay and Fox give these poor saps simple kitchen tasks that are obviously way above their skill level, presumably in the hope they'll fail. And then, joy of joys, Ramsay gets to turn insincerely red-faced and yell. Last season, the producers brought on a particularly tragic character -- a fat, slightly dumb man who, nice as he seemed, was clearly not going to survive -- who didn't make it through the first episode before breaking down in tears. It was a good moment for no one. (That man would later be hospitalized, the second hospitalization in two seasons.) The victims -- er, contestants -- in "Hell's Kitchen" are just cannon fodder for Ramsay's temper tantrums, proof that American television sure does know how to destroy everything good and pure.

Tastes like hell

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 11:32:00 +0000

On the southwest side of downtown Minneapolis sits an old, smoke-darkened brick building. It's home to an appliance mart, a nail salon, a violin repair shop, and a long alley-shaped restaurant identified only by a sign that reads: Hell's Kitchen. Just blocks from the city's busy convention center, somehow the corner manages to look deserted even on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

Inside Hell, however, it's another story.

The blood-red walls are hung with black fixtures and artwork by Ralph Steadman, whose leering skeletons and cartoon crows are like the "Bloom County" of the underworld. Behind the maitre d' station, handing out pagers, stands a tall, dark Elvira wearing Goth makeup -- whiteface, inch-thick eyeliner, some kind of bolt through her lip -- and a silk kimono with puffy Shrek slippers. She's scowling. The room is mobbed, she's running out of waiting space, and the post-church crowd is getting mean.

Meanwhile, a server in pink Winnie the Pooh pajamas hurries from the kitchen in back, her tray loaded with bison benedict, lemon-ricotta hotcakes, scrambled eggs with shrimp, and foie gras in black truffle sauce, plus a basket of bread and a glass pot of homemade peanut butter. She's headed for a table by the window. But as she tries to cross the entryway, a bulky guy with a mustache steps out and blocks her way.

I Like to Watch

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 13:00:00 +0000

People often write to me and say that they're grateful, because I save them from having to watching crappy stuff on TV. That gives me the illusion that I'm providing a service of some kind, like passing out free cans of tuna to pregnant women or speaking with teenagers about the benefits of proper hydration while tripping on ecstasy.

But then I have to wonder: What are these people doing instead of watching crappy TV all the time like I do? Because I've been watching crappy TV long enough now that if I weren't watching crappy TV, I'm not sure how I would spend my time.

It's like my friend who, when I mentioned the question of whether or not to have kids, said, "I don't like going to bars anymore. I don't have the energy for parties. I fall asleep after a few pages of reading. I can only travel so much. What the hell else am I going to do but have kids, really?"

And my friends who never watch crappy TV? They remind me of myself, before I started wasting half of my time watching crappy TV: Their minds are overactive. They never seem to unwind. They have productivity fetishes. Everything they do has to have value or meaning. They make lists constantly. They don't like to "waste" their time on things that have no inherent benefits beyond being vaguely enjoyable and sort of amusingly stupid.