Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The whole gastroworld is waiting breathlessly–or so hypes the hype–for reviews of chef Gordon Ramsay’s first U.S. restaurant, Gordon Ramsay at The London, which launched last Thursday night in New York. The restaurant, Ramsay’s tenth, opened with small formal and casual dining rooms in the London NYC Hotel (formerly the Righa Royal) that, Ramsay notes pithily, must earn their keep, but good: “The till has to start working,” Ramsay told the AP. “New York is an expensive place to survive.” True enough. Ramsay, the star of Fox’s Hell’s Kitchen and of The F-Word on BBC America, but better-known in his native UK for his equal parts talent, wealth, controversy, fame, and bad language, is one of just three chefs there with a coveted three Michelin stars. Apparently, he wants them here too.
Personally, I’m getting more and more turned off in general by the Risk-like games of world domination chefs play these days, but in Ramsay’s case my irritation stems less from his braggadocio (I also can’t stand to watch him yell at people on Hell’s Kitchen) than from his “Get Women Back in the Kitchen” campaign on the F-Word. The segments, in which he goes into homes of women who’ve invited him there to help them learn their way around a roast, were sparked by Ramsay’s own research that showed that three out of four young English women can’t cook. He launched the program with his customary restraint by telling the Radio Times in 2005 that British women “can’t cook to save their lives.” Ramsay, like lots of bullies, claimed to be misunderstood in the face of pissed-off rebuttals from Prue Leith and Clarissa Dickson Wright of Two Fat Ladies, but the unavoidable questions remain: Why not women and men? Why “back”? The same research showed that men are “far more likely to find cooking enjoyable, while women are more inclined to view dinnertime as a chore”–how far do you have to go to guess why that might be?
