I just watched a bunch of seasons (I’ve had to do work-critical, but boring data entry, so I can just listen to most of it and just glance at the screen from time to time) and sometime around season 5, they stopped even pretending it was a cooking show. And around season 9, it became “Big Brother” with cooking.
Plus, one thing it’s convinced me is that however good a cook Ramsay is, I’ll never ever eat in one of his restaurants–if THAT is the image he wants to present of how he trains his chefs, their food/service/standards simply can’t be good. Yeah, it’s all manufactured, but he’s successfully associated every aspect of “abusive boss” and “uncaring customer customer service peon” with himself to me. How about showing him try to TRAIN the chefs and THEN get pissy when they don’t listen. It’s better TV and it makes him look like less of a douchebag.
I’ve eaten at a few 3 Michelin Star restaurants (including Le Bernardin) in my life that I know that service doesn’t have to be marred by a crazy-assed cook screaming at his brigade*, food arriving late and with crazy-assed disgusting sanitary standards (one episode, two women were coughing like they were going to hack up a lung and Ramsay was a condesending douchebag until he bullied them into going back into the kitchen–yuk)
And he started doing dumbass stunts as punishments: clean goats? pick up garbage on the side of the road? This isn’t what I want to see chefs do.
Finally, in the earlier seasons, he’s a racist (he makes fun of people’s accents), sexist, homophobic, um…fat-phobic? fat-shaming? jackass. If you’re going to swear at people, at least be more creative about it than “You fat Jamacian fuck-face!”
*As a matter of fact, the only time I’ve ever heard anything like what Ramsay does is in an IHoP and I ended up walking out–I really don’t go out to eat to hear a manager scream at a waitress and her shriek back in return.