Ramsay’s mouth can be nothing but trouble
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
Foul-mouthed celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay has a bone to pick with Times restaurant critic S. Irene Virbila: She’s too stingy with her stars. Ramsay, in town shepherding the opening of his new restaurant at the London hotel in West Hollywood and the Thursday-night return of his Fox reality show ‘Kitchen Nightmares,’ said he had no complaints with the review itself. “I think she writes brilliantly,’ he said.
“But why just 2½ [bleeping] stars?” Ramsay asked.
Virbila, who visits restaurants incognito, ranks on a four-star scale. Ramsay said he had a plan to track Virbila down and do whatever it took to get an extra half star -– or more. “Tell me, what does she look like? When I see her I’m going to wine her and dine her and make love to her passionately and try to get three stars.... C’mon! Tell me what she looks like?”
Well, we’re not telling. Ramsay, meanwhile, may be learning the hard way that some times it pays to just keep his [bleeping] mouth shut up....
... Ramsay’s ability to curse up a blue streak serves him well as star of Fox’s reality TV shows “Hell’s Kitchen” and “Kitchen Nightmares,” the latter of which returns Thursday night with a special two-hour episode that begins at 8 p.m. entitled ‘Gordon Revisits.’ And when he walks through the dining room at London he says guests often ask him to toss off an insult as they hold up their cellphones to capture it all. “They say, ‘Tell us to “[Bleep] off, you bloody cow!” ’ ”
Sometimes, though, that mouth is nothing but [bleeping] trouble.
A wide-around-the-middle woman went into the kitchen the other night for a tour, and Ramsay happened to take note of her dinner order: No wine, no dairy, no cheese. Meat well cooked. “I said, ‘When are you due, sweetheart?’”
“I stuck my size-15 foot in it. She burst into tears.”
Of course, she was not pregnant, just fat.
So what did Ramsay do?
“I apologized and comped the bill! Of course, I learned a lesson.”
-- Rene Lynch
