During the Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 – while most people were nurturing sourdough starters like they were human babies – I developed an unhealthy obsession with Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. From the faces he’d pull during the kitchen inspection to the inevitable disgust at that first bite of food, Gordon Ramsay’s inimitably charismatic screen presence bore me through the period. Now he’s back, with glossy Netflix series Being Gordon Ramsay, and turning the camera on his own project, a multi-restaurant development at the top of a new London skyscraper.
“It’s a huge undertaking,” Tana, Gordon’s patient wife, tells her husband, as they relax on the sofa. “Really, the biggest thing you’ve done to date.” And Ramsay’s plan is ambitious. He’s taken a 20-year lease on a vast space at the top of 22 Bishopsgate, in which he intends to open four different projects. There’s Gordon Ramsay High, a spin-off of his Michelin-starred fine dining establishment on the Royal Hospital Road; Lucky Cat, leaping over from Mayfair; a branch of his Bread Street Kitchen chain; and an on-site culinary school. “The whole sector is struggling,” Ramsay tells viewers, as he embarks on a packed schedule of meetings with chefs, designers, builders and customers. He’s here, in some ways, to reassert the power of the restaurant, of the hospitality industry, at a time when things are “pretty dire”. But, in other, more striking ways, he’s here to reassert the power of the Gordon Ramsay brand.
