Since time immemorial, celebrity chefs have all had a distinctive look: Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson, Steven Seagal in Under Siege, the rat from Ratatouille, Hannibal Lecter, the Swedish Chef, the Little Chef, the Smurf with a chef’s hat – icons all. Gordon Ramsay is no different. He has the craggy, lined face of a philosopher king (it’s like a carefully engraved cube or monolith), the golden quiff and frosted tips of a boy-band star (they’re like the golden follicular spires of the heavenly city) and the T-shirt-and-sports-jacket combo of an executive who has just spent the children’s college fund on a Maserati for his secretary (she’s just temping! She barely knows him!).
Merely seeing Gordon Ramsay conjures up the rich musk of an expensive aftershave even though we do not yet have the technology to broadcast smells. But some day man’s ancient dreams will be realised and we will know for certain what Gordon Ramsay smells of. Ramsay also frequently appears before his sigil, which is a silhouette of a fork against a star. It’s a symbol I expect to see draped on every building eventually, for I imagine Gordon Ramsay’s gastronomical future involves a spatula flapping at a human face, forever.
In previous episodes of Gordon Ramsay’s Future Food Stars (BBC One, Thursday), Gordon has developed a knack for designing melodramatic entrances – jumping from a helicopter into the sea, gliding along the ocean on a speedboat or bursting through the chest of a beloved character actor. In this episode Ramsay just walks and talks on his legs like a regular schmuck. On the plus side I find this very relatable, because I also sometimes use my legs.
“I’m back on the hunt for the UK’s top food-and-drink entrepreneur,” he says as he advances towards us. (Don’t look him directly in the eye!) Ah yes, Ramsay is hunting the deadliest prey of all: food-truck proprietors, hot-sauce makers and craft-beer brewers. He is planning to invest £150,000 of his own cash in the business of the winner, which will probably be just about enough to buy them a novelty chef’s hat given the state of inflation. But that’s fair enough. As I mentioned earlier, one of the most important things a food entrepreneur can do is peacock together a “look” – an eyepatch, a tricorne hat, a parrot. Though now I think of it, it’s possible I’m thinking of pirates or pick-up artists, not food entrepreneurs.
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Ramsay is a whimsical fellow and has idiosyncratic demands that I’m not sure are generally practical for small food businesses. In this week’s episode, for example, he gathers the entrepreneurs around him in the ruins of a great house and tells them they must procure for him 100 pine needles and 25 pine cones from the top of some trees in a nearby forest. If I met a craggy-faced stranger in the ruins of an old castle who told me to bring him pine needles from atop a high tree, I’d be pretty sure he was a witch. I’m surprised he doesn’t do it in rhyme while cackling.
But Ramsay has a greater culinary purpose than mere witchcraft. He believes that unnecessarily climbing high trees will toughen up these effete metropolitan gastronauts. He also expects them to use the pine needles and cones to make delicious pastries. As always when watching food shows, I am tempted to start licking the screen, but instead I retain my dignity, go to the fridge and start gnawing on a lump of old Cheddar.
The main task of the episode is for each team to come up with special “hot sauces” that they must then shill to the hipster denizens of a Newcastle food market. Gordon Ramsay’s Future Food Stars is basically The Apprentice ... But Food! In fairness, food people seem more scruffily relatable than Apprentice contestants, who generally look as if they’ve read American Psycho as a self-help book and now cosplay as businesspeople at parties.
The Future Food Stars have a more nuanced understanding of the world. Consequently, if your kids watch shows such as Gordon Ramsay’s Future Food Stars, they will learn two very important things about adulthood: (1) there will be bickering, and (2) their dreams will die, possibly on television, possibly murdered in cold blood by Gordon Ramsay. And so it comes to pass. There is hot sauce. There is bickering. And people’s dreams die with Ramsay’s hands clasped around their throat.
Mark Moriarty: Off Duty Chef (RTÉ One, Wednesday) promises a lot with that title. I hope for a scenario where he is being coaxed out for one last job or even that he might spend an episode groaning “I wasn’t even meant to be working today!” followed by a shift’s worth of phoning it in. That’s the sort of work-shy whining you’d get if there was a programme called Patrick Freyne: Off Duty Journalist. (“Isn’t it what I’m getting in this column?” says you.)
Mark Moriarty neither whines nor skives. He zips amiably through mouthwatering but not exactly avant-garde recipes – risotto, butter chicken, brownies. “Brownie and coffee, what a combo,” he says at the end, risking this crazy, controversial opinion just to shake things up. Mark Moriarty is the most pleasantly normal man I have ever seen making the most tantalising normal food in the most normal house while saying the most normal things. Everyone in Ireland was in his class at school. You don’t get him climbing pine trees at the behest of a food witch. While I wish he would invest in an eyepatch, tricorne hat and parrot, this time I do lick the screen.
To keep to a gastronomical theme, I also decide to watch a show called How to Eat the Rich, hoping for tasty ideas for my slow cooker. Sadly, it’s actually called How to Get Rich (Netflix). I am so hungry for both food and social justice that I misread it. How to Get Rich is hosted by a man named Ramit Sethi, who likes strolling in slow motion while delivering soothingly voiced narration. “Let me teach you how to get rich,” he says at the outset.
I have an identically titled show, but it’s not on Netflix – it’s a 20-second voice note on my phone that I send to people for $$$ and that I will give you today for free: “How to Get Rich (1) Be born into wealth or (2) gain asymmetric access to a new technology or (3) become close to a local strongman in the aftermath of great turbulence or (4) seize the means of production and begin the purge.”
Ramit’s suggestion is: make a budget. Wealth is not, in his understanding, value extracted from the workers by a decadent rentier class but a “mindset” that anyone can access. Of course, if we all succumbed to such prosperity gospel shenanigans we’d all be wearing yachting caps and holding cigars in our signet-ringed fingers and nobody would be doing crucial work such as writing television columns.
Ramit’s advice about budgeting isn’t the worst, but when the show seemingly equates an indebted couple struggling to make ends meet with a woman who finds it difficult to live on $25,000 a month, I figure my 20-second voice note might be better. Email me for details and tell your friends. It’s not a pyramid scheme, I promise.
