Ramsay's Boiling Point. Hmmm. Good title. How many Channel 4 viewers, I wonder, have found themselves maintaining a steady simmer of rage at this kitchen bully boy's antics during the recent Thursday night show? Chefs, as we all know, are infamous for tempers hotter than flaming Armagnac and mouths as filthy as an overflowing rubbish bin. But these past few weeks we've seen Gordon Ramsay take culinary passion to stomach-churning extremes.
Has he perhaps been acting it up for the Channel 4 cameras - adding a dash of extra venom just to make it clear that we are glimpsing creative genius at work: a Picasso of pots and pans, dishing out misery in the same helping as talent? Are the fiery reputations of Ramsay and his pal, Marco Pierre White, the other terrible infant of British cooking, deliberately exaggerated?
I doubt it. By coincidence, last week, a friend rang for a meandering chat which cast unexpected light on kitchen temper tantrums. She had heard, she said, about a young Irish chef, recently returned from London, who was interviewed recently by a recruitment agency in Dublin. During the course of the session he stood uneasily, refusing to sit down. Why? Because, the previous week, while working for one of the aforementioned charmers, he had been lifted by the lapels for some misdemeanour and plonked down on a red-hot stove. This may sound improbable, but I checked the story out and it is true.
"Without naming names, there are a few chefs here in Ireland who are as bad as Gordon Ramsay," says Michael Martin, head chef of The Tea Room in the Clarence Hotel. "It's become sexy to be a top chef, and it goes to people's heads. They use mental and physical aggression because they think they can get away with it. But it's not as bad here as in England."
Martin should probably know, having spent over eight years in London. There, besides briefly overlapping with Ramsay at Le Gavroche, he survived three years in the kitchen of Nico Ladenis. "He threw a plate of French beans at me one day - but I didn't pick them up. And if he'd hit me, I'd have killed him. With Nico, though, anything like that was forgotten the next day."
It's natural that any leader of a creative team, working to tight deadlines, should boil over now and again. But persistent bullying with a torrent of personal insults, threats and public humiliation is another thing entirely. I have no idea how Nick Nairn, Glasgow's celebrity cook and an admiring disciple of Marco Pierre White, behaves in the kitchen, but I do remember him telling me last summer with a touch of swagger in his voice that he thinks nothing of throwing out "customers with attitude". "I go up and tell them to f--- off," he said. "We don't take any shit." Customers with attitude, eh? Maybe it's time that we looked more critically at the cult of the superchef. Maybe we should be more wary of the oversized plates with the flamboyant signature reproduced in porcelain - and the kind of food on them that pushes kitchen pressure well above the safety limit.
"Ever since the time of Catherine de Medici we've had perfectionist chefs with bad tempers," says Aimee Grubb, restaurant critic for Harpers & Queen magazine. "But Ramsay's Boiling Point really shocked me. It sits very uneasily with the elegance and refinement of his restaurant. It was a serious error of judgment to let television cameras in."
I won't be ringing up to book a table at Ramsay in Chelsea, that's for sure - a sudden and strange turnabout for somebody who tried countless times to sample GR's food while he was at Aubergine but was defeated by the three-month waiting list. On the other hand, I've found a reason at last to appreciate that other restaurant trend - the see-it-all, open-plan kitchen.
The last programme in the series Ramsay's Boiling Point will be shown on Channel 4 at 9 p.m. on Thursday