Being Gordon Ramsay review – Sanitised propaganda that could have been so much more interesting

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 multirestaurant 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.

“I’m a hard and difficult person to work for,” he confesses to the camera, but viewers will already know this from Ramsay’s decades on our television screens. He has graduated from serious chef (earning a rare three-Michelin-star designation for his namesake outfit) to television staple and, ultimately, culinary tycoon. The show sees him barrel between London, Las Vegas, Miami and even Manila. He hangs out with the rich and famous, walks the Formula One paddocks, is brown-nosed by other chefs and restaurateurs. And the giant, decadent space of 22 Bishopsgate symbolises this elevation: a great phallic tourist trap, in which Ramsay can deploy new branches of his existing restaurants. Any jeopardy raised by the financial stakes of the endeavour (Ramsay claims to have put in £20m) is offset by the knowledge that you are, at that very moment, watching an advert for it. You, the viewer, are part of the marketing plan.

On Kitchen Nightmares, Ramsay has clear values. His feedback is harsh but fair, his scrutiny of the establishments thorough and unflinching. Because the show is Ramsay’s magnum opus, Being Gordon Ramsay feels strikingly lacking in self-criticism or introspection. “Sometimes it’s like a live version of Kitchen Nightmares,” he jokes, as they soft-launch the food court. Yet it’s not. There are some carefully curated bumps on the road (guests steal cat charms, a fat fryer overheats, a banquette collapses under Ramsay’s weight), but overwhelmingly the show is more interested in food and lifestyle porn. The implosion of the Bread Street Kitchen project at 22 Bishopsgate (it has still not opened) is skirted over quickly, when that story may well have been more interesting than the successful launch of RGR High and Lucky Cat. Ramsay, it feels, is too big to fail. Both in the ability of his brand to carry early reservations and bring in hype, and in the reality that he cannot sully his project with the aroma of disappointment.

It means that Being Gordon Ramsay fails to deploy its best asset: Ramsay’s honesty. In its fixation with providing an effective advert for 22 Bishopsgate, the show fails to pick up far more intriguing threads. Ramsay’s rivalry with Marco Pierre White, for example, or why, in 2019, 18 years after the birth of their daughter Tilly, Gordon and Tana decided to have two more children, six-year-old Oscar and two-year-old Jesse. There’s a psychologically compelling show to be made about Gordon Ramsay, but this isn’t it, and perhaps Netflix (which has produced several vain celebrity documentaries, from Beckham to With Love, Meghan) isn’t the broadcaster for it. Just as Gordon is a supporter of Glasgow’s historic Rangers FC, yet his kid is shown wearing the colours of social media darlings Inter Miami, so too does the entire Ramsay formula feel like it has become sanitised, commercialised, and, worst of all, Americanised.

Which is a shame because Ramsay is one of Britain’s best telly exports, and he deserves to be making something better than his own propaganda. Being Gordon Ramsay is an easy watch, but it has little to say about food, little to say about the restaurant business, and little to say about the man himself. Far from being the Kitchen Nightmares lens turned on its presenter, Being Gordon Ramsay is the latest in a line of biographical documentaries that offer their subjects far too much power.