Fancast: dish 'n dat

What is it about Long Island that produces so many winning chefs?
It’s amazing. It’s like that little place in Berkshire, a place called Bray, where you’ve got the Waterside Inn and the …, both … star establishments in the middle of the U.K. Long Island, I don’t know really. It’s quite a fascinating area. We’ve just gone back to revisit Kitchen Nightmares over the last couple of weeks as well, and it’s been so refreshing to see so much talent there. Long Island for me, it’s producing more chefs coming out of there than Paris. So yes, it’s buoyant, it’s on the outskirts of Manhattan, and so they have access to phenomenal restaurants. I can’t say, maybe it’s something in the ingredients, but again, we have a couple of contestants from Long Island this year and a phenomenal array of chefs. Long Island seems to be the draw at the moment.

Did you tape a fourth and a fifth cycle of this show almost back-to-back?
Yes, we did. Yes. That’s a good question, really. First of all, when you build a restaurant of that phenomenon—I really hate that word “set” and I hate the word “cast” —it is from the most amazing health and hygiene … properly air conditioned, properly irrigated with hot and cold running water, so the whole thing is built like a … Obviously, FOX is paying for it, so in terms of expenditure it’s far more economical and on the back of the draw were 22,500 cast. Finding 30 chefs in that bunch wasn’t difficult.

On becoming a chef:
If you become a chef because you’re obsessed by becoming a celebrity, getting my ass kicked and working my nuts off the way I did in France and getting pushed around those kitchens wasn’t about becoming famous. It’s learning your craft and understanding what it takes to survive in this industry. On the back of exposure from TV to books to Rachel Ray to Martha Stewart, the customer’s integrity is far greater than every before. As a nation, just like the U.K., we don’t complain enough. The more we complain in this country the better our restaurants will be.

On dressing up and pretending to be a contestant:
Bobby and Shayna, honestly, are tenacious and determined. It’s really weird, like I said at the beginning to the first gentleman; I actually sat on the bus this year as a contestant. I went through a prosthetic makeup, which is a hideous six hours of sitting there, which I’m not very good at sitting down for six minutes let alone six hours. It was really weird to sit opposite Bobby on the coach when he’s like yelling at me, “I’m the black Gordon Ramsay and you guys, good luck, because you’re going to need it. I’m the five-star general.” It was so funny because I was Terrance from Texas and I was absolutely peeing my pants with laughter but trying to keep a straight face. I had a ponytail, long hair, which is really weird. Chefs don’t do ponytails and we shouldn’t do them because I guarantee that whenever there’s a discovery of hair in the food, it’s guaranteed it’s from the chef’s ponytail.

When you see those first signature dishes and everybody knows you’re going to ask them to do that, have some of these people not watched the show?
You know what, I get really frustrated and I share that level of frustration on Kitchen Nightmares because they know I’m coming. So when a chef is that incompetent or stupid or lazy in terms of health and hygiene, when people say, “Oh, you’re doing that for the cameras,” no, I’m doing that because if you work in this industry and we’re going to spend 25 or 30 years in the kitchen trying to master our craft, how stupid do we have to be to put together a venison tartar with capers, shallots, parsley, lemon juice, egg yolk, and combine that with a scallop tartar with, again, ketchup, lime juice, ... white chocolate bound together with caviar? What type of nut is going to actually come out and eat and pay top dollar for that level of stupidity? No, it does hurt. You’d think they’d perfect it in a way that says right, keep it simple, focus on the ingredients and when we go out for lunch or dinner, let’s be honest, it is the flavor that holds the memory. It’s not how things look. The presentation is one thing, but the execution of flavor is what draws you back to a restaurant. Remember that flavor? The pistachio ice cream served with the chocolate sorbet served inside a soufflé, that’s what you go for. It’s the flavor. That’s what bugs me about that level of stupidity. Listen, I’m not just saying it’s chefs here, we have it back in the U.K. and in France even.

What celebrity would you love to cook for?
What celebrity would I absolutely love to cook for? I get excited cooking for anybody, to be honest. I’m cooking for Nelson Mandela’s birthday party in Hyde Park this summer, which I’ve been invited to do. I suppose if I wanted something really fun and sexy, it’d have to be Cameron Diaz. She’s tall, she’s beautiful and she loves pink meat.

Ramsay's response to a journalist asking him to curse at him as though he were a hack writer:
You’re an articulated journalist, right, with integrity? I’m here to discuss season four, I’m not here for … I don’t like cursing. That may sound slightly bizarre, but trust me, it’s not my fault entirely. It’s the industry language and any chef would be a hypocrite if they didn’t admit to swearing in the kitchen. It’s something I’m not proud of. Every time, I get reminded of that by my mother. More importantly, I have four young children. My wife is a schoolteacher. I can switch it off. I have an outside life. I’m not forecasting for my first heart attack at the age of 41 and secondly, I’m not going anywhere near a divorce. Trust me: I don’t enjoy cursing and I really mean that.

Are the fireworks seen on the show make-believe?
Yes. Of course it’s real. There’s nothing played for any form of camera. You see 44 or 42 minutes of the edited version and I run service from 6:00 until 10:00, four hours, and cook for 120 guests. Of course it’s going to look like it’s combustive, tenacious and full of drama, and it is, but there’s no script. That’s why I fight every week that that restaurant opens, to make sure I run the restaurant and not a show.
We do have good days and we do have bad days. We do have meltdowns and we do have tears. That goes on in any top-flight kitchen. Now, if I was running a mediocre, run-of-the-mill, Caesar salad, flip-a-burger, of course there’s no heat. When you decide to cook at that level and you want it to be perfect, it’s harmony when it hits perfection. For me, it’s real. I’ve done nothing but keep it real. I think that proves in the level of contestants that want to become good chefs that apply to get on there.

On how he feels about changing the stigma of English cooking:
Going to Hollywood, meeting the Queen and receiving the OBE, that was quite breathtaking. I wanted my mother there. It was very nice. Unfortunately, the canapés were a letdown. Next time I go to Buckingham Palace I’ll bring my own food. Honestly, seriously, we’ve had a dogmatic approach in the U.K. in terms of being content. When you’re central Europe and you’re so close to France, Spain, Italy, you have this amazing amount of history on your doorstep there to be indulged, ... kidney pies, puddings, the fish and chips, that’s all being reinvented and being put back on the map.