The sun hasn’t set on Ramsay’s televised media empire.
In September 2023, during the premiere episode of the 22nd season of the infamous culinary competition program Hell’s Kitchen, one of the world’s most popular chefs stood on a sound stage and, with a solemn face and clipped British accent uttered these words: “I am Gordon Ramsay, and my American dream came true.” Such a claim could be written off as the hyperbole typical of reality TV if not for the fact that it was materially accurate. It is estimated that the Scottish-born chef is worth as much as $220 million, a result of eighty eight restaurants operating on three continents, a culinary academy, assorted merchandise, and a seemingly endless supply of reality television projects.
The sun hasn’t set on Ramsay’s televised media empire. Since 2023, there have been at least six Ramsay-centric productions slotted annually to air on TV, often through partner network FOX, for whom Ramsay’s properties drew $150 million in ad revenue in 2020, or through partner streamers. For Ramsay and Co., 2025 began with a bang with two popular unscripted productions: the revived Kitchen Nightmares and the relatively new Next Level Chef. This year also saw two entirely new Ramsay shows: Gordon Ramsay’s Secret Service, in which Ramsay uses surveillance technology to investigate struggling restaurants, and Next Level Baker, a spin-off of Next Level Chef. It is not an unusual occurrence for one to be watching the latest episode of, say, Hell’s Kitchen and, in the breaks, be served promotions not only for an upcoming episode of Gordon Ramsay’s Food Stars set at the chef’s London culinary school, but also ads for Welch’s featuring a cleaned-up version of Ramsay’s infamous mouth.
How is it that a man who spends no small amount of his time on television being literally censored has become so omnipresent in primetime American media and culture? I have watched enough of Ramsay’s shows to anticipate how he’d respond: By getting off my ass and working, you donkey. While this is undoubtedly true, the rise of Ramsay’s empire is not just the story of one man’s unrelenting dedication to success in all endeavors but also a case study in the ascendent role of personality as capital in the present media economy. To look closely at Ramsay’s present career and its promised future trajectory is to track the success of his own self-commodification, as well as glimpse the diminishing returns born of the conflict between authenticity and scale that such a strategy demands.
To the general public, Gordon Ramsay’s persona is defined by a singular, unmistakable feature: anger. Ramsay’s displeasure—at unseasoned food, under/overcooked meat, and dishes made with boxed pasta—is legendary in its explosiveness. There are innumerable YouTube compilations showcasing the particularly obscene forms that Ramsay’s rage takes: he throws raw scallops, smashes dishes, spits out unseasoned food, goes red in the face screaming often-censored invectives at the unceasing incompetence and insolence of those around him.
However, the spectacular anger for which the foul-mouthed chef has become known risks overshadowing a much more fundamental and significant part of his personality. In 2006, Ramsay sued the London Evening Standard after a TV critic claimed that his production team had faked some of the unsanitary and generally abysmal conditions exposed in a Yorkshire restaurant in the first season of the now-infamous Kitchen Nightmares. Upon winning the libel claim and receiving £75,000 in damages, the chef issued a firm statement: “We have never done anything in a cynical fake way.”
In a “reality” entertainment industry that revolves around constructed personas, cannily plotted narrative arcs, and hero/villain casting, Ramsay is a rare creature who can (seemingly) get away with being totally, unapologetically himself. Any on-screen cynicism he levies is, assuredly, entirely real. This commitment to authenticity, no matter how uncomfortable it makes those around him, is central to the British-raised chef’s brand and a driving force in its trans-Atlantic appeal. It should surprise few that the very abrasiveness of Ramsay’s authenticity—blunt-spoken, unafraid to mock contestants’ weight or appearance, dismissive of the “entitlement” of younger generations—would find a ready home in primetime American audiences, especially in a cultural moment where many have come to associate unfiltered candor with truth.
Because of this, it is tempting to think that Ramsay is popular because he is mean in ways that are typically frowned upon in polite company. He embodies the affect of vengeful judgment that Mark Greif sees as characteristic of court television. Never mind that the figures that populate Ramsay’s shows are aspiring young professionals and home cooks, not feuding spouses or unscrupulous business owners. They, by floundering in the face of Gordon’s exacting expectations, nonetheless serve as proxies for, as Greif puts it, “every inept, chiseling, weaseling, self-focused sort of person you meet in your daily life,” whose excoriation you can enjoy on primetime.
Yet, unlike the arbiters of court TV or other prominent men known for their rejection of P.C. language or basic social niceties, Ramsay’s personality is anything but one-note. Just as he is unafraid to tell inept cooks to give up their dreams, he is equally liable to encourage an unpopular chef jarring against hostile team members, or utter a soft-spoken, “young lady, this is incredible” to the humble-looking pastry made by a working mother. To this end, I venture that Ramsay’s anger serves a more compelling function for audiences than surrogate vengeance. What the sharp side of the chef’s personality instead offers us is a fantasy of the virtue and validity of meritocracy.
Ramsay’s biography itself could be ripped from a meritocratic parable. Raised in public housing by a working mother and alcoholic father, Ramsay entered the culinary world after a devastating injury destroyed his burgeoning soccer career. Thanks to his years of athletic training, Ramsay took quickly to the physical and mental demands of his newfound industry. By his early twenties, he broke into the elite London restaurant scene as a junior chef under the notoriously bad-tempered and exacting Marco Pierre White. Barely a decade later, the ex-footballer would hold two Michelin stars and have a restaurant of his own.
Today, Ramsay remains a vocal advocate for the redemptive power of hard work. As he put it in 2019 on popular YouTube talk show “Hot Ones”: “for all those millennials and snowflakes out there, the more you’re pushed, the thicker your skin gets and the better you become.” While Ramsay has admitted that not all of what transpired in elite kitchens in his day was healthy, he nonetheless continues to practice a version of the exacting mentorship he received, and actively endorses the meritocratic logic that fuels it.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in his television shows. As chefs of all levels sweat under the eye of the camera, they are bombarded with Ramsay’s exhortations to pull themselves up by their apron strings: “You have to raise the bar,” “step it up,” “take this to the next level,” and, of course, “ELEVATE!” For this, Ramsay’s anger is less a punitive force than a cleansing one, animating the essential logic of meritocracy: in exchange for suffering and abuse, you become stronger, faster, more skilled. Watching Ramsay insist on this principle, episode after episode, to the point where the competitors themselves become infected with his phraseology, how can we viewers, too, not be tempted to believe it?
After 20 years of watching Ramsay navigate sound stage kitchens, it is easy to forget that his TV introduction was the 1999 Boiling Point, a documentary that shocked audiences with its raw portrayal of a young, profane chef vying for a third Michelin star. The specifics of his media origins still matter to him—Ramsay repeatedly rejects the label of entertainer. “I loathe the words, ‘TV chef,’” he insists in a 2017 interview. “I’m not a TV chef; I’m a real person who works on TV. I mastered my craft and continue to push the boundaries.”
Although Ramsay disavows the commercial concerns of peer celebrity chefs, he has proved undeniably successful in mobilizing his popularity in the service of a lucrative and increasingly global brand. Moreover, for the past decade, it seems that his efforts to “push boundaries” have been focused less on the culinary than on the entertainment sector. Since 2015, the culinary wing of Ramsay’s enterprise has opened nineteen new restaurants. Of these new eateries, two purport to be gourmet establishments; one, Le Pressoir d’Argent, has been graced with Michelin recognitions. The remaining brick-and-mortar operations are largely mass-market, franchise affairs, with names in the style of “Gordon Ramsay Burger” (or “Pizza,” or “Fish & Chips”).
Meanwhile, in the same ten-year period, Ramsay has hosted or produced over forty seasons of television across nine separate unscripted series. What is striking here is not just the sheer number of television products the Michelin-awarded chef has shepherded to screen. More notable, I venture, is how Ramsay and company have managed to cultivate a slate of entertainment products distinct and engaging enough to retain audience interest despite their appearing nearly one after another in the primetime television calendar.
Negotiating the right balance between repetition and novelty is a known challenge for reality TV; for Adorno and Horkheimer, it is a fundamental characteristic and animating tension of the culture industry itself. Like any contemporary media ventures worth their salt, Ramsay’s productions work confidently from within the standardized conventions that Adorno and Horkheimer diagnosed: thematized seasons of long-running franchises, reboots of notorious challenges from past competitions, conspicuous product placement by brand partners. Each episode plays familiar chords of tension and release: Will the Wellington cook in time? Will service meet Chef Ramsay’s expectations? How long will it take for him to insult someone?
However, creative production chez Ramsay has shifted gears in recent years with the 2021 formation of Studio Ramsay Global (SRG), a “worldwide production venture” created in partnership with old friend FOX Entertainment and aimed at developing new in-roads into culinary and lifestyle programming. Watching the products of this era, one gets the sense that the function of these unscripted projects is increasingly not just entertainment but cross-pollination—seeding and evaluating novel formats, problematics, and challenges that can then be used in existing or future series within the Ramsay extended universe. To whit: in a 2021 episode of Hell’s Kitchen, Ramsay challenges contestants to create a dish designed to rack up the most “likes” on Instagram, using the moment to stress the importance of social media for aspiring chefs. Two years later, he puts the same test to the culinary entrepreneurs in the inaugural season of Food Stars, his Apprentice-style competition. Meanwhile, the technical constraints and fun-house absurdity of Ramsay’s 2022 Next Level Chef begin appearing in more measured but identifiable doses in Hell’s Kitchen and MasterChef seasons from 2023-2024.
Perhaps the most striking example of the brand’s increasing willingness to cannibalize existing concepts for new creative material is their launch of a new web series based on one of the most well-known and widely circulated Ramsay-related Internet memes. In the YouTube-exclusive show, low-level Internet personalities are pitted against each other in a sandwich-making competition to earn the iconic and “beloved” designation of “Gordon Ramsay’s Idiot Sandwich.” That the original “idiot sandwich” meme—in which Ramsay holds two slices of bread on either side of a chastised-looking woman’s face—was staged as part of a 2015 late-night skit (and not a moment of candor from one of Ramsay’s shows) is largely ignored.
In many ways, Ramsay’s ability to anticipate and embrace the conventions, tone, and pace of digital content—now the driving force of food media—is what sets his brand apart at present and best reflects its success in recent years. That Ramsay’s fiery personality is particularly well-suited to Internet popularity and longevity has been an immense boon for the brand’s cultivation of what Kate Eichhorn, in her 2022 book Content, calls “content capital”: status and relative power that acquires to those active in the creation and circulation of nearly all that is consumable online.
As legacy media competitors unevenly navigate the transition into the fast-paced world of platform-optimized entertainment, Ramsay’s camp is uploading compilations of the foul-mouthed chef’s most viral moments to YouTube with SEO-informed titles—“Can a Next Level Chef mentor make better chicken wings than Gordon?”—aping the user-generated best-moments videos that helped shape his digital notoriety in the first place. Part of the beauty of this venture, for Ramsay-qua-corporation, is that much of the work of growing this well of content capital falls on fans and Internet users, who are only too happy to upload videos of their beef wellington to TikTok and wait for Ramsay to swoop in via “duet” just to call them a donkey. Implicit in the expansion of the Gordon Ramsay extended universe is the exporting of the fantasy that he has long embodied: we could all have the opportunity to be called a donkey by Ramsay one day, and we would be the better for it.
But this begs the question: Is this degree of growth sustainable for Ramsay’s particular personality-based brand? Can he really continue to “elevate”—in the entertainment or culinary spheres—when spread this far across a stacked hand of revenue-generating spin-offs, reboots, and meme fodder?
There are signs of weakness in the bulwark of unfiltered authenticity that has defined the brand from the start. You do not have to be a longtime viewer to see how Ramsay’s personality has softened since his TV career began. Fans on Reddit speculate about the causes of this mellowing. Larger budgets lessening the need for constant intensity? An expanding roster of shows dividing his attention? Changing mores that find verbal abuse on primetime reality TV increasingly unacceptable?
And then there is the frozen food. Subreddits dedicated to Ramsay’s fandom frequently field debates over the relative “hypocrisy” of the chef’s line of microwave dinners, given his history of excoriating cooks for serving frozen food. It is not news for a popular celebrity to face allegations of “selling out” when their behind-the-scenes commercial activities become noticeable. But fans seem particularly betrayed when confronted with the advertising and merchandising arms of the Ramsay industrial complex, which often undercut the values of the man himself. The cognitive dissonance of seeing the beloved chef’s face behind the glass of a Walmart freezer aisle, promoting the furthest thing from culinary excellence imaginable, is enough to drive some devotees away from Ramsay’s shows altogether. When it comes to “Gordon Ramsay’s Idiot Sandwich,” at least, they are missing little. The show is trite and, frankly, boring; the crowd anemic; the contestants, flustered and awkward; even Ramsay’s gregariousness is pushed to its limits, and to little avail. Rarely have twelve minutes passed so slowly.
Here, then, is the double bind: a brand based on one man’s dedication to both authenticity and excellence at all costs, never mind the personal casualties, cannot reasonably continue to expand his reach without some diminishing returns. If Ramsay himself senses this, he isn’t letting on. “My life is about high performance,” Ramsay said in a podcast interview in 2023. “When I don’t have it, I need to up the jeopardy”—more stars, more shows, more partnerships. And if this single-minded impulse to “level up” eventually runs out of track? Viewers can at least be assured that the trip back down will be spectacular.
Marie Lambert is a writer, educator, and recovering academic based in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Amherst College, she received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. Her writing — popular, scholarly, and ghost — has appeared in various print and digital outlets.
Article photo via Wikimedia