Using only his ears, Gordon Ramsay lay out his trademark criticisms without seeing the food or chef.
Lots of chefs are known for different things. Some are known for their bleeding edge gastronomical practices, others are known for the restaurants that bear their names, and others are known for their rigid adherence to time-tested classics.
Then there’s Gordon Ramsay, who, a great chef by any metric, is known for being really, really good at criticizing people’s cooking. He did it on shows like Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares, then he took a more egalitarian approach, turning his wrath (and occasional praise) to Twitter users submitting pics of their food.
Now, in a high-concept new video, he’s showing the breadth of his ability to criticize by working with his back to an amateur chef. Ramsay will make a dish at his station all the while, without looking, giving instructions to the amateur chef at his own station. They can’t see each other or their works in progress.
Yet still, Ramsay is 100% sure the other guy’s dish is going to suck.
Watch Ramsay and “totally random guy” Shane get to work in the video below from Bon Appétit. (Oh, now seems like the right time to mention that Shane appears to not just be an “amateur chef,” but a bad chef who doesn’t cook much or at all. God help him.)
Anyone who has approached an ambitious, instructive recipe knows that direction alone doesn’t get you too far. A sense of timing and technique are both vital to the act, and those can’t be barked out by a chef, even when they’re as experienced as Gordon Ramsay.
But you’re mostly just here to see a charmingly exasperated Ramsay use audio clues and intuition to accurately criticize this guy as he goes along. Using that as our goal, both chefs succeed wildly in this exercise.
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