Food television has lengthy handled chefs’ lives, kitchens and appetites as dependable dramatic substances – Floyd, Bourdain, the Hairy Bikers, Nigella. And restaurants, in any case, are naturally dramatic environments: excessive stakes, risky personalities, the ever-present chance of failure.
Gordon Ramsay’s Boiling Point, broadcast in 1999, stays one of many style’s defining artefacts. It charted the nerve-shredding run-up to Restaurant Gordon Ramsay – then his defining solo enterprise, now his three-starred flagship – capturing a chef whose repute, funds {and professional} legitimacy felt perilously intertwined. The rigidity was not scripted. Failure appeared genuinely believable.
Fast ahead three a long time – and 89 extra eating places – and Ramsay’s new Netflix sequence, Being Gordon Ramsay, revisits strikingly related territory. Once once more, cameras comply with the buildup to a significant opening – or openings, ought to I say: 22 Bishopsgate, the place the chef is taking over not a single flagship gambit however an enormous, multi-concept improvement encompassing 5 distinct eating places. Once once more, stress gives the narrative engine. But this time, the stakes really feel unmistakably totally different.
In 1999, Ramsay was a chef making an attempt to turn out to be Gordon Ramsay. In 2026, he’s a multimillionaire hospitality magnate whose title, face and famously flamable persona are recognised everywhere in the world.
Nostalgia, in fact, is irresistible tv. But Ramsay’s return to the playbook that cast him invitations a extra revealing query: what does it now imply to be Gordon Ramsay – and, by extension, what does it imply to be a chef in any respect?
Because no matter it means to be Gordon Ramsay in 2026, it bears restricted resemblance to the circumstances going through most cooks. The previous a number of years have delivered an unbroken sequence of pressures: Brexit-related labour and import constraints, pandemic aftershocks, inflationary prices, power volatility and fragile shopper confidence. In 2025, a median of 11 eating places closed each week throughout the UK.
If that quantity appears staggering, how about these? At Ramsay’s Bishopsgate enterprise, firm filings and business reporting have famous document revenues of £134m alongside a £7.3m working loss, attributed to acquainted pressures: enlargement prices, inflation, wage will increase and the extraordinary expense of launching tasks at scale.
The improvement itself reportedly required funding in extra of £20m. None of that is uncommon for giant hospitality teams engaged in aggressive development. Expansion is ruinously costly; returns hardly ever fast. Yet the optics of jeopardy change radically when seen from the vantage level of smaller operators, for whom comparable losses can be catastrophic.
“The whole sector is struggling,” Ramsay tells viewers, safety-yellow hello–vis and exhausting hat firmly in place. And we’re inclined to consider him. Ramsay has turn out to be one in every of hospitality’s most enduring narrators of stress. But Being Gordon Ramsay will not be merely a documentary about eating places. It can be, at factors, a meditation on the burdens of success. On display screen, we see Ramsay reflecting on parenting regrets, previous errors and the creeping suspicion that he could have unfold himself too skinny. Fair sufficient. The hospitality enterprise has exhausted far sturdier souls.
Yet the juxtaposition is tough to disregard. We are watching a documentary a few £20m restaurant complicated absorbing multimillion-pound losses, framed alongside the anxieties of a multimillionaire involved about working too exhausting.
But in the end, this isn’t actually a narrative about success or failure. It is a narrative about scale. In right this moment’s restaurant economic system, threat is skilled very in another way relying on who’s taking it. A multimillion-pound loss would possibly bother a big hospitality group. For an impartial restaurant, it’s usually deadly.
Ramsay’s repute stays anchored to the picture of the chef, however his position has lengthy since modified. He doesn’t prepare dinner in most of his eating places. His head cooks do. The Michelin stars hooked up to his empire are the product of these kitchens, formed by the techniques, requirements and expertise pipelines Ramsay has constructed, slightly than by his day-to-day presence on the range.
Ramsay’s most enduring legacy will be the cooks who’ve handed by means of his kitchens. Few figures in British hospitality have produced so many profitable alumni. Angela Hartnett, Marcus Wareing, Clare Smyth, Jason Atherton, Matt Abé, Kim Ratcharoen and others emerged from Ramsay’s orbit to construct eating places carrying status of their very own. The volatility that as soon as outlined him has, over time, hardened into one thing extra sturdy: affect exercised by means of folks slightly than presence.
This is what makes Being Gordon Ramsay really feel faintly surreal. Just weeks after showing as a speaker at this 12 months’s Michelin awards, the sequence presents Ramsay at residence, debating pancake thickness along with his household – a tableau of home familiarity set towards the fact of a worldwide restaurant empire working at a scale most cooks won’t ever inhabit.
There was a time when Ramsay’s televised stress felt broadly consultant of restaurant life. Today, not a lot. For most others, the drama is now not whether or not a canape passes muster, however whether or not the enterprise survives one other quarter. Another month. Another week.
If Being Gordon Ramsay units out to indicate us Gordon Ramsay the chef, what it actually captures is Gordon Ramsay the establishment – and establishments, not like particular person eating places, can take in spectacular failures. And but, for all of his bluster, 22 Bishopsgate has not had the success or acclaim that he would possibly like. There have been no five-star critiques. In truth, there have been no critiques in any respect.
The sequence gestures towards the stress, the complexity, the dangers of opening at such scale, but stops wanting confronting probably the most consequential query: what occurs if it doesn’t work? The enterprise has not, not less than for now, been as profitable because the present has made it appear. We are proven stress, however not consequence. Jeopardy, however not collapse.
And but Ramsay, in fact, endures. Because at that altitude, failure behaves in another way. For most cooks, the arithmetic stays far much less forgiving. A single unsuccessful opening can finish a enterprise, a repute, a profession. Survival is rarely assumed.
Ramsay, against this, operates at a scale the place even failure can resemble a type of victory. The empire contracts, recalibrates, strikes on.
The establishment lives to inform the story. The man who as soon as embodied kitchen-level threat now operates at a scale the place it carries very totally different penalties. Volatility replaces disaster. Survival turns into extra probably. For most cooks, nonetheless, the stakes stay brutally unchanged. When the jaws of defeat are salivating, Ramsay will, inevitably, snatch victory.
