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“My heart sank” when I heard Gordon Ramsay’s production company has made a docuseries about the sweary chef’s rise to fame and notorious beef with Marco Pierre White, said Carol Midgley in The Times.
But now I’m “eating my words”. This isn’t just another “vanity epic” – the show “sizzles with gossip, snark, strutting macho energy and anecdotes that are the stuff of HR managers’ nightmares”.
The drama builds to a first meeting between the feuding chefs for 20 years, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. It’s a “fascinating study of two great talents and their competing egos”.
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Viewers are transported back to London in the late 1980s and early 1990s when White “almost single-handedly transformed Britain’s culinary reputation and ushered in a new generation of brilliant young chefs”. Ramsay is a familiar presence on television, but it’s “far more interesting” to get White’s insights – he “retains a knack for stealing the show”.
“It’s a culinary willy-waving contest,” said Michael Hogan in The Guardian. At one point, White brags: “We were bigger and better than the Beatles.” The “mouthwatering question” from the start is whether, decades after their “bitter bust-up”, White and Ramsay can meet without “taking copper-bottomed saucepans to each other’s heads”. Both sides of the feud are “picked over in chewy detail” – “there is, in a very real sense, beef”.
Heston Blumenthal is also at the table. But he “often feels like a gooseberry” and “third wheel”. Instead of sharing the limelight, the Fat Duck chef becomes the “palate cleanser between courses”.
When White and Ramsay do finally sit down together to hash things out in the third and final episode, it’s as captivating and “infuriating as you might expect”. The former is “prickly and unrepentant”, while the latter still seems to have an enormous chip on his shoulder. “Does it make for delicious entertainment? Yes, chef! Service please.”
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Irenie Forshaw is the features editor at The Week, covering arts, culture and travel. She began her career in journalism at Leeds University, where she wrote for the student newspaper, The Gryphon, before working at The Guardian and The New Statesman Group. Irenie then became a senior writer at Elite Traveler, where she oversaw The Experts column.
