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Gordon Ramsay’s ‘Boil in the Bag’ Restaurants
Woops!!……..
Poor old Gordon has ‘copped it’ again. An undercover newspaper reporter has ‘discovered’ that Gordon Ramsay serves ready made and reheated meals in four of his London restaurants.
According to the Sun newspaper the majority of the meals served at his ‘Foxtrot Oscar’, ‘The Narrow’, ‘The Warrington’ and ‘The Devonshire’ are all prepared in a central building called ‘GR Logistics’ (!) where they are then individually portioned and distributed by the van load across London.
Posing as a kitchen worker the reporter tells of how one of Ramsay’s head chef’s describes how cheap it is too make a dish using a chicken leg and that all you need to do is ‘pop it in a pan of boiling water’.
A spokeswoman for Gordon Ramsay Holdings insists the food served is still ‘fresh’ and is used because of the small kitchens within each of the establishments.
The media are enjoying this, out come the quotes Gordon is famous for; the ones about women being lazy at home and buying in pre cooked food, chefs who buy in ready made desserts etc. I’m not sure what the difference is between him ‘bagging’ up a ready made lasagne and a cook on national minimum wage in a roadside eaterie using a lasagne made by a national food manufacturer. It’s all relative yet he has gon on record condemming restaurants for reheating such food rather ‘than employing chefs to cook them freshly’.
I suppose it all comes down to honesty, chefs get themselves in al sorts of trouble when they start trying to be ethical about everything when in fact they are not nor can they be. I would never dream of critcising any home cook for buying ready made meals, bottled sauces etc because it isn’t my place to do so. If you make pea soup with frozen peas then guess what? You’re not alone. How many restaurant owners are going to pay a chef to stand in a kitchen for an hour shelling peas for a cheap bowl of soup?
Gordon should come clean and stop being the self styled champion of good food in Britain because he isn’t. The fact is that many of these trendy eateries receive very average reviews and people in glass houses really shouldn’t throw stones.
“The bigger they are, the harder they fall,” comes to mind. I’m surprised that the UK is big enough for his ego.
April 18, 2009 @ 6:01 pm
I was hoping you’d pick this one up I was going to do it myself !
Coq Au Van (£2.60 per portions from GR Logistics) - preprepared
Mark up of up 586% accoring to The Sun
Bought in fishcakes
I like the chef who was lambasted on Kitchen Nightmares for buying food in, not preparing all of his own with local ingredients - he got to call Ramsay a two-faced hypocrite and get it published in the national press -
Rod
April 18, 2009 @ 6:24 pm
Miles,
If it’s going to be pre prepared then it’s got to say so and it’s got to have excellent ingredients and taste delicious because of it. Why is it some people can make millions in the food industry while others work hard and produce fabulous results and bring home the minimum wage…. life’s not fair!
Anyway, I’m feeling good about myself tonight…. no I’m not going out on the town, I’ve just finished making a batch of angel hair pasta from local free range eggs and local organic flour and semolina. The result I can tell you was really good after just three minutes boiling. More impressive though, is my make-shift pasta drying contraption which consists of two large cereal boxes and several long handled wooden spoons straddled across …. if I were a business woman I would market it as a biodegradable, recyclable homemade pasta drier
Better get in quick before Gordon 
Cid
April 18, 2009 @ 7:26 pm
Annie,
It isn’t
Miles
April 18, 2009 @ 7:51 pm
Rod,
Thought you’d like it-thanks for leaving it for me
Miles
April 18, 2009 @ 7:52 pm
Cid,
Well done to you! How many people bother to do that? I think you should be really proud of what you do. I mean that sincerly.
Miles
April 18, 2009 @ 7:53 pm
Miles,
Isn’t ’sous vide’ the new name for boil-in-the-bag these days? Naughty Gordie!
GDave
PS. Go Cid! I like to dabble with pasta too. I probably only have a 50% success rate but that’ll improve. Actually today, inspired by a thread on a homebrew forum of all places, I was inspired to cook up a batch of Bol, which I’ll be serving tomorrow teatime on a bed of Spag.
April 18, 2009 @ 9:35 pm
GDave,
Naughty Gordie indeed-he’ll write a book on it next, or his wife will. “Tana Ramsay’s 100 Boil in the Bag Recipes for all the Family”
Miles
April 18, 2009 @ 9:47 pm
This Gordon Ramsay guy screams and yells on commercials for “Hell’s Kitchen” which is apparently a big hit over here. I haven’t seen it because I don’t need to spend my relaxation time watching someone throwing hissy fits!
Way to go on the pasta, Cid! I’ve never made pasta before but have thought I should try an amaranth version. I’ve tasted amaranth pasta and it was wonderful — making it myself is another story.
Melissa
April 18, 2009 @ 10:12 pm
GDave,
I looked at the fridge, the kitchen cupboard and the freezer this afternoon and soon came to the conclusion there wasn’t much inside…. but I had eggs and flour and semolina and my old pasta rolling machine. I sieved the flour and bunged in some semolina (and I do mean bunged
) then poured in as much egg yolk as the mixture took to hold together as a pasta dough. Mix by hand so you know the consistency. I never know whether I should kneed it well or not so moving on to the fun bit I just shove it through the machine a few times (bought at a car boot sale years ago) with the odd sprinkling of flour to stop it sticking. One large pan of boiling water and a pinch of salt, in goes the pasta, timed to three minutes exactly because it’s angel hair thickness. I read somewhere that the addition of fine semolina helps the pasta to hold it’s shape rather than become a glutenous mass… don’t know if that’s true but it sounded plausible.
Your Bol avec Spag sounds great… no need to ask if garlic is involved
Cid
p.s. I always get lots of flour and pasta on the kitchen floor when I make it… some got stuck to the bottom of my all terrain faux leopard slippers
… don’t tell Miles will you.
April 18, 2009 @ 11:13 pm
Melissa,
I have total faith in your ability to make perfect pasta. After all, if our soup business hits the fan, we’ll need to move swiftly in this direction
Cid
April 18, 2009 @ 11:20 pm
Cid,
Yeah I’ve read that about semolina too. In fact, I’m sure I read somewhere that you can use 100% semolina for pasta. I might have dreamed that one. A very savvy car boot sale purchase I must say. I got my pasta machine from Argos so you can imagine the quality!
Easily the best thing I’ve made with mine is tagliatelle with mussels, using shallots, white wine and the mussel liquor (and tonnes of butter) for the sauce. I spent the whole time eating it making, “Mmmmm,” noises!
Right, I’m going to get scrubbed up and head on into Glasgow. Meeting up with a fellow Manc to watch the FA Cup semi-final, drink inordinate quantities of beer and shout abuse at a television screen. I pray to God I stay away from Miles’s blog when I get home tonight!!
GDave
April 19, 2009 @ 12:56 pm
GDave,
Any man who can make that tagliatelle dish will not be single for long me thinks
Enjoy your football thingy, hope your lot win (I’m not into football, more of a tennis fan myself). When normal service resumes I’ll tell you about the garlic sauce I made today.
Cid
April 19, 2009 @ 5:42 pm