Roasting In Hell’s Kitchen by Gordon Ramsay
October 14th, 2008Title: Roasting In Hell’s Kitchen
Author: Gordon Ramsay
Publisher: HarperEntertainment (2006)
I assume you have heard of Gordon Ramsay. It’s pretty hard to watch TV without seeing him somewhere. But if you don’t know…Ramsay is a world class chef who has 21 (I think) fine dining restaurants around the world. He also has parlayed his cooking fame into a number of television shows, most notably Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares. (I’m partial to Kitchen Nightmares because I love reclamation projects). I’m sure there are plenty of really awesome chefs out there that are not getting involved with TV on the scale that Ramsay is…but that’s probably because they aren’t quite as charismatic. Ramsay is famous for his fine dining and his short temper in the kitchen. Oh…and also for his extravagant use of the “F-word”, which he uses in every possible grammatical way possible.
Roasting In Hell’s Kitchen: Temper Tantrums, F Words, and the Pursuit of Perfection is Ramsay’s autobiography. It basically goes through his entire life. Ramsay had a pretty rough upbringing as his father was extremely emotional abusive. I found his stories of his childhood to be kind of sad and didn’t quite keep my attention the entire time. When he started talking about life in various restaurants the book got much better. He told a lot of funny stories about his early life in the kitchen and the appalling ways some of these places were run. Those aspects of the book are pretty interesting.
The book reads very quickly as it is pretty conversational. While Ramsay seems to be a fairly cocky individual, he does a pretty decent job of not bragging the entire book. Also, there were plenty of pictures. And I LOVE when books have pictures in them. They provide a nice break from whatever you are reading and are in color and shiny. I like shiny things.
Anyway…this is a pretty good book if you are interested in Gordon Ramsay. If you have no interest in Ramsay or life as a fine dining chef, then I imagine you won’t like this much.
Rating: 3 out of 5
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October 14th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
I watched the first couple of season of his show and loved it. Didn’t know about the book though. Thanks for the heads-up.