Nothing on the internet is ever lost. It may be forgotten or relegated to some dark corner of a digital archive, but lost? No no. All it takes is a click here or a share there for for some tidbit of history to be suddenly unearthed. A lesson Gordon Ramsay learned the hard way this week, when a nine-year-old clip of him getting scolded for preparing a subpar pad thai reemerged to capture our fickle attention.
The video is cribbed from Ramsay’s British TV show The F Word, a late-aughts reality show that saw the chef crossing the country doing what he does best. Often he cooked with other celebrity chefs, or experimented with local home cooks. The show’s fifth season, the one the clip is from, orbited around the search for the “Best Local Restaurant,” per Ramsay’s judgment. In each installment, Ramsay visits two local restaurants devoted to a particular cuisine: Italian, Indian, Chinese. It’s in the episode featuring Thai cuisine, the season’s fifth, that Ramsay receives the schooling of his life. Check out the clip, which surfaced this week on Twitter, here:
The extended version is also available on Youtube.
It seems that Ramsay, known for inflammatory comments and a penchant for yelling in the faces of fellow chefs, gets a taste of his own medicine, as the esteemed chef Chang, then the executive cook at London’s Blue Elephant, rips into his pad thai. It takes but one bite for Chang to exclaim “This is not pad thai at all!” Ramsay appears flummoxed, and in turn defends his dish, but Chang doesn’t budge. People on Twitter had bunches of thoughts. Here are some highlights:
The clip feels incredibly relevant, especially as news circulated this week of a Malaysian contestant on MasterChef UK having been eliminated for preparing a classic Malaysian dish in a manner unfit for the British judges. The echoes between the two scenarios are hard to ignore. We’ll bet that Ramsay had hoped this clip would stay buried deep in the depths of the internet. Unfortunately for him, everything that’s old is new again. And if watching the shouty chef get talked back to is something you enjoy, then I recommend you follow up with this clip of a woman showing Ramsay how things are done:
Had you seen this clip before? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
See what other Food52 readers are saying.