HELL'S CUSHION

The most notable thing about Gordon Ramsay's new Netflix documentary is the lack of jeopardy involved in watching a multimillionaire tackle a new project

- Hannah Twiggs

Food television has long treated chefs' lives, kitchens and appetites as reliable dramatic ingredients – Floyd, Bourdain, the Hairy Bikers, Nigella. And restaurants, after all, are naturally dramatic environments: high stakes, volatile personalities, the ever-present possibility of failure.

Gordon Ramsay's Boiling Point, broadcast in 1999, remains one of the genre's defining artefacts. It charted the nerve-shredding run-up to Restaurant Gordon Ramsay - then his defining solo venture, now his three-starred flagship - capturing a chef whose reputation, finances and professional legitimacy felt perilously intertwined. The tension was not scripted. Failure seemed genuinely plausible.

Fast forward three decades - and 89 more restaurants - and Ramsay's new Netflix series, Being Gordon Ramsay, revisits strikingly similar territory. Once again, cameras follow the buildup to a major opening - or openings, should I say: 22 Bishopsgate, where the chef is taking on not a single flagship gambit but a vast, multi-concept development encompassing five distinct restaurants. Once again, pressure provides the narrative engine. But this time, the stakes feel unmistakably different.

In 1999, Ramsay was a chef attempting to become Gordon Ramsay. In 2026, he is a multimillionaire hospitality magnate whose name, face and famously combustible persona are recognised all over the world. Nostalgia, of course, is irresistible television. But Ramsay's return to the playbook that forged him invites a more revealing question: what does it now mean to be Gordon Ramsay - and, by extension, what does it mean to be a chef at all?