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Gordon Ramsay’s Secret Service ★★★½
It’s 1.07am and celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay is speeding through Washington DC wearing a black baseball cap. Police sirens whirr behind him as his eyes dart between the road, his rearview mirror and a camera on the dash. In this first scene of his new series, the 58-year-old multimillionaire is doing his best Jason Bourne ... which is a bit more like Jason Statham in Spy.
Ramsay is on his way to a Greek restaurant, he tells us, to uncover “the problems that everybody tries to hide from me”. He has a man on the inside. He has a duffle bag full of spy gear. And within minutes he’ll be rifling around in a dark kitchen and muttering “f---ing hell” while throwing bloody chicken carcasses on the ground. We’re back, baby.
Gordon Ramsay in Gordon Ramsay’s Secret Service. Credit: Greg Gayne/Fox
Despite all the theatrics, Gordon Ramsay’s Secret Service is essentially just Kitchen Nightmares. Each episode is centred on a struggling US restaurant, which the hard-headed Brit has been tasked to turn around. It features all the obligatory shots of dirty kitchens, festering food and Ramsay cussing out belligerent owners.
The only differences? Well, an “insider” on the staff has tipped him off instead of the owners nominating themselves (“Please don’t fire me,” one half-jokes when outed in a Traitors-style reveal). There are a lot more hidden body cams. And, importantly, our boy is undercover for the first half of each episode, monitoring the situation from inside the world’s most conspicuous van parked right outside.
It’s beyond silly, but purposefully so. And once it gets to the meat of the thing – Ramsay giving it to people straight and turning their lives around – it’s just as enjoyable as the long-running series it’s so indebted to.
More than 20 years ago, this foul-mouthed chef struck TV gold with the creation of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. The unvarnished series tapped into the chaos of real-life restaurants, juiced it for drama and laughs, and managed to (mostly) tie things off into a happy ending so you don’t feel too bad about all the genuine hardship.
The show spawned a hugely successful US adaptation, Kitchen Nightmares, as well as the spin-off series, Hotel Hell – both of which have been comfort food for me while home sick over the years or in the bleary-eyed trenches of new parenthood. And I’m not alone. The former proved popular enough to warrant a revival in 2023.
It’s strange, on its surface, that a show like this would still be relevant or popular today. How can a guy like Ramsay – who has also hosted 23 seasons of Hell’s Kitchen and serves as a judge and executive producer on US MasterChef – be so prolific in a world where we’ve collectively and comprehensively disavowed the idea of the Difficult Chef?
Gordon Ramsay with the restaurant owner in the series premiere of Gordon Ramsay’s Secret Service.Credit: Greg Gayne / Fox
But, after all the shouting and viral moments – shout-out Amy’s Baking Company – the magic trick of these shows is always in Ramsay’s dual ability to turn around and effectively mentor. And the fact is he usually uses his rage for good. In Kitchen Nightmares, a true post-recession show, which often involved counselling people through their soul-crushing debt. Here, it’s telling one restaurant owner he needs to tell his son he loves him, and another that he’s disrespecting his wife (oddly, there’s no talk of the hardships of COVID in at least the early episodes).
Does he need to be hiding in a van running a black ops mission to do any of this? Of course not. But it’s entertaining all the same.
Gordon Ramsay’s Secret Service premieres at 7.30pm, on Thursday, July 30, on Ten, with new episodes on Wednesdays.
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