Gordon Ramsay has made a sport—a career, really—of lambasting other people’s cooking, particularly on Twitter. This hobby of his dovetails pretty nicely with his general tendency to yell at anyone who comes within a three-foot radius of him (for some reason, Alexa users can now bring the terrors of his verbal abuse into the comforts of their kitchen).
This general unpleasantness has resulted in occasional lapses in judgment that lead to piss-poor optics; for instance, his disastrously unfunny criticism of a traditional South Indian breakfast, which he somehow saw fit to liken to prison food. Haha!
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This is why it’s so deliriously, utterly thrilling to watch the man whose glib reflex is to disgrace other people’s cooking get a taste of his own medicine. It’s karmic retribution in the form of an eight-year-old clip from Ramsay’s The F Word, posted to Twitter by user @sydneeW on Monday with the utterly apt caption “YALL IM CRYINGGGGGGGGGG.”
I don’t say this often, but I am glad this tweet went viral.
The 28-second video shows Ramsay cooking what he refers to, nominally, as pad Thai. He feeds it to mononymous chef Chang of the Blue Elephant; Chang takes a bite and glares at Ramsay, who is utterly, nakedly desperate for validation.
“What do you want to know from me? Ask me?” Chang snarls.
“How is it?”
“This is not pad Thai at all. Pad Thai has to be sweet, sour, and salty,” Chang replies.
Ramsay, reduced to a simpering caricature of himself, chirps that it doesn’t taste too bad, that he knows it isn’t perfect.
“For you,” Chang says. “But not for me.”
It’s pretty nice to see this clip get resurrected, especially on the exact platform where Ramsay loves to dish out insults like Santa does Christmas gifts. (Ramsay did not respond to immediate request for comment from MUNCHIES regarding what it’s like to see this clip get a new lease on life. Chang could not be reached for comment.) The video is drawn from an episode of the F Word in which Ramsay cooks up a storm for a group of monks at London’s Wimbledon Thai temple.
Ramsay loves Thai food, he explains in voiceover. He loves eating it. He loves cooking it, he explains. (Too bad he can’t!) There are some other, mildly cringeworthy aspects of the video—watch Ramsay neglect to try to pronounce “toong tong,” the dumplings that are colloquially known in parts of the English-speaking word as “moneybags”—but it gets really good once he begins cooking what he calls his “pad Thai.”
Pad Thai is a dish he loves cooking at home, Ramsay tells the viewer. He jazzes it up with king prawns, chilies, tamarind paste, coriander—but apparently, these accoutrements aren’t enough to mask the dish’s basic inadequacies.
Later on in the episode, Ramsay spies on those poor monks as they eat his pad Thai. They claim not to hate it.
If you ask me, Ramsay’s pad Thai is pallid, almost ghostly-looking. I’d be playing by Ramsay’s very arbitrary rules if I were to judge the dish solely based on its presentation.
But hey—if those are the rules, my man, it’s only fair I stick to them.
