I had a meal at Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen. I realize this may shred my reputation as a foodie.
I hereby confess to being a fourth-degree Gordon Ramsay fanboy. I’ve watched all the British bad boy’s TV series, seek out his recipes online, and own a cookbook. I scramble eggs and grill burgers closely following instructions on his YouTube videos. I find his bluster amusing, his cooking insights useful.
I’ve even watched an embarrassing number of episodes of Kitchen Nightmares. When my wife and I visit restaurants that violate his rules of success — too many items on the menu! Owners who linger in the front of the house but don’t do any work! — we chuckle knowingly.
A visit to Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen
And so it was with trepidation and hope that my lovely wife and I and a couple of friends headed to the new Hell’s Kitchen restaurant at the Wharf in Washington, D.C. This is his third Hell’s Kitchen in the U.S, all of them spin-offs of the long-running reality competition series of the same name. Like most of his restaurants, they are located in high-traffic tourism hubs. He has places in Las Vegas, New York, and various casinos around the country.
This should immediately tell you something.
And it did. The experience at Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen was not the heavenly Hell I’d hoped for. Instead it lived in an in-between gustatory purgatory (I promise to never use that phrase again).
A place for the Ramsay-curious
Hell’s Kitchen is clearly designed as a lure for Ramsay-curious travelers, falling somewhere between pure tourist sops like Margaritaville and the more food-driven Michelin-starred restaurants operated by top TV chefs like David Chang and Tom Colicchio.
Hell’s Kitchen at the Wharf is partly a Gordo theme park. A video display of the man himself barking out insults stands by the front door. Images of him, chef-jacketed and cross-armed, loom on the walls, the red- and blue-hued open kitchens that the show made famous stand front and center, columns of flame lick up the walls on video screens, and so forth.
There’s a muchness to it, as the Brits might say.
What’s cooking in Hell’s Kitchen
HK fans may recall that the hapless competitors had to master, among other things, Beef Wellington, sautéed scallops, and lobster risotto.
Many times Gordon scraped raw or overdone scallops from plates into the trash, shouting his withering contempt: “You can’t serve this sh*t to customers!” he’d yell.
As I hoped, all three dishes were on the menu. And so we tried ’em all.
The food at Hell’s Kitchen
The Wellington was as-seen-on-TV excellent: lovably tender meat, precise medium rare temperature, densely rich duxelles, beautifully crisp jacket of pastry.
The scallops were perfectly cooked, soft and sweet but wearing a firm, crusted sear.
And yet: With the lobster risotto, the coins of lobster tail were splayed across a bed of risotto so oddly dense and heavily flavored that the saffron disappeared entirely. It made a rich dish unnecessarily, inexplicably richer than it needed to be.
Other plates ranged from meh to wow.
- The mac and cheese, featuring among other things smoked Gouda, was so good I looked up reverse-engineered recipes of the HK version online (I am not the only fourth-degree Gordon fan) and made it the next week at home.
- My buddy’s short rib was dry, a clear whiff by the kitchen.
- But dessert, sticky toffee cake claimed to be from Ramsay’s mom’s recipe, was smashing, as Gordon might say, a kind of moist Heath Bar.
Drinking with Gordon
Check, please
The damage: $316.75 for two. To be fair, we got three apps, two entrees, and five drinks between the two of us. But still.
Running dozens of restaurants that promise the quality produced by a chef with three Michelin stars and an international following is, to be plain, a burden the big man has brought upon himself.
I’m sure quality and cost control in an establishment he cannot personally supervise are a challenge, to badly understate.
What would Gordon think?
Still, Hell’s Kitchen doesn’t live up to Ramsay’s own standards.
Had our evening been an episode of the Hell’s Kitchen series, he might have chased our waiter onto the street with a vulgar rant, scraped the lobster into a trash bin, and roared at the floor manager to explain what in god’s name she was actually doing.
So maybe Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen serves inconsistent food for high prices and tries to capture travelers with a well-known brand. But if it’s a tourist trap, well, at least it’s a Gordon Ramsay tourist trap.
For this fourth-degree Ramsay fanboy, that was good enough for one night.
But I never need to go to Hell again.
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Craig Stoltz blogs at eatdrinkgosmart.com
