The brutal truth that ‘Being Gordon Ramsay’ happily ignores

The most interesting story in Ramsay’s new Netflix documentary is the one left largely unspoken: the multimillion-pound losses beneath the drama, writes Hannah Twiggs

Gordon Ramsay is still the chef figurehead, but his kitchens now run on something far larger than one man (Netflix)

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?

Because whatever it means to be Gordon Ramsay in 2026, it bears limited resemblance to the conditions facing most chefs. The past several years have delivered an unbroken sequence of pressures: Brexit-related labour and import constraints, pandemic aftershocks, inflationary costs, energy volatility and fragile consumer confidence. In 2025, an average of 11 restaurants closed every week across the UK.

If that number seems staggering, how about these? At Ramsay’s Bishopsgate venture, company filings and industry reporting have noted record revenues of £134m alongside a £7.3m operating loss, attributed to familiar pressures: expansion costs, inflation, wage increases and the extraordinary expense of launching projects at scale.

The development itself reportedly required investment in excess of £20m. None of this is unusual for large hospitality groups engaged in aggressive growth. Expansion is ruinously expensive; returns rarely immediate. Yet the optics of jeopardy change radically when viewed from the vantage point of smaller operators, for whom comparable losses would be catastrophic.

“The whole sector is struggling,” Ramsay tells viewers, safety-yellow hi–vis and hard hat firmly in place. And we are inclined to believe him. Ramsay has become one of hospitality’s most enduring narrators of pressure. But Being Gordon Ramsay is not merely a documentary about restaurants. It is also, at points, a meditation on the burdens of success. On screen, we see Ramsay reflecting on parenting regrets, past mistakes and the creeping suspicion that he may have spread himself too thin. Fair enough. The hospitality business has exhausted far sturdier souls.

Ramsay’s new show is restaurant jeopardy at a scale few operators will ever recognise (Netflix)

Yet the juxtaposition is difficult to ignore. We are watching a documentary about a £20m restaurant complex absorbing multimillion-pound losses, framed alongside the anxieties of a multimillionaire concerned about working too hard.

But ultimately, this is not really a story about success or failure. It is a story about scale. In today’s restaurant economy, risk is experienced very differently depending on who is taking it. A multimillion-pound loss might trouble a large hospitality group. For an independent restaurant, it is often fatal.

Ramsay’s reputation remains anchored to the image of the chef, but his role has long since changed. He does not cook in most of his restaurants. His head chefs do. The Michelin stars attached to his empire are the product of those kitchens, shaped by the systems, standards and talent pipelines Ramsay has built, rather than by his day-to-day presence at the stove.

Ramsay’s most enduring legacy may be the chefs who have passed through his kitchens. Few figures in British hospitality have produced so many successful alumni. Angela Hartnett, Marcus Wareing, Clare Smyth, Jason Atherton, Matt Abé, Kim Ratcharoen and others emerged from Ramsay’s orbit to build restaurants carrying prestige of their own. The volatility that once defined him has, over time, hardened into something more durable: influence exercised through people rather than presence.

Cooking at home with daughter Tilly – domestic calm set against the machinery of a global restaurant empire (Netflix)

This is what makes Being Gordon Ramsay feel faintly surreal. Just weeks after appearing as a speaker at this year’s Michelin awards, the series presents Ramsay at home, debating pancake thickness with his family – a tableau of domestic familiarity set against the reality of a global restaurant empire operating at a scale most chefs will never inhabit.

There was a time when Ramsay’s televised pressure felt broadly representative of restaurant life. Today, not so much. For most others, the drama is no longer whether a canape passes muster, but whether the business survives another quarter. Another month. Another week.

If Being Gordon Ramsay sets out to show us Gordon Ramsay the chef, what it really captures is Gordon Ramsay the institution – and institutions, unlike individual restaurants, can absorb spectacular failures. And yet, for all of his bluster, 22 Bishopsgate has not had the success or acclaim that he might like. There have been no five-star reviews. In fact, there have been no reviews at all.

The series gestures toward the pressure, the complexity, the risks of opening at such scale, yet stops short of confronting the most consequential question: what happens if it doesn’t work? The venture has not, at least for now, been as successful as the show has made it seem. We are shown stress, but not consequence. Jeopardy, but not collapse.

And yet Ramsay, of course, endures. Because at that altitude, failure behaves differently. For most chefs, the arithmetic remains far less forgiving. A single unsuccessful opening can end a business, a reputation, a career. Survival is never assumed.

Ramsay, by contrast, operates at a scale where even failure can resemble a form of victory. The empire contracts, recalibrates, moves on.

The institution lives to tell the tale. The man who once embodied kitchen-level risk now operates at a scale where it carries very different consequences. Volatility replaces catastrophe. Survival becomes more likely. For most chefs, however, the stakes remain brutally unchanged. When the jaws of defeat are salivating, Ramsay will, inevitably, snatch victory.