The Food Scandal That Shook Gordon Ramsay's London Eateries

Imagine if someone had served Gordon Ramsay pre-made food on Hell's Kitchen. The British chef, famous for berating contestants' subpar cooking on the TV show, would have had a meltdown full of F-bombs, and likely asked the competing chefs to leave. This might come as a shock: Nearly 16 years ago, pre-made food was found being served at some of Ramsay's restaurants and pubs in London.

One of Ramsay's biggest scandals was when The Sun investigated in 2009 that some food had been mass-produced off-site, and not fresh in his restaurants. This wasn't true for every menu item, but The Guardian reported that items such as fishcakes, sausage rolls, coq au vin, anything braised, desserts, and items cooked in sauce. were made at a production kitchen in London.

This is a common occurrence in restaurants and bars — many might use items like frozen french fries or pre-made pastas to cut down on prep time and labor and ingredient costs. Ramsay's restaurants, however, are world-renowned and hold Michelin stars (here's why he's lost some of them). Customers might not be too upset to find out that the $2 French fries from the fast food restaurant arrive at the restaurant frozen, but if they're paying $25+ for a plate at a celebrity chef's restaurant, it's understandable that they would be frustrated to find out it wasn't even made under the same roof.

It's not a secret that scaling in the restaurant industry comes with challenges in maintaining quality, especially across multiple locations. Some kitchens simply might not have enough space to support constructing a variety of dishes or a high level of traffic, and that's when preparing food off-premise might make sense. The representative from the commercial kitchen cited this as the primary reason for this food preparation decision.

In a Reddit thread, users discuss how bad this scandal was; some are in the defense of Gordon Ramsay's restaurants, because technically fresh food was being prepared and served. Menu items were never brought in frozen. Some users argued that transporting the food to a different location doesn't necessarily mean it's not fresh, while another stated in their comment, "But it's not, it's made by a company which makes for other restaurants as well, which means there is no real value in eating in his restaurant."

The other complaint after this information came to light was how much the food was being marked up. Restaurants normally charge 200-300% more than what it costs to make a profit on menu items, according to SpotOn, but it felt like the prices were too high at Ramsay's establishments for not even being made in-house. For example, The Guardian reported that the fish cakes cost £1.92 to produce, but they were listed on the menu for £11.25. If you learned a lot about Ramsay from the recent Netflix documentary, you know that he's had a long journey as a chef — and this incident was definitely one that taught him what his customers expect from his restaurants.