Rare Times Gordon Ramsay Was Actually Impressed By Food

If you've ever seen Gordon Ramsay in one of his several television shows, you'll know he doesn't hold back when it comes to food. Whether it be about a poorly prepared dish on "MasterChef," an unsanitary kitchen on "Kitchen Nightmares," or a delusional owner on "Hotel Hell," Ramsay is often seen in his shows berating or insulting someone about whatever it is they did wrong. While he does tend to go easier on the particularly young chefs that appear on "MasterChef Junior," he refuses to sugarcoat how he feels for anyone.

However, not every episode is so negative. From time to time, Ramsay finds a small beacon of hope and eats something he deems delicious. These moments are rare, but if you dig deep enough into the foul-mouthed chef's filmography, you're likely to find some moments where he is genuinely excited by the food presented to him. From the simple french fry to the intensely complicated beef Wellington, here are a few of the rare moments when Ramsay is actually impressed by a particular dish.

Located a stone's throw from the ocean in Brighton is Momma Cherri's Soul Food Shack, a small restaurant offering food from the American Deep South that is having trouble bringing in a consistent stream of customers. When Gordon Ramsay and the "Kitchen Nightmares" crew first arrive, he is taken back by the sloppy décor, remarking that "it's definitely a shack from the outside." However, he is instantly charmed by the restaurant's owner, Charita, who has never worked in the restaurant business before, but proudly tells Ramsay that she comes from a long line of "big mommas."

To start his evaluation of the struggling restaurant, he sits down for a meal. First, he has catfish goujon with hush puppies and homemade pineapple salsa, which he calls "quite nice" and compliments the delicate nature of the fish — already viewers (and the restaurateur) are surprised. For the main dish, he has a plate that is clumsily piled high with ribs, spicy chicken jambalaya, and corn and bean succotash. While the dish didn't look well put together, Ramsay says, "This might be the first time I actually go back to the kitchen with an empty plate." And to Charita's delight, that's exactly what he does, telling her it was "bloody delicious." 

If you've ever made french fries at home (or even ordered them at a restaurant), you'll know how hard it is to get them to all look and taste the same. Some are always too skinny and end up burnt, while others are too thick and don't cook all the way through, not to mention how impossible it is to get the salt evenly distributed. The difficulty of making such a seemingly simple dish inspired a challenge during an episode of "MasterChef." However, for one contestant, Brandi, it was hardly challenging at all. She makes fries for her kids at least once a week at home, so she was already a seasoned pro.

Gordon Ramsay knows they are winners before he even tries them. He points out the perfect color and uniformity of the fries and then takes a bite, noting their perfect crunch and seasoning as well. If you had any doubt of his opinion, he puts that to rest when he calls the fries "utter perfection," which is a response not many can get from Ramsay. When it comes to feel-good food, leave it to a mom to put all the other contestants to shame.

Bazzini's, a failing restaurant in Ridgewood, New Jersey, is disappointing from the start of one episode of "Kitchen Nightmares." Not only is the restaurant not open for lunch when Gordon Ramsay arrives, but the interior is dated, and the long, skinny dining room makes the whole place feel cramped. When a very hungry Ramsay is finally served the best food the restaurant has to offer, he's brought a parade of disappointing dish after disappointing dish. Between the rock-hard chicken and the mushy risotto, he doesn't think the restaurant has anything good to offer. But when he's finally served dessert, he sees a glimmer of hope.

When he bites into the carrot cake, he can tell it's made with passion and love. He's then greeted affectionately by the creator of the delicious dessert, Sharyn, the restaurant's charming pastry chef. She's thrilled by Ramsay's reaction to her desserts and is the only one standing tall throughout Ramsay's harsh criticism of the restaurant and its food. When he asks for her recipe, she tells him he can have it ... "for a price." You go, girl. 

In an episode of "Kitchen Nightmares," Gordon Ramsay travels to Mount Sinai, New York, to visit Handlebar. What was once a popular spot for the upper-middle-class residents of the town has now become a run-down, dated restaurant that can barely turn over 18 tables on a Saturday night. The owners seem to have full faith in both the restaurant and their head chef, Melissa, even though she doesn't consider herself to be a real cook.

First, they serve Ramsay their soup of the day, the clam chowder. At first, he hides his reaction and calls over one of the owners, Bill. If you've ever watched "Kitchen Nightmares" before, you'll know that when Ramsay calls you over about something he's just eaten, it's rarely a good thing. However, to everyone's surprise, he actually has nothing but good things to say about the dish, calling it, "nicely seasoned, quite tasty, and perfect for a winter's day." But when the owner reports back to the head chef and tells her the good news, she's surprised, claiming that she didn't think it was a good batch. Unfortunately for the owners, the clam chowder ends up being the first and only thing Ramsay likes that day.

If you've ever watched "MasterChef Junior," you'll know that Gordon Ramsay is far nicer to the younger contestants than he is to the adults who appear on "MasterChef." However, he was so impressed by this young chef's dessert that it just had to be added to our list. In a season 3 episode, Ramsay calls home chef Jenna to the judge's stand to be critiqued.

She brings forward a beautiful coconut rice pudding with a mango and mint compote. Before Jenna can even finish describing the dish, he takes a bite. At first hiding his reaction to the dish, he laughs at the young girl's visible anticipation and excitement. It's so good, he has to go in for another bite. When he asks her how old she is and she tells him that she's only 12 years old, he exclaims "O. M. F. G.," and the kids' eyes all widen in surprise before Ramsay adds that the "f," of course, stands for "food." Given the famously foul-mouthed chef's reputation, you can't blame the kids for jumping to conclusions.

When Gordon Ramsay arrives at Burger Kitchen in Los Angeles for an episode of "Kitchen Nightmares," he finds a divided family, a chef on the brink, and terrible food. The restaurant claims to specialize in burgers yet manages to mess up every burger sent Ramsay's way. The owners blame the chef, the chef blames the owners, and the owner's son just doesn't want to be there. However, as Ramsay investigates deeper, he discovers that the owners are not allowing the chef to create his own recipes or order his own ingredients.

So, when Ramsay asks him to make a burger completely on his own, he proves that he does have what it takes to run a kitchen. He serves Ramsay a delicious and beautifully presented burger with smoked Gruyere cheese, grilled tomatoes, spring mix, mustard aioli, a jumbo homemade pickle, a crispy bun, and a patty perfectly cooked to medium, prompting Ramsay to say, "That's what I call a burger!" 

However, even with Ramsay's stamp of approval, the owners still try to find something to complain about. If Ramsay says it's good, we wouldn't argue!

On an episode of "MasterChef," a prospective contestant named Dustin decides to cook sausage rolls, a traditional British snack — but with a spicy Italian sausage instead of the traditional banger sausage. However, Dustin doesn't start off on a good foot, as he refers to Gordon Ramsay's English heritage ... even though he's from Scotland.

Ramsay is skeptical about all the extra garnishes on the dish at first, since sausage rolls are typically a very basic type of street food. He watches in horror as Dustin turns it into a gourmet dish, adding a spicy marinara sauce, Parmesan cheese, parsley, and a little bit of basil pesto that's "just for show." But that horror quickly turns to delight when he finally tries it and ends up leaving none left on the plate for the other judges. He high-fives the chef after giving him the ultimate compliment: "That ... was f***ing delicious." 

On one episode in the first season of "MasterChef Junior," the contestants are challenged to take on Gordon Ramsay's signature dish, the famous and notoriously difficult-to-make beef Wellington. For this particularly challenging dish, all the contestants are paired up. One pair is comprised of two incredibly talented young chefs, Troy and Alexander, both of whom have produced some impressive dishes on the show.

When they bring their beef Wellington up to the judge's stand, Ramsay immediately comments on how beautiful it looks on the outside, and the boys are hopeful that the inside will be just as perfect. They wait in anticipation as Ramsay cuts it open, and they are delighted to see that perfect red color on the inside. The moment of truth comes when Ramsay takes a bite, and the boys breathe a sigh of relief as Ramsay confirms his delight. "You have just nailed one of the most sophisticated, one of the most difficult dishes anywhere in the world," he says, telling the young competitors it's a dish he'd serve at his own restaurant. 

In a season four episode of "Kitchen Nightmares," Ramsay travels to Zeke's, a struggling restaurant in New Orleans. When the restaurant first opened in 2002, it was a bustling neighborhood favorite run by the beloved owner named Zeke. However, Zeke's, along with rest of New Orleans, was forever changed by Hurricane Katrina. Tragically, Zeke died in the devastating hurricane, and the restaurant remained in a state of limbo until Darryl and Ellen Cortello made the decision to buy Zeke's. They decided to keep the original name, but changed everything else, including the staff, the menu, the prices ... and the quality of ingredients.

When Ramsay arrives, he orders an assortment of food from the menu, including the oysters Cortello, a made-up dish named after the owners. He hates everything he's served, except for one saving grace: the bread pudding. It looks like a big sloppy mess, and Ramsay assumes it will be a disappointment, but he's wrong. "It doesn't look fantastic ... but it tastes delicious," he says. Emil, the kitchen manager and genius behind the bread pudding, glows with delight from Ramsay's reaction.

One of the most popular and over-the-top contestants ever to appear on "MasterChef" is Tommy Walton, a fashion designer turned chef. Given his background, he always makes every dish he prepares beautiful to look at, often claiming that you have to eat with your eyes before you eat with you stomach. He's typically seen dancing around the kitchen, eliciting eyerolls from his more reserved competitors, or making up silly words about his food.

In one episode, Walton is excited to set the bar, as he is called first to the judges' table. He brings forward a beautiful bananas Foster with apples, maple-bourbon cream, and a sweetened cream cheese filling. The dish looks delicious, as it is perfectly colored not just on the top, but on all sides as well. As Gordon Ramsay takes a bite, he says, "Wow. It's rich, it's sumptuous, and it's steeped in alcohol ... Tommy, delicious."

In this season 4 episode of "Kitchen Nightmares," Gordon Ramsay travels to Plainfield, New Jersey. In the center of town is Blackberry's, a soul food restaurant run by Shelly Withers. Once a successful caterer, Withers thinks she is well-equipped to run a restaurant with the help of her mother, Mary, who has invested her retirement fund into the struggling restaurant. When Ramsay first arrives, he notes the marvelous location where Blackberry's sits in the bustling little town. However, that is the extent of the compliments he has for a while, between the confused décor, the strange outfits, and the disgusting food.

The food at Blackberry's is so bad that Ramsay ends up sick in the bathroom by the end of his first meal. However, when he comes back to his seat, he is met with something truly delicious: Mama Mary's red velvet cake. The cake is so good that he even gives the sweet matriarch a kiss on the cheek and declares, "I've been saved by Mother Mary."

During one episode of "MasterChef," the contestants are asked to bake apple pies as part of a pressure test. Last up to the judging table is Christine Ha, the show's first and only blind chef. The usually calm chef becomes flustered during the process and fails to get her pie into the oven until there are only 18 minutes left on the clock. In addition to being under an intense amount of stress, the young cook cannot see how her pie comes out, which only adds to her nerves. When she brings her pie to Gordon Ramsay, she assumes it looks like a "pile of rubbish."

However, she's overcome with joy to hear from Ramsay that it looks stunning, with a crisp, dark brown color on the edge and a beautiful glaze across the top. In an attempt encourage her to trust her instincts and stop doubting herself, he brushes his knife across the top of the pie crust so she can hear what a great job she has done. When he finally takes a bite, he marvels at the flavor and congratulates her on her fantastic accomplishment. A rare moment of kindness and encouragement from Ramsay, this moment will surely stick out forever in any "MasterChef" fan's mind.

If you've ever watched a Gordon Ramsay show, you've probably heard him talk about his disdain for vegans. In fact, in 2016, in response to a fan who asked him on Twitter if he's allergic to anything, Ramsay simply replied, "vegans." However, his aversion to non-meat eaters makes this moment from "MasterChef Junior" all the more special. In a season 5 episode, one young contestant, Shayne, brings forward a beautifully plated Southwest vegan burger with avocado fries and a sriracha sauce. He explains to Ramsay that he used a plethora of ingredients to get the patty to bind so well together, including black beans, brown rice, peppers, onions, and tomatoes.

As both Ramsay and guest judge Mayim Bialik take bites out of the burger, they can hardly believe it's not real meat. Although the young chef has certainly proved his talent as a vegan chef, Ramsay has no intention of turning vegan anytime soon. "I never thought I'd say this but ... you've just turned me vegan for the night," exclaims a delighted Ramsay.

Another show created by Gordon Ramsay is "The F Word." It's similar to his other shows except for one major difference: It's filmed live. That means that if Ramsay doesn't like your food on this show, you'll have to take his criticism live and unedited. In one episode on the first season, Ramsay calls forth the captains of the two competing teams: Licensed to Grill and Chop it Like it's Hot. Since both teams were instructed to cook a skirt steak with chimichurri sauce and chorizo and white bean fricassee, Ramsay has to use his refined palate to judge the differences between the two dishes.

Debbie, representing Licensed to Grill, is asked to bring her plate forward first. Ramsay expresses his initial worry about the dish in the beginning, but eventually reveals that he loves the rustic nature of the dish and how the heat balances out the freshness from the chimichurri. Up next is Patty from Chop it Like it's Hot. She explains that her team decided to add a quesadilla to their dish with cheese and roasted red peppers. While this is a slight deviation from the original, he admires the rich and creamy taste of the dish. After he's done judging both dishes, he's delighted by how good they both are and says that he "can't fault anything here." No faults found in two consecutive dishes? That has to be record for Ramsay.

Gordon Ramsay professing his love for everything he is served rarely happens on "Kitchen Nightmares." There have been certain occasions, however, where Ramsay likes some of the food, or even just one dish, though the praise usually gets lost in his contempt for everything else he has to eat.

Example: Morgans in Liverpool, England, which served the long-suffering chef prawns that he called "hard, disgusting bullets" followed by a "huge dish of overpriced stodge," which was basically a lot of sausage served over some weird mashed potato apricot thing. For dessert, Ramsay got sticky toffee pudding, which he ... liked. "For the first time this evening, I'm glad to be here," Ramsay said after making a couple of requisite "mmm" sounds. He called the dish "light" and "not too sticky," then proceeded to backhand the compliment by noting that the chef who made it probably wasn't the same one who dreamed of putting apricots in the mashed potatoes.

Ironically, footage caught the chef at Morgans (who did not make Ramsay's dessert) saying that the sticky toffee pudding was so bad that it shouldn't even be on the menu. He might have been slightly embarrassed to hear it was the only thing Ramsay actually liked.

Remember when people used to say, "Never trust a skinny chef?" Well, Gordon Ramsay began season 1, episode 3 of "Kitchen Nightmares" by fat-shaming The Mixing Bowl Eatery's manager, so apparently that adage doesn't apply to everyone who works in the restaurant business. So that was kind of low, but probably not the meanest thing Ramsay has ever said. Anyway, maybe he was just trying to soften the blow from what everyone knew was coming: his unfiltered thoughts about the food at the Bellmore, New York, restaurant.

On its menu, The Mixing Bowl Eatery declared its crab cakes "award-winning." Ramsay didn't exactly agree with that assessment when he tried them, but he did say they were fresh. And because Ramsay can't really compliment something without then un-complimenting something else, he made sure to add a caveat about how he wasn't expecting to be served anything fresh in "such a dreary, dreadful dining room."

After the meal, Ramsay visited the kitchen and praised the crab cakes as "the high point" of the meal. He then went on to complain that everything else he ate was "very average, very dreary, and it's very sad." Perhaps tellingly, the crab cakes didn't end up starring on The Mixing Bowl Eatery's revamped menu — instead, the restaurant reinvented itself as a place to get healthy food, though by then, everyone seemed to have forgotten about the fat-shaming.

It's sometimes hard to fathom why a restaurant would voluntarily subject itself to Gordon Ramsay's unfiltered criticism on "Kitchen Nightmares." Some restaurateurs seem genuinely confused when Ramsay lists all their problems ... it's like they want him to throw up his hands and say, "Everything's perfect! I have no idea why people don't want to eat here!" So when Ramsay likes a dish, it's at least a small win. But in one case, Ramsay's praise ends up being a huge kick in the pants because it's aimed at a different restaurant.

La Galleria 33 was the restaurant world's version of a TV spin-off. It was launched by two sisters whose parents owned L' Osteria Ristorante, a successful eatery in the same Boston neighborhood. The sisters must have thought some of the success of their parents' restaurant would work its way into their new venture, but it did not. Enter Ramsay. La Galleria 33's issues were obvious by the time Ramsay finished his meal. Ramsay called the food "bland" and "boring." La Galleria 33's chef even admitted to preparing and freezing items in advance. "It's better to serve frozen food than rotten food," the chef said, which didn't exactly help his reputation. Whatever.

After the meal Ramsay wanted dessert, but the restaurant was out, so he sent the busboy/manager down the street to L' Osteria. He returned with the sisters' mom and some tiramisu. Ramsay called it "delicious" and "amazing." Ouch.

Omi Hopper became internet famous before she was TV famous — in 2020, she made a name for herself by posting her family's Puerto Rican dishes on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. Every internet-famous person gets a few mean comments because the world is full of people who like to be donkey butts from the safety of their parents' basements. Maybe Hopper thought the wildlands of the internet would harden her against the in-person meanness of the meanest chef of all, so she signed up for Season 2 of "Next Level Chef." 

It turns out she didn't need to worry. Gordon Ramsay liked a lot of her food, including the seafood dish caldo'e pezcáo. His biggest compliment, though, came after the baking challenge in episode 12. Hopper made buñuelos, a fried-then-baked choux pastry with a coconut crema filling and wild berry sauce. Ramsay praised the dish as visually beautiful and compared it to something you might see on a dessert cart in a fancy hotel. Ramsay was also pleased with the flavor, and the dessert saved her from elimination. But the big moment came as she was headed back to the lounge and Ramsay called after her, "Omi, could I have the recipe, please?"

Now, it's one thing for Ramsay to like your food and another for him to ask for the recipe. Hopper didn't go on to win the season, but that kind of praise is career-building all by itself.

The internet is rife with culinary train wrecks, and one would not imagine that big, important TV chefs would spend a lot of time sifting through the horrors in search of the rare gems. But one pandemic-era recipe became so famous that there was no escaping it, no matter who you were. You could have been hunting polar bears in the Arctic Circle, and your bush pilot would have been like, "Have you tried that feta cheese pasta thing yet?" Even Gordon Ramsay was not immune to the omnipresence of the feta cheese pasta thing. In an interview with People, he praised baked feta pasta for helping people survive the pandemic, though he almost certainly meant mentally, not nutritionally. "I love that stuff," he added.

In case you have been in the Arctic Circle and English is not your bush pilot's first language, the internet was first introduced to baked feta pasta (properly, uunifetapasta) in 2019 by Finnish food blogger Jenni Häyrinen. (Uunifetapasta is not traditionally Finnish, by the way — it's something Häyrinen said she "came up with.") The viral recipe gained traction during the peak of the pandemic and actually caused feta cheese to sell out at some grocery stores. 

Ramsay not only called uunifetapasta "magnetizing," he also said it was "inspirational" to see people come up with simple, inexpensive recipe ideas that millions of people get excited about.