Reputation is an odd thing. By making sweepingly asshatted pronouncements (SAP), Chef Gordon Ramsay has gotten himself a reputation for saying really stupidly elitist things that piss people off and show a real lack of common sense. Last week it was his SAP that restaurants should all be fined if they don’t serve seasonal food. As bloggers and mainstream media jumped to point out the hypocrisy (Ramsay owns a restaurant in Dubai – where absolutely nothing served is seasonal or local), Gordon Ramsay Holdings was forced to issue a statement.
Because of this reputation, any similar SAP attributed to Ramsay will be believed.
Today while reading the blog Cupcake Takes the Cake, I came across a post that indicated Ramsay had made a rather inflammatory SAP against everyone’s favourite treat, the cupcake.
The whole cupcake thing has been done to death. I thought we were through the woods, done hearing about how fucking cool and “retro” cupcakes were. I thought we were finished with interviews with the bakery proprietors telling mind-numbing stories about how they found their grandmother’s old recipe box in the attic and dusted one of the recipe cards off and lo! there was a glorious cupcake recipe and they just jazzed it up a bit to make it “cutting-edge” and it is the perfect marriage of great memories and contemporary cuisine.
The writer at Cupcake Takes the Cake was much chagrined, and attributed the quote to the Los Angeles city news and entertainment blog, LAist. The mention of Ramsay on LAist is actually part of a regular daily news round-up that links out to other sites.
The linked site where Ramsay makes this SAP? A site called NewsGroper, a selection of FAKE blogs, supposedly (but NOT) written by various celebrities. When folks are done reading Ramsay’s rant about cupcakes, they can read the “blogs” of Amy Winehouse (“God. Me Bond song gets flushed down the pisser…marriage all to shit…cops looming every which way…and two of me baby turtles have some kind of skin disease.”); The Dalai Lama (“Richard Gere cheated on me.”); or Barack Obama (“Don’t tell anyone, but John’s endorsement has been privately in my pocket for months. I don’t know if it was that one time we gangbanged Hillary in that debate or the countless hours we’ve spent up all night talking on the phone, but John and I have made a real connection.”)
I’m not sure whether it was the blogger from LAist or Cupcake Takes the Cake – or both – who missed the huge disclaimer of “THESE BLOGS ARE NOT REAL” up in the lefthand corner on the Newsgroper site, but someone needs to pay more attention before they run around the intarwebs half-cocked and looking for offence where there is none.
As for Ramsay – it might be an idea to cut back on the sweepingly asshatted pronouncements for a while, so that people don’t start believing every inflammatory statement attributed to him without checking it out further.