Gordon Ramsay has built his television presence with a fleet of shows that offer entertainment and an insight into the world of cooking. If you’d like to see Ramsay attempting to fix faltering businesses, there’s Kitchen Nightmares and Hotel Hell. If you want a straight-forward cooking competition, there are various flavors of MasterChef. But the show that catapulted Ramsay into the spotlight was Hell’s Kitchen. Like Kitchen Nightmares, Hell’s Kitchen was an American version of a show that Ramsay had introduced in the UK, with the basic concept of 20 contestants broken down into two teams — red and blue — to go through a cooking challenge or work dinner service on their lonesome. What sets Hell’s Kitchen apart from other cooking showsis how Ramsay will often lob insults at the chefs, or break down into an angry rant.
Ramsay’s more creative insults have become part of the creative lexicon, and with a new season of Hell’s Kitchen premiering this month, viewers are bound to hear more. But one of these insults has stuck in my mind since I heard it and paved the way for Ramsay to become an internet sensation. That insult was first heard in Season 2, Episode 5, “7 Chefs,” and it occurred during dinner service. It still leaves me absolutely shook.
Gordon Ramsay’s Most Iconic Insult Came During a Heated Dinner Service
In “7 Chefs,” the Blue Team went through a lot. During their challenge, where they participated in a taste test with dishes made of processed food, they lost and had to clean the kitchen while the Red Team got to do a TV Guide photoshoot with Ramsay (and to rub salt in the wound, one of Blue Team’s chefs had to serve Red Team champagne). Things only got worse during dinner service, as Blue Team members Garrett Telle and Heather West had a conflict over who got to handle the meat station. This led to a delay in most of the meat dishes, and Ramsay belowed what would become an iconic line: “Where’s the lamb sauce?!”
What makes it even more memorable is the line that Ramsay adds when one of the chefs finally brings him the lamb sauce: “F— off, you useless sack of Yankee Doodle shite. Kindly f— off.” Neither Garrett nor Heather were in the vicinity, but it shows that when Ramsay’s truly ticked off, no one is safe from his wrath. To this day, whenever I’m cooking something, Ramsay’s roars about lamb sauce enter my head, which ends up being the strangest motivation to turn out the perfect dish.
The Lamb Sauce Line Became a Meme That Transcended “Hell’s Kitchen”
Ramsay had no idea that his rage over lamb sauce would become a meme, or that it would kickstart his path to being an internet sensation. Soon, official Hell’s Kitchen merchandise would pop up, including T-shirts bearing the “Where’s the lamb sauce?” line. In 2016, the lamb sauce line would become an internet sensation, as people took to Reddit and various parts of the internet to make memes about its location — or lack thereof. To this day, people still pop into the comments of Hell’s Kitchen and other Ramsay-related videos on YouTube with usernames featuring “lamb sauce” only to type: “You’ll never find me, Gordon!” Ramsay himself has leaned into the internet sensation, even appearing on The Late Late Show with James Corden for a Hell’s Kitchen-inspired sketch where he infamously called Julie Chen Moonves “an idiot sandwich” (and, you guessed it, sparked another viral meme).
It wasn’t until Ramsay launched his own YouTube channel that things came full circle. While most of the content is re-uploaded episodes of Hell’s Kitchen, Kitchen Nightmares and/or Hotel Hell, Ramsay often prepares simple recipes. Two of those videos have him cooking lamb, and one of them is cheekily titled “Gordon Ramsay Finds The Lamb Sauce.” True to its title, the video does feature Ramsay preparing a lamb dish with a delicious garnish. With Hell’s Kitchen primed to return for another season, Ramsay no doubt will have some scathing words for contestants if they fail to live up to his high standards. But none of them will ever match his demands for lamb sauce.
