'Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted' review: Travel with the celebrity chef as he tackles the craziest cuisines from the world's most exotic locations
Spoilers ahead
Ever since Gordon Ramsay became a household name, the famed chef is known for cursing and yelling at people who he feels are incompetent. However, that's not all there is to the celebrity chef. Ramsay, in fact, showcases his other side in an all-new show where he travels to exotic locations and discovers new cuisines.
'Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted' looks like it clearly is trying to be his version of 'Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown', a food travelogue that was made famous by the late chef. The plot of the show isn't that hard to follow. Ramsay travels to six countries around the world and tries out the local ingredients and their way of cooking food. He also hunts and harvests the ingredients he needs for his food.
If you know Ramsay, you should know he loves a good healthy competition. So at the end of his trip in each country, he faces a friendly cookoff with the local expert/chef and the local people who helped him through the week attending as guests and judges.
Three episodes into the season and it is not hard to miss the love and respect Ramsay exudes for culture. His eager passion to get to know more about new food and how they are have been made for ages, with particular recipes and techniques that have been used for decades, is adorable to watch. The best part about his work is that he has to learn and grasp everything in five days.
It is quite thrilling to see a Michelin-star chef like Ramsay at the top of his game going out of his comfort zone and learning new things by broadening his horizon. In the first episode, we see Ramsay in Peru. While he is there to learn about local ingredients, techniques and cultures, the famed chef also tries out some real gross delicacies that most of us will pass. Eating a worm from a cactus, he takes a bite and spits it out calling it a "crispy cockroach".
While most of us can only picture Ramsay standing in a kitchen and yelling "idiot sandwich" at contestants, in this series we see him trying to climb a 100 ft mango tree while holding on to the tree trunk like his life depends on it. His next stop in the second episode is New Zealand where he tries out another worm from the bark of a tree and spits it out as well. We even get to see Ramsay wrestle an eel as he tries to catch it with his bare hands.
In the third episode, Ramsay heads to Morroco where he cooks a lavish feast for the Morrocan New Year celebration. In this episode, we also get to know that the local chef who Ramsay will be facing off had applied to his restaurant a number of times a couple of years ago, but didn't get in.
Though the episodes are fun and educational to watch, there are times that the signature Ramsay emerges and yells at the natives for the delicacies that he finds disgusting. In New Zealand, after trying the worm that is supposedly meant to taste like peanuts, Ramsay says, "The only thing that's nutty will be the person eating them."
There were a few other incidents where Ramsay was quite offensive, but he did manage to pull off an almost nearly good spinoff to Bourdain's 'Parts Unknown'. Ramsay does stumble, struggle and goes through a great deal throughout each episode and he somehow manages to make it through successfully.
Ramsay's 'Uncharted' can make for a good watch, but we can't be sure if it will be a hit with everyone who watches it.