“Perhaps Even Celebrity Chef Gordon Ramsay Cannot Save My Marriage” by Brandon Forinash
"But then also there’s the unsettling coincidence that I’m writing this story. That I’ve been writing it for years, that I will be writing it until I don’t know when."
This story grabbed me right away. Maybe “right from the title” away. It’s fun, playful, feels promising. There’s an idea there. And then the first few paragraphs follow through on the promise that title, with writing that feels immediate and confident and assures you you’re in good hands while also making you want to keep reading.
Then, just as you may be wondering if the story might be all idea, might be too clever, might only be one one-note… the story pivots, as if knowing and wondering and fearing that too. It turns back in on itself, gets meta and self-referential, and really starts to soar.
I think it’s such an incredibly fun story, and one that knocked me out on my first read and has really stuck with me across these weeks since, and I hope you all enjoy it as much as I do.
—Aaron Burch
“Perhaps Even Celebrity Chef Gordon Ramsay Cannot Save My Marriage”
The second day of filming, I am talking to one of the producers who is trying to reassure me that, despite my unease, I am actually doing great and the tape all looks great and I should keep going along with the process. Be yourself, she says to me, and then I hear Gordon shout my name from our bedroom.
“Coming, Chef!” I say and try to quiet my amygdala.
I navigate past a camera and the lighting to get into the bedroom where Gordon, his hands clasped to his face in shock, stands aside a couple of dresser drawers that he’s pulled out and plopped on our bed.
“What the f--k is this, Brandon?” he asks me in a voice, again, of absolute shock.
“Uh,” I say as my amygdala punches me in the back of my head, “They look like socks and underwear, Chef.”
“Brilliant.” Gordon nods aggressively, fist clenched in hand. “That’s because they are socks and underwear.”
“Yes, Chef.”
“And whose underwear are they?”
“They’re mine, Chef.”
“Right again, buddy boy, so let’s see if you can make this three for three. Why the f--k,” he reaches into the drawer and lifts out a bunch of my old boxers, “are you holding onto these.”
I’m at a loss. I look back at the crew and the camera and the producer gestures loudly that I should not look back at the camera.
“I mean, look at the state of them,” Gordon says and proceeds to stick his fingers through various holes. He takes a favorite pair of mine and actually tears the worn-out middle seam and I think I make a little noise with my mouth.
“You’re f--king groaning? So tell me, buddy boy, what are you groaning about?”
“I just,” and I want to be clear that I know this isn’t the best response, but the words come out of my mouth in this order, “I think that pair was still…good.”
“Good? Good?! There’s holes in them! What are they good for?! To keep your b-----ks only half covered? Does your wife think they’re good?”
“No, Chef—”
He turns to my wife, “Do you want to f--k him in these?”
My wife looks at me pitifully and looks back at Gordon, “No, Chef Ramsay.”
“There you go,” he says and claps/wipes his hands. “These are f--king out.”
Look, I know how this is supposed to work. We are meant to see some Hard Truths, own up to them, work on ourselves and on our marriage, and by the end of this experience I should demonstrate to everyone that I will be a New Man going forward. I know this. And I’m not even totally opposed to it, except I don’t know what the hell is really so bad about me or my marriage. Maybe we don’t go dancing the way we did when we were dating, but we’ve built a solid life. We live in a decent neighborhood in a charming, if dated, ranch-style. We work important jobs that, though not highly valued, provide us more money than we spend. And though I am not perfect or a hundred percent the ideal husband I want to be all the time, bottom line, I think I am a solid partner to my wife.
But Chef Gordon Ramsay isn’t coming to my neighbor’s house to fix his Marriage Nightmare.
After Gordon leaves and the cameras and lighting and production pack up and the production assistant talks us through the shooting schedule for tomorrow, after my wife and I have a couple of awkward silent hours in front of the TV before bed, I go into the study to play FIFA and have a think. Why am I not being myself around Gordon?
In part, it’s of course Gordon. The forehead of that man. I read that when doctors conducted a post-mortem of the great 19th century British actor, Edmund Kean, they found that the muscles of his brows, making up what we call the “triangle of sadness,” were uncommonly strong. That is to say, there was either something about him (genetics) or his work (genius) that meant he could physically command the expressions of tragedy. I don’t know what muscles are going on in Gordon Ramsay’s forehead, but the faces he makes as he keenly observes your nighttime ablutions—that expression from Gordon Ramsay’s forehead leaves you absolutely stunned.
Although, it’s more than that. It’s one thing—it’s kind of a gas—for an international celebrity to lay into the way you don’t dry your toothbrush after using it. But when there’s a camera in your face to record for millions of people your explanation as to why exactly it is you don’t think about the nasty rings of used toothpaste that form on the counter surface and who it is (your wife) that has to clean it, it’s something else. I mean, what will your parents think, or your work friends, or Twitter? Like, how big of an asshole will the editors make me vs. how much of me, the real me, is coming through in the final cut? I tell my students to pay attention to the “but”s in poems and stories, but there aren’t any in reality TV. So it’s definitely the cameras that also have me out of sorts.
Look, I know how this is supposed to work. We are meant to see some Hard Truths, own up to them, work on ourselves and on our marriage, and by the end of this experience I should demonstrate to everyone that I will be a New Man going forward.
But then also there’s the unsettling coincidence that I’m writing this story. That I’ve been writing it for years, that I will be writing it until I don’t know when.
You see, for several years now, I have been hypothetically working on a short story titled “Perhaps Even Celebrity Chef Gordon Ramsay Cannot Save My Marriage.” Progress has been somewhat irregular, but I have it down to a party trick. My wife and I will be hosting dinner with the in-laws or out with our friends or having drinks with strangers on a downtown rooftop during a wedding reception, and they will ask me what I have been up to lately/what I am doing/what it is I do.
The same as ever, I say. Always grading! You know, the life of an English teacher. But he’s also writing a story, my wife will offer. And then, I will talk about this story I’m working on in which Gordon Ramsay goes through my holey underwear or berates me in the kitchen for how I cut an avocado or delivers biting commentary on our date night small talk, something like, “Are you seriously asking her about work on a Friday night? Are you f--king kidding me? You live with her. You already know how s--t it’s been,” cups his hands and bellows into my ear, “Don’t talk about work on a Friday night!” And when I tell the story in that way, it’s a kind of misdirection.
Now that it’s all really happening, the story isn’t coming to me as readily. Or I can write some of the lighter parts (a scene, for example, where Gordon asks me how I would rate myself in the bedroom, and I’m like, “Um...I’d say, I don’t know, maybe an 8 out of 10.” To which Gordon acts overly impressed, “Wow, gosh, that’s great,” so I feel I have to hedge, “I mean, I wouldn’t say I’m the most amazing lover in the world, but I feel like I do good work, you know. I haven’t heard any complaints from the Mrs.!” Even though I have never before referred to my wife as ‘the Mrs.’ and I start to spiral because now the entire country is going to think I am a total dick), but it just feels like more of the same.
I can imagine the producer shaking her head at some late-night meeting with Gordon back at the hotel after shooting, saying she doesn’t know what it’s missing, and Gordon saying very meaningfully that they have to find a way to get through to me.
“Alright,” Gordon says and sends the intern who’s the nephew of someone only vaguely important out for coffee.“Nobody’s going anywhere until we figure this out.”
The next day, Gordon comes to observe me while I’m teaching.
But really it’s more like Gordon makes a grand visit to the school where I teach and subsequently observes my classroom. Principal Bloomer has the drumline out on the concourse to play when Gordon arrives on campus. Members of the student council and theater and the cheerleading team have made posters. There are a lot of photographs and selfies with admin and select students. There’s an assembly where Gordon talks about the importance of having a good teacher and he tells a very moving story about one of the first chefs he studied under and he makes a point that I think I’ve made a thousand times about how a teacher can only do their job if students are hungry (I say ‘motivated’) to learn. I usually get eye-rolls. Literally everybody is nodding and grunting in agreement when Gordon says it. When he does actually come to observe my classroom, my students are more engaged than I’ve ever seen.
It ’s all too much.
We’re reading and discussing the bullfighting chapter from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and though everyone is actively participating, it seems like they’re coming to me with wrong answers only. About fifteen minutes in I can see Gordon is literally squirming in his seat. Thirty minutes in and he’s giving these little shakes of his head and grimacing. At one point he actually sparks up a side conversation with a student who laughs and looks over at me and then looks away. And I can feel the cameras filming everything.
“Right,” Gordon says and pops up in front of class. “Ok, so I’ve got some questions for you. You’re used to getting grades from Mr. Forinash. Is he a harsh grader?”
My students respond with some variations of “Oh, yeah, so mean”/ “Harsh, but mostly fair”/ “Nothing is ever perfect for him, which I don’t think is fair to expect of high school students” / “He’s just a slow grader.”
Gordon looks at me, which I see as some cue for me to respond, “Well, I think—”
“Not quite yet, Mr. Forinash. I’ve always thought of grades as feedback, yes? And if there’s anything I’ve learned in cooking, it’s that quality feedback is absolute gold. So, tell me,” he says and slaps his hand. “What grade would you give Mr. Forinash as a teacher?”
“Solid B+,” Fabrizio says.
“No,” Lauren, my try-hard, objects, “I think an A-. Or maybe like an 89.6.”
“That we round up to a 90 at the end of term,” Gordon says with a smirk.
“I think,” and I know this isn’t going to be good because it’s coming from Ethan, “he deserves a fat D.” Which gets a laugh from the group around him.
“That’s pretty harsh,” Gordon says. “And I’m going to push you there, because I think it needs some justification. Why does Mr. Forinash deserve a ‘D’ as your teacher.”
Ethan’s smile drops and he sits up now. The camera’s on him. The producer’s watching him and making notes on a pad. Gordon’s staring at him, all that fierce attention.
“It’s just, I think like a lot of his fire’s gone.”
“Don’t tell me, son, tell Mr. Forinash.”
“Sir,” he says to me in the first instance he’s ever called me ‘sir.’ “I don’t mean any disrespect, but most of us don’t want to be here. And when you don’t even want to be here, for us, it’s kind of like, what’s the point of caring?”
In our one-to-one after class I want to explain myself to Chef Ramsay that teaching really has gotten harder since the pandemic. And it’s not even about the pandemic anymore. Even before the pandemic we were struggling with low wages, lack of technology, competition from charter schools, class sizes, teacher shortages, which are just some of the fiscal constraints worsened since the pandemic. There’s everything going on outside of the classroom in our students’ lives—social media, their home lives, their dating lives, their own work and what they are doing in the world outside of school. There’s so much going on all at once that it feels like all the things that matter most to me go missing, stay missing, when the most mundane or trivial or ugly things keep demanding my attention, like emails.
But I don’t say any of that. Instead, when Gordon asks me if it’s true what Ethan said, have I really lost my fire, I give a bit of a shrug. Which Gordon obviously doesn’t like. “F--k me, is that all you’ve got? I’m trying to figure out what motivates you, what animates you. What gets you up in the morning. I’m sat across a man, but I’m wondering where in the f--k are your balls?”
An average episode of Ramsay’s show is 42 minutes. I did the math and, give or take a few hundred for music and transitions, that’s about 5000 spoken words that make the final cut. Which feels like scant material to cover the challenges in modern education, and more than I’d like to share about my marriage.
“I don’t know, Chef.”
But if I am being absolutely honest about why I am not committing myself fully to this process, it’s that I am in a different place now than when I started drafting this story. At first it was only a funny idea, and then there came a time when I needed it to be more, when I would have given anything for someone to drop into our lives like Mary Poppins and save us.
That night, after another painful failure in the kitchen in front of Gordon to make even the simplest thing, a burger—“It’s raw! It’s f--king raw!”—he tells us he’s at a loss. “I’ve half a mind to walk away.”
“Please don’t give up on us, Chef,” my wife asks him.
“I need to see some passion. Some commitment.”
“We have the passion,” she says, “we are committed. We want to see this through.”
“I hear that from you, but I need to hear it from him.”
I tell Gordon that I am committed and he says he doesn’t believe me. I ask him what he needs from me, and he tells me to just be honest. No more excuses. No more games.
“You might be standing here in front of me, now, but you might as well be lost up your own a--hole.”
Gordon calls off for the night, tells us he’s going to have a long think, and hopes I do too. He steps outside and we can hear him talking to the cameras. I can only guess what he’s saying.
My wife puts in an order on a delivery app while I clean up my failed meal. Between us and around us, enveloping us, in the small space of our antique kitchen with its 1980s appliances, awkward diagonal island, the electric stovetop with three functioning burners, is the unsaid.
And, of course, the smoky residue of somehow still underdone hamburgers.
In various drafts of this story, my wife has confronted me here.
In one version, she tells me that if I don’t try, if I don’t meet Chef Ramsay halfway, she’s going to walk away as well. In another, she apologizes for bringing this show, these cameras into the house, and suggests that we run away from the production and become ranchers. In a more truthful version there is a grand revelation that it was me, in fact, that invited Gordon Ramsay here.
But if I am being absolutely honest about why I am not committing myself fully to this process, it’s that I am in a different place now than when I started drafting this story. At first it was only a funny idea, and then there came a time when I needed it to be more, when I would have given anything for someone to drop into our lives like Mary Poppins and save us. But in this time, from when I conceived this story to now, I’m not the same person, I’m not even the same writer as I was before.
In the bullfighting chapter of The Sun Also Rises, the one I was doing a bad job teaching, Hemingway likens the role of the author to that of a matador. A mediocre matador will stand away from the horns until the bull goes past and then throw himself against the body of the bull to create the illusion of peril. A gifted matador however, will hold himself as closely as possible to danger, without ever being touched.
When I first came across this idea, I liked it, and I took it. I made it a part of me. I thought that way about writing for a long time, that an author needs to put themselves and their characters in genuine danger if the writing is going to be any good, provide for the audience a pleasurable catharsis.
My wife is pregnant again. We’re at the halfway point today, as I am writing this, and everything looks great this time, our doctor assures us. Because it’s important during pregnancy, we take walks most every night. We talk about our days and our plans and hopes. I tell her about my progress and frustration trying to elevate this story. And Bailey (oh! that’s her name) tells me with absolute sincerity that I should write the story that people want. She gives me permission.
Look, I don’t know you. And I don’t know what you want, if you would like me to take you to the point where my marriage was in most serious jeopardy.
If you need that catharsis, I am sorry, because I’m not going to give you that. Telling a story in that way creates a theater, where the writer stands at the center and the audience sits on the outside and watches.
When what I want, what I have come to want, are stories where we can reside (for a little while) and that can reside within us (maybe forever).
Writing a story like that would be an invitation.
Here is this space that I have made. It is a friendly space. I hope you have found it to be friendly. But it is friendly to everyone and so it is also somewhat uncomfortable. The person you’ve been avoiding—or the thing, the place, the idea—walks in while we are already sitting at the restaurant or are standing in line at the open bar. You groan and turn to me, you say, “Ugh, I can’t believe that they are here.” I look over your shoulder and tell you I think they see us, that they are in fact walking in our direction. I tell you that I am sorry, that actually I invited them here tonight. I am sorry that I have done this to you, brought you here, but I thought it was important.
I decide to listen to Bailey’s advice, to stop fighting it, to go along with what Gordon asks me to do over the next few days. A production schedule that includes 1) a scene in which I am shown a compilation of footage from my friends and family, coworkers, all the people outside of my marriage whose opinion matters to me, and finally of course Bailey, herself, expressing her fears for me and us if I keep on my current path, 2) a much more (personally) enjoyable day in the classroom where Gordon surprises me with a visit accompanied by some of my former students who talk about what my class and my teaching has meant to them, and 3) finally a turning-the-corner cooking session where Chef Ramsay teaches me how to make the perfect omelet and reveals some of his story of struggle that kind of relates to my own, and even though my omelet isn’t perfect, he sees that I am trying, which matters.
Before the final reveal, production sends us away for the weekend. We make full use of this time. Without the cameras, with production settling down, we finally have a chance to say things to each other that are our own and no one else’s.
On Sunday afternoon, production picks Bailey and me up from the hotel and blindfolds us. The production assistant gives us some direction, not exactly telling us how to react, but reviewing the sequence of action, some advice and reminders about how to interact with Chef Ramsay if we are feeling flooded by emotion (don’t approach him, let him approach you).
When we follow the cameras into our house, when they lead us into our home, it really is a transformation. In the living room, they have replaced the clunky hand-me-down furniture with velvet mid-century pieces that Ramsay calls ‘sexy.’ Gone, he shows us in the kitchen, are the old white appliances, and in their place are a brand new dishwasher, fridge, oven. No more half-dead electric range and instead a top-of-the-line convention gas grill top. And the pièce de résistance, an outdoor patio complete with speakers.
“This is no mere patio! This,” Chef says, “is a dance floor!” And with that a song comes on, and I hear my wife gasp because it’s not just any song, it’s our song. Our wedding song. I look at my wife and she’s crying, and now I’m crying too, and so I take her in my arms and we dance on our new patio, swaying slowly to the music while she repeats over and over, “I love it,” “It’s perfect,” “Thank you”.
We dance and none of the cast or crew say anything for a long few minutes, but I can see them over her shoulder as we turn. I can see the cameras move around us, can see the producer line up the shot of us and Chef Ramsay, and when she has it I see her smile and start nodding to her assistant. I look around at all of their faces, and I have this thought: after everything is done, after the final edits, after our episode finally airs some Monday at 8 PM/7 Central on Fox, in some way we will stay like this, we will exist like this, forever, for whoever you are out there that sees this.
And for once, in this long process, I’m alright with that.
STORY:
Brandon Forinash has stories on X-R-A-Y, Wigleaf, Flash Frog, among other indie zines. Matt Leibel's story, "Martha," blew his mind.
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ART:
Erin Dorney is the author of Yearbook Club and Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering, an image-text collection forthcoming from Autofocus Books in March 2025.
Next Tuesday, we’ll feature a bonus interview with Brandon about this story and also some “bonus deleted scenes”!