"gordon ramsay" news and stories

Chefs Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver talk the talk about sustainable fishing, and even appear on the BBC show "The Big Fish Fight," where they go to the source, and supposedly walk the walk. But, report the editors at TheStir, both chefs have been caught red-handed serving unstainable fish at their restaurants. What were the two star chefs putting on the plate that caused the ruckus? Find out at TheStir.

Watch episodes of BBC's "The Big Fish Fight" online.

We were pretty excited to hear the news that "The Big Fish Fight," a U.K.-based show featuring superstar chefs Jamie Oliver, Heston Blumenthal and Gordon Ramsay was taking on the dark side of the fishing industry. But the news got even juicier yesterday when bad-boy Gordon Ramsay told The Daily Mail that while in Costa Rica filming his episode on the illegal shark-fin trade, things got downright harrowing for the chef when he got close to a Taiwanese crew with a full load of fins and a stash of cocaine. The story continued to be a nail biter when he crossed paths with a shady character named Enrique, who is thought to be the third largest supplier of shark fins in the world.

The experience includes cars with ominously darkened windows, pointed steely rifles and chilling threats of bodily harm. In the backdrop? The sheer gruesomeness of sharks being shocked with electric prods, their fins sliced from their bodies, and then being thrown back into the sea to die.

"At one [point], I managed to shake off the people who were keeping us away, ran up some stairs to a rooftop and looked down to see thousands and thousands of fins, drying on rooftops for as far as the eye could see. When I got back downstairs, they tipped a barrel of petrol over me," Ramsay told The Daily Mail.

No doubt there are plenty of chewed-out former contenders from Hell's Kitchen that would like nothing better than to send Gordon Ramsay swimming with the fishes. Well, Britain's Channel 4 is going one better: They're sending the famously ill-tempered chef to swim with the sharks.

And not just any sharks -- bull sharks, perhaps the most aggressive species of shark, prone to unprovoked attacks on humans. (Hey Gordon, sound familiar?)

What might otherwise seem a desperate publicity stunt designed to showcase another side of an overexposed celebrity (presumably Ramsay won't be able to launch into an expletive-laden tirade underwater) is ostensibly for a good cause: It's part of Channel 4's series of programs called "The Big Fish Fight," aimed at educating viewers about the impact of overfishing.

According to The Guardian, Ramsay's dramatic contribution will be part of a larger investigation into the controversy over shark-fin soup, which leads to the killing of nearly 100 million sharks per year and had caused significant declines in the population of the ocean-going predator.

The body of a man found floating in the Hudson River last Friday afternoon was identified as 39-year-old New Jersey chef Joseph Cerniglia, a 2007 participant in Gordon Ramsay's reality TV show "Kitchen Nightmares."

Cerniglia, owner of Campania, an Italian restaurant in Fair Lawn, N.J., was pulled from the river around 3 p.m. on Friday when police responded to a 911 call that a body was floating in the river, the New York Daily News reported.

Police still don't know how Cerniglia wound up in the river, but the department is conducting an open investigation, a New York City Police Department spokesman told Slashfood on Monday.

Even with a Michelin star and a slew of TV shows under his belt, loud-mouthed British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay hasn't had much luck with restaurants in the U.S.

And now he's been hit with $2 million in tax bills in connection with his New York restaurant, Gordon Ramsay at the London, the New York Post reported.

Plagued with financial difficulty since its 2006 opening, Ramsay sold the restaurant last year to the hotel that houses it -- the London NYC. It was not clear why Ramsay owed $2 million in taxes on a restaurant he no longer owns, the Post reported.

"This relates specifically to a restaurant operation in New York which has been restructured. Conversations are in hand with U.S. authorities to settle outstanding corporate liabilities," a spokesman for Gordon Ramsay Holdings in London told the U.K. paper News of the World, which broke the story.

More after the jump...