Foul-mouthed celebrity chef Gordon
Ramsay finds himself in a hot stew down under after suggesting a
television journalist was a lesbian.
After being interviewed by Tracy
Grimshaw, Ramsay, the star of Fox's reality series Hell's Kitchen,
let out a tirade the following
day at the Melbourne Good Food and Wine show.
Ramsay showed an
audience of thousands a doctored picture of a naked woman on all
fours, with multiple breasts and a pig's face, which he said depicted
Grimshaw.
“That's Tracy
Grimshaw,” he said. “I had an interview with her yesterday, holy
crap. She needs to see Simon Cowell's Botox doctor.”
Ramsay also
suggested Grimshaw was a lesbian.
“Obviously,
Gordon thinks that any woman that does not find him attractive must
be gay,” Grimshaw said the next day on her television program A
Current Affair. “For the
record: I don't and I'm not.”
Ramsay's
publicist told the Herald Sun
on Sunday that it was “just a joke,” and that the pair were good
friends. But Grimshaw disagreed.
“We do not have a
great relationship. We have no relationship at all,” she said.
Australian Prime
Minister Kevin Rudd backed Grimshaw on Tuesday, calling Ramsay a “low
life.”
“All I could
describe his remarks as reflecting is a new form of low life,” Rudd
told Australian radio. “I just think that's off, and offensive.
Good on Tracy Grimshaw for coming out and giving him a left upper
cut.”
Ramsay's culinary
empire includes 21 restaurants and pubs in the UK, U.S., France,
Japan, Dubai and the Czech Republic. But several eateries have
faltered amid the economic recession.