Gordon Ramsay's '24 Hours to Hell and Back' Has an Official Premiere Date
Gordon Ramsay is currently dominating food television on Fox. He’s the judge and mentor on MasterChef and its spinoff MasterChef Junior, as well as on Hell’s Kitchen, another cooking competition that has two teams of chefs competing for a position at a restaurant of Ramsay's choosing. This summer he’s got a fourth show premiering on the network called 24 Hours to Hell and Back. Similar to the hit Kitchen Nightmares, the show that made Ramsay a household name, on 24 Hours to Hell and Back he will be attempting to bring restaurants back from the brink of failure.
In the past, Ramsay has expressed regret that he walked away from Kitchen Nightmares, so this new show might be a tribute to a classic of the cooking show genre: Ramsay will drive across the country in his mobile kitchen, ominously named Hell on Wheels, making stops at restaurants that are just “one bad review away from shutting their doors,” according to a statement from Fox. Here’s the catch: He’s only got 24 hours to do it.
The stakes on the new show are high: Ramsay is combining the timed competition element of a show like Iron Chef or Chopped with the already high stress environment of a working restaurant kitchen. People's livelihoods hang in the balance. And given that Ramsay is known for his tough love tactics when he’s trying to whip a struggling restaurateur or chef into shape, there is bound to be at least one meltdown per episode.
Ramsay has a reputation for being too tough on people, but it’s worth remembering that his restaurants have been awarded 16 Michelin stars in total. He knows how to make a restaurant thrive.
He's also proven time and again that he might not be quite has harsh as he appears—he once surprised a former Hell’s Kitchen competitor with a home renovation and regularly makes jokes at his own expense on the Late Late Show with James Corden. What does that mean for the restaurant owners and staff on his new show? That no matter how hard he pushes them, he’s always got their best interests at heart.
You can find out for yourself if Ramsay’s experiment works on June 13 at 9:00 p.m., when 24 Hours to Hell and Back premieres directly after MasterChef.