Last week, Carolina Dining Services hired British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay to make a guest appearance for one week at Lenoir. But they didn’t invite him to scream at the sweet ladies rolling cucumber avocado rolls or the burrito bowl workers who could probably run an efficient WWII weapons factory assembly line by themselves — Ramsay was brought in to wrangle and flame the inconsiderate students.
I ate breakfast, lunch and dinner every day at Lenoir last week to study how Gordon Ramsay would improve the UNC dining experience. He started off mildly insulting students at the escalators who were standing instead of walking up the moving stairs, saying “Maybe if you all walked up the escalator and lost some weight, it wouldn’t break every other day from how fat you all are.”
This calmness quickly melted away when he migrated to the Top of Lenoir and was met by a group of first-years talking while standing directly in front of the escalator. He screamed at them to get out of his face, which significantly cleared up foot traffic in the area, but then they went and stood in the center of the dining hall instead. Due to AP Style expletive rules, I cannot write what he said upon seeing that.
After unsuccessfully trying to squeeze in between a bunch of chairs to get to the end of a table, Ramsay yelled at a group of particularly spatially unaware students. Their jackets were all over the ground and their backpacks were slung over so many chairs that no one else could sit there. He screamed, “Push your chair in, you freak” and “Only a string bean could fit through here” multiple times. I saw some students’ abdomens pushed so hard against the tables that they looked like they might throw up their buttered chicken.
At the drink station, he caught one student sipping different drinks and pouring them out indecisively as a line of people stood behind them. Chef grabbed his cup and said “You’re lucky you’re not a beverage because I would spit you out and dump you down my toilet.” The other students in line were in and out of the drink station in under 10 seconds each.
Then he marched toward the salad bar, grabbed a handful of spilled bacon bits and dumped it down the perpetrator's pants. He called them a bacon "B-word" before leaving to check out the deli station.
In a particularly gratifying experience for me, Ramsay reached over the counter and grabbed two slices of white bread. He put them on the sides of a rude student’s head, shoving in pieces of lettuce, tomato and bacon as well. When responding to Chef’s question “What are you?” with “an idiot sandwich,” he screamed that the student was in fact an idiot BLT, and then questioned how he got into UNC.
As he was leaving, a student whipped obliviously around the corner with two steaming plates of roast turkey and mashed potatoes, spilling gravy down Gordon Ramsay’s classic white shirt. He called her a "wanker" and a “turkey” with “mashed potatoes for a brain.” When he saw a student get up and leave wads of napkins all over a nearby table, he yelled, “Do you leave your dorm room this dirty? No wonder no woman wants you.”
On his last day in Lenoir, he stood by the moving dish conveyor belt with a bucket of dirty dish water, so whenever someone dumped their dishes down rudely or threw their cutlery into the tubs of water too hard, he splashed them while yelling, “You donut.” After shaping up student dining hall etiquette, he descended the escalator as CDS workers cheered. He had finally helped them solve their nightmare dining hall. Their kitchen of hell was now a sort of paradise, and Ramsay went on his way to terrorize Chase Dining Hall.
