The chef from 'Hell's Kitchen'

PASADENA, Calif. - "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen!" That's chef Gordon Ramsay's war cry as he excoriates contestants on Fox's Hell's Kitchen.

Though Ramsay seems to outdo Lucifer in his cranky search for perfection, he's actually a cream puff in real life - or so he says.

"The problem in kitchens today is the lack of discipline. Suddenly, cooking is one of the very few jobs anywhere in the world that you don't need qualifications," he says.

"You . . . could walk down Sunset Strip tomorrow morning and get a job as a commis [apprentice] chef washing salads in the bistro, brasserie, without even producing a form of certificate, certification, that you are a trained chef."

Ramsay, 42, a Briton, says one of the principal downfalls for chefs is smoking.

"You can never smoke a cigarette and expect to perfect food literally two minutes after that," he says. "So if it's an old-fashioned thing that we need to smoke to just sort of feel less stressful, it's absolutely rubbish. There are other ways of becoming less stressful than smoking."

Ramsay has a wife and four children. He's far less bombastic at home, he says. "I don't act or perform like that when things go wrong with a Sunday lunch at home."

But he admits he's not the soul of restraint when his wife, Tana, is cooking.

"When Tana's roast potatoes are stuck to the tray or the Yorkshire puddings haven't risen, I get a little bit impatient," he admits. "Of course, I want to jump in there and do it myself because I'm starving, and I want to move things on a little bit quicker. So we don't have appetizers, entrees, and desserts in our house. We have one course, and dessert is a treat, and going out is special. . . . There's two sides to Gordon Ramsay. Yes, I am a driven, self-confessed perfectionist, but in a domestic scene, you know, I want to have that excitement with that journey as well."

On Aug. 18, the 11 remaining contestants on Hell's Kitchen have to devise three-course meals that don't exceed 700 calories. The winning team gets volleyball pointers from 2000 Olympian Annett Davis during a day at the beach, while the losers prepare both kitchens.

As persnickety as he is about haute cuisine, Ramsay says he's a meat-and-potatoes guy at heart. "Whether you've got a budget of $100 a month or $300 a month for food at home, it's having the intelligence not to waste, because I didn't grow up with a silver spoon," he says. "We didn't go out to restaurants and have that kind of glamorous insight. So mainstream, great appetizer, great entree, and something exciting, involving fruit and clearly a lot of starch, protein for the entree."

One of his passions, he confesses, is In-N-Out Burger, a chain of fast-food outlets in California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona: "I've been somewhat obsessed with In-N-Out burgers."

On another of his shows, Kitchen Nightmares, Ramsay prowls the nooks and crannies of restaurants, giving them the white-glove treatment. He says his own restaurant in New York is often cited for minor infractions.

"We get panned for a little seal or an egg being left out of the fridge or whatever. Of course, we get violations because it's Gordon Ramsay, and they are over us 10,000 times more, and every time we go into Kitchen Nightmares and we unleash a disgusting kitchen, they know I'm coming.

"But I need kitchens to have the attitude like walking into a dental surgery, like any customers should have the divine right any time across that dinner to walk into that kitchen and just to stand there for two minutes."