Image copyright
Fox
Image caption
Michael and Gordon Ramsay in the final of Hell’s Kitchen
After nine weeks of gruelling competition, chef Michael Wray faced his final test.
The shy but talented cook had made it through to the final on the first US series of Gordon Ramsay’s show Hell’s Kitchen. His last challenge was to run his own kitchen in full view of TV cameras and one of the world’s most fearsome chefs.
It was a test Michael, then aged 27, passed.
Footage of the tall, heavily tattooed young chef embracing Ramsay after winning the show was beamed into millions of households across the world in 2005.
“For the first time I feel like I’m in control of my own future,” Michael said on the show. “I’ve proven myself to myself and that’s important.”
Michael initially thought he had won $250,000 prize money to open up his own restaurant. “As Michael was celebrating the win of a restaurant,” Ramsay’s voiceover said, “I realised that an individual of Michael’s talent – I didn’t want him to get away.”
Ramsay made Michael an offer to work alongside him in London. After some nervous deliberation, a shell-shocked Michael agreed. The room erupted in cheers.
But Michael would later change his mind. “It was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make. I regret it all the time,” he tells the BBC.
“I was in Hell’s Kitchen with a drug problem. I was deathly afraid of going to London with this giant addiction.”
Growing up in rural Colorado, Michael was interested in cooking from an early age, often helping his father in the kitchen. He says it was a way to express himself outside the classroom, where he struggled due to his attention deficit disorder.
He dropped out of high school and went to work in a kitchen.
In 1999, Michael spent two years training to be a chef in London. It was during this period he became fully aware of a chef with a fearsome temper called Gordon Ramsay, who was building a name as one of the world’s best chefs.
“He had this reputation out there of being this badass chef that no one wants to mess with,” Michael recalls.
“I tried for like a year to work with him for free but no-one could get in there, it was really exclusive.”
When he heard about auditions for Hell’s Kitchen through his in-laws, who worked in the industry, Michael decided this would be his best shot at getting close to Ramsay. He applied and went through a rigorous process of interviews and tests. Eventually, he was told he had made the final 12.
Michael saw the show as a chance to show off his talent and draw on Ramsay’s expertise. But as soon as the cameras started rolling, Michael realised it was going to be tougher than he thought.
He learned that Hell’s Kitchen would be open to the public and one contestant would be eliminated after each service. Cameras would be rolling 24/7, even when they slept.
Image copyright
Fox
Image caption
“He wasn’t chef Ramsay, he was this happy, boisterous kid,” Michael says
“I went into this thinking that I’m going to learn all this great chef stuff from Gordon Ramsay and then I ended up realising I needed to do everything I could to stay on this show to win,” he says.
“I didn’t want to be on national TV and lose.”
But Michael had little to worry about.
Despite Ramsay telling him he had a “palate like a cow’s backside” in the first episode, Michael soon emerged as a frontrunner.
While contestants regularly received the famous wrath of Ramsay’s tongue,