My Take | Hong Kong's restaurants need the Gordon Ramsay treatment

The one great thing about British chef Gordon Ramsay, who opened his restaurant in Central this week, is that the man has absolutely no regard for political correctness in cooking.

He doesn't give a flying toss about fat, cholesterol, sugar, salt or calories. These health concerns are completely foreign to him. If something needs a whole block of butter and lots of cream, in they go. And he never, ever says "organic".

Instead, like real estate agents who point to the truism of "location, location, location", Ramsay's basic advice, offered repeatedly in his own BBC cooking show, is "fresh, fresh, fresh". If the meat, seafood or vegetable is fresh and top-quality, the cooking takes care of itself. You are pretty hard-pressed to ruin it.

I am a Ramsay fan. Unlike many of the hottest Western chefs who use the most exotic and unpronounceable herbs and inevitably offer tiny portions, Ramsay uses ingredients we all know and his dishes are always generous. I wonder what he does with the leftovers besides chucking them into the bin. Perhaps he can do a whole show on leftover treats.

There is, of course, the darker side of Gordon Ramsay, the foul-mouthed critic in Kitchen Nightmares where he can't seem to complete a sentence without the F- or S-word. Actually, it's a bit off-putting the way his aggressive posturing often reduces many a hapless restaurateur and chef to tears and utter public humiliation. But that is apparently the show's main attraction. Come to think of it, maybe he should do a Hong Kong version of Kitchen Nightmares.

God knows how many so-called restaurants in this town deserve the Ramsay treatment. In most North American and European cities I have visited, you can usually find at random decent food at a reasonable or cheap price. The dirty little secret of Hong Kong, despite its reputation of being a food paradise, is that most cheap outlets offer lousy food, and expensive ones are no guarantee of quality. There was a reprimand, attributed to Ramsay against a chef on Kitchen Nightmares, though I never saw it: "There is so much oil in your dish the Americans are going to invade."