Quarantined chef makes meals with hotel room appliances, gets pat on back from Gordon Ramsay

The 23-year-old chef from Cornwall turned standard hotel appliances like an iron and coffee maker into multi-purpose cooking tools to produce some restaurant-level gourmet meals.

A young chef has become an internet sensation for cooking meals with some basic hotel room appliances while quarantining in Canada. Now, even celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, of Hell’s Kitchen fame, reacted to his video, and praised him for his resourcefulness.

Cornishman Jago Randles, 23, has become a TikTok star for his videos in which he creates restaurant-level gourmet meals using just electrical appliances available in his room during his isolation. Titled as “Isolation Kitchen” series, he has cooked up some amazing spread sans oven or a gas stove – using just a coffee maker and steam iron!

As his videos racked in millions of likes and views on the platform, one of them also attracted the attention of the notoriously hard-to-please chef Gordon Ramsay.

The multi-Michelin stars chef, in a duet video which he dubbed as “DYI room service”, wrote: “This looks better than many dishes I’ve had in Hotels!”

As Randles cooked an egg and then some asparagus in a coffee percolator as well as a chicken breast on an iron, it got off to a rocky start with Hell Kitchen’s chef urging to add salt. However, as it progressed, Ramsay was heard in the video saying: “To be honest that looks like some decent food, certainly some of the best food I’ve seen in any hotel.”

His meals are not simply egg on toast or cup noodles but gastronomic feasts including salmon with rice vermicelli and steamed bok choy and ‘sous vide’ bacon-wrapped chicken with a mushroom cream sauce! He even makes a crème brûlée using a tiny whisk.

According to Cornwall Live, the young man was forced to quarantine for two weeks at the Gec Granville Suites Hotel in Vancouver after arriving in Canada to cook at a mountain resort in Whistler, British Columbia.

The hotel too shared many of Randles “creative meals” on their Instagram page and added: “We actually have kitchenette suites with stovetops, so you don‘t have to use the iron and coffee maker to cook your food”.

“I was in the hotel room and I thought, ‘What if I could try cooking bacon on the iron?’ because I wanted a bacon sandwich,” he told TODAY Food on how it all started. Randles added that he started the series because he was very bored quarantining for two weeks all alone.

“A lot of the time I would be either just wanting to eat or be thinking about what food I could cook next and what I could cook well on an iron, because I didn’t have an awful lot else to do other than watch TV. It kept me quite entertained, to be honest,” he added.

Although Randles’ meals look very palatable and delicious, not everyone was been impressed by his efforts. Even though Randles was seen using baking parchment, foil and wrap to protect the appliances many were concerned about hygiene issues.