Can’t stand the heat?

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The New Yorker has a detailed, insightful profile of Gordon Ramsay, the British chef who was introduced to most Americans while he tortured apprentice chefs on “Hell’s Kitchen,” a “reality” show.

Now he’s opened a restaurant in Manhattan, one of the toughest restaurant towns anywhere. Bill Buford, who wrote “Heat” after spending six months in Mario Batali’s kitchen at Babbo, profiles Ramsay.

Gordon Ramsay, the only chef in London honored with three stars by the Guide Michelin, is not a monster, Buford starts, charitably. One sentence in, and you’re already braced for him to sink his incisors into the pale neck of a salad boy.

Ramsay, who is also the host of three uniquely adversarial in-your-face television shows (“Hell’s Kitchen” in the United States; “The F Word” and “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares” in the United Kingdom), is not the most abusive person running a restaurant. And although a British undercover documentary once captured him in mid-torrent, profanities flowing in a diatribe directed at a young intern, earning Ramsay the title of one of the country’s “most unbearable bosses,” the people who work for him show a tenacious, irrational-seeming loyalty verging on love. But he does get angry, helplessly and uncontrollably angry—not an earthly anger but something darker—and has trouble knowing how to stop.

Oh, my.

The rest is worth a read, if you’re at all interested in the world of big-time celebrity chefs and what happens when they start spending more time in front of cameras than they do in front of stoves.

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