Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen is the worst. It's boring.

Do we really need to introduce Mr. Ramsay? He is a protégé of legendary British chef Marco Pierre White. He has won three Michelin stars at his flagship London restaurant, Gordon Ramsay. He is also a host known for his vulgar remarks on numerous TV shows, including “Hell's Kitchen,” “Kitchen Nightmares,” and “MasterChef.”

St. Louis fine dining connoisseurs will also be familiar with the Four Seasons' eighth-floor dining room and rooftop deck, overlooking downtown, the Mississippi River, and the Gateway Arch. The restaurant opened with the hotel in 2008 as Cielo Restaurant & Bar. Under successive executive chefs Fabrizio Chenardi and Gian Nicola Colucci, the elegant Italian restaurant has grown into one of the area's best kitchens.

In 2018, Cielo was replaced by Cinder House, a Brazilian-inspired restaurant from acclaimed St. Louis chef and restaurateur Gerald Kraft. Cinder House's wood-fired cuisine was a hit when it opened, and the restaurant was gaining momentum pre-pandemic with the introduction of the Diaz Room tasting menu, Kraft's most ambitious project since closing Niche, his finest restaurant to date.

Surprisingly, the hotel's background has as much to do with Ramsay's Kitchen as the chef's background. Of course, I didn't expect to see Ramsay prowling the dining room, sprinkling F-bombs with flakes of Maldon sea salt as a finishing touch. I expected a minimum of hospitality at the Four Seasons, but over three visits, the service ranged from distracted to surly. The dining room and bar looked much the same as they did at Cielo and Cinder House, but the atmosphere that turns local diners into pampered guests for a few hours was gone.

Maybe the Four Seasons is just absorbing the energy of the restaurant. Then again, I never expected Ramsay's Kitchen to rival the fine dining of Gordon Ramsay's Restaurant, but if the latter restaurant is major league, Ramsay's Kitchen is single-A ball, the lower tier of single-A where the less-than-prospects toil.

The St. Louis Ramsay's Kitchen, which opened in April, is the chain's fifth location, joining locations in Boston, Las Vegas, Oklahoma and the Chicago suburb of Naperville, Ill. The menu is similar at each location, with some differences — for example, the Boston location has a raw fish bar, while the St. Louis location does not.

But overall, the Ramsay's Kitchen concept suffers from the same inherent flaws as two other culinary heavyweights St. Louis hotels have imported in recent years: the relatively short-lived Grand Tavern by David Burke at the Angad Arts Hotel in Grand Center and Casa Don Alfonso at the Ritz-Carlton St. Louis in Clayton. Ramsay's Kitchen is less pretentious than those restaurants (the most pretentious thing here is the insistence on calling the tap water “house water”), but it still assumes that we who live in Flyover Country are anxiously awaiting the arrival of exotic delicacies like tuna tartare and jumbo crab cakes.

These are two of six appetizers on the dinner menu (which also includes fluffy parker rolls, which you'll need to order in place of bread). The tuna tartare is surrounded by ribbons of avocado, but your eye is drawn to the plate's generous dollop of sour cream. Both accompaniments come with a heady garlic-chile soy sauce that helps to soften the taste of the tuna, which is saltier than the ocean it was caught in.

The crab cakes are appealing in their simplicity: large, plump pieces of crab meat served on a bed of herb aioli and accompanied by a mixed-green salad. They have minimal filler; they barely hold together as a cake. But once you get past the initial sweetness of the crab, you're left yearning for another flavor; the herbs in the aioli are more subliminal suggestion than condiment.

At $27 and $30, respectively, you'd expect more subtle flavors from the tuna tartare and crab cakes, no matter which chef the restaurant bears its name. Another appetizer, sticky cauliflower, is more affordable at $16. The crunchy bites are tempting, but the sweet “Korean barbecue” glaze shows as much enthusiasm for the many facets of Korean cuisine as a consultant's PowerPoint presentation on 2016's hottest restaurant trends.

I can add “spectacular failure” to the list of things I didn't expect from a new Four Seasons restaurant. Still, audacious failure would have been preferable to this boring menu, generic hotel fare with celebrity-chef twists.

The main course of smoked chicken had a definite smoky flavor, but not enough to overpower the overcooked white meat and the bland, lumpy red bean and bacon ragout. The crispy skinned salmon had tender flesh beneath the advertised crisp skin, but the expected crackling from the lemon vinaigrette and chimichurri sauce was lost in the mild cauliflower puree.

My dinner companions and I sat bolt upright when our server brought over Ramsay's Kitchen fish and chips, a big slab of deep-fried haddock atop thick-sliced, triple-cooked potatoes. The subtle but unmistakable sweetness of the batter led us to decide to share our fair-fried favorite rather than the battered fish. The potatoes were perfect in texture, but lacked any salt or other seasoning.

Yes, Ramsay's Kitchen serves Ramsay's signature Beef Wellington. Yes, if you're already spending money on dinner here, you should order it. The beef, encased in golden puff pastry, is a beautiful medium-rare, a temperature the kitchen mandates for this dish, and the mushroom duxelles in the crust and the red wine demi-glace on the plate give the tender meat some much-needed dignity. Still, for my $69 main course, I wanted something fancier than the unseasoned potatoes (puréed this time) and glazed root vegetables that accompanied my beef Wellington.

The beef Wellington is good, as is the RK Burger from the lunch menu: two smashed patties smothered in American cheese and mayo. For $23, you expect more than just good food. Restaurants at the Four Seasons are obviously expensive, but with this hotel's reputation, celebrity chef or not, you expect the restaurant to be impressive enough that you don't have to count every dish every time you order.

“Great” is not the word that comes to mind when you think of Gordon Ramsay, and this restaurant is especially reprehensible because it is more likely than Cielo or Cinder House to draw diners to the Four Seasons who wouldn't normally shell out hundreds of dollars for dinner.

Another four letter word that doesn't require a beep is “pass.”