by Neil Simpson
While working at the Intercontinental Hotel and in his other job at Maxim’s de Paris in London, Gordon spent hours working out which were the capital’s best and most innovative restaurants. He already knew what he would need to learn if he were ever to run one of them. And he wanted to make sure he knew exactly whom he could learn it from. ‘I believe that, if you want to be the best, then you have to work for the best. If you do, there’s no automatic assumption that you will make it. But that’s where you have to start.’
At the top of Gordon’s list as a possible mentor was Leeds-born Marco Pierre White, the man who had made headlines and won awards with the launch of Harvey’s in south London’s then unfashionable Wandsworth. At 25, Marco was only five years older than Gordon, but he was already seen as one of the country’s new generation of super-chefs. And, as soon as Gordon clapped eyes on him, he knew he had found a soul mate. A hero had been born.
‘Marco had long hair. He looked like he’d done ten rounds with Mike Tyson. I thought, Christ, I want to work for that guy.’ Cooking, for a man like that, really could be rock and roll, Gordon decided. It would be worlds away from the pre-heated meats and overcooked sauces that were already starting to drive him mad. But how could he make the move?
In the end, Gordon just rang the normal booking number for Harvey’s, demanded to speak to Marco, spun some lies about his experience and qualifications and was given a few trial shifts where he could try to prove his worth. Looking back, he says he knew he was in the right place from the very first morning in south London – not least because the atmosphere in the kitchen was as tense and exciting as he had hoped for. He says everyone there seemed to have a temper, everyone swore constantly, everyone shouted and screamed at one another. And, while Gordon was at the bottom of the pile and the focus of much of the aggression, he knew immediately that he would thrive on it.
‘The most important thing for a chef is that you’ve got to be able to take a bollocking. The trick is to remember that none of the insults is meant to be personal. Bollocking worked with me. I’ve been slapped and kicked and punched. And when the chef shouted at me, I listened, took it in and said, “Oui, chef.” When I was training, a bollocking made me try harder. At Harvey’s, I took the flak till the cows came home. Marco pushed me as far as possible; it was a test of strength and yes we went to the limit and yes I know it was worth it.’
Gordon stayed at Harvey’s for nearly two long years, working 17-hour days, learning his craft, storing up information and experiences and helping make some of the capital’s freshest, most exciting meals. It was tough, exhausting and the money was lousy. But Gordon loved every minute. ‘For the first time in years I felt secure,’ he said. ‘Good at what I was doing and happy in myself.’ But he still kept his private life and his professional life separate. The kitchen gang used to get together for football games in the afternoons and at weekends – but Gordon was determined to make sure his boss never found out about his past at Rangers. ‘I was terrified that one day Marco might turn around and say, “You were a failed footballer, and now you are a failed chef”, so I kept that part of my life secret.’
Working for a man like Marco Pierre White was never going to be enough for Gordon, though. He wanted to be a man like Marco Pierre White. So both of them knew that after a couple of years he would have to move on. To his credit, Marco had seen the potential in his younger apprentice. He saw how hard the man was prepared to work and how much abuse he was prepared to accept to produce the best possible food. So he decided to help him. As a first step, he put him in touch with the even more legendary Roux brothers.
The Frenchmen, Michel and Albert, had reportedly said that in moving to Britain their life’s mission had been to convert ‘a nation of culinary barbarians into one of gourmets’. By the time Gordon met them they were well on their way. Le Gavroche, their flagship restaurant in Mayfair, had won almost every award going and the brothers were famous for encouraging younger chefs to fulfil their potential through their Continental-style apprenticeship schemes.
‘There was no better or more exciting place in the business to be,’ Gordon said of his nearly 18 months at Le Gavroche. But both he and the Roux brothers knew he had far more still to learn. Michel and Albert were well known for having an amazing eye for spotting talent – and for working out how their proteges could smooth out any rough edges and fulfil their potential. They said Gordon needed to spread his wings and gain international experience among some other grand masters. They said he should head to Paris. Armed with some letters of recommendation, Gordon did just that. At that point, Paris was still the world’s most renowned culinary capital. It was where the giants of the art worked. And it was going to change Gordon’s life.
His first job was at the world-famous Guy Savoy restaurant. But before it began Gordon had time for his first-ever working holiday. He headed south to the ski resort of Isola 2000 in Provence, where he was to live and work at the Hotel Diva. ‘I was at work at 7.30 in the morning to set up service. Then I’d ski from midday till 4pm, then be back in the kitchen from 5.30pm until midnight.’ Little did he know back then that these would be the shortest working hours he would experience for some time.
Back in Paris, Gordon started to learn more about cooking, as well as more about himself. ‘You can never be bored in Paris. It’s a boisterous place and a rude city and the Parisians are incredibly arrogant. I think it is a place that helped to form my character. I found out a lot about myself in Paris and I think I found my soul there.’ He also found a French girlfriend, a tall, dark-haired Parisian who was a waitress at the prestigious George V Hotel. And he found professional inspiration in the elegant and intimate surroundings of the Guy Savoy.
‘One of the many things Guy taught me is that flavour is the most important aspect of a dish,’ Gordon says. ‘I trained my palate in Paris and learned that taste is what should be held in the memory, not what the dish looks like on the plate for the first 30 seconds. People pay big money for food which tastes phenomenal, not just for something which looks pretty when it gets to your table. There has to be much, much more to a top chef than style. The content has to be spot on as well.’
Behind the scenes, things were as manic and angry as they had been in London, though for Gordon there was one key difference. ‘I couldn’t speak a word of French when I arrived there. But it meant, thankfully, that I couldn’t understand a word when I was being yelled at, which was nice.’ As well as learning French – which Gordon lapses into all the time when shouting at his restaurant staff to this day – he also learned a little more about the work ethic required to become a top chef. It is a story he would ultimately tell in his cookbook Kitchen Heaven.
‘When I was training with Guy Savoy I arrived one Friday morning feeling exhausted at the end of a busy week. I made the mistake of telling him so. “What do you mean, tired?” he said. “How many hours did you sleep?” I told him just six. “Six? That’s far too many. By the time you get to 60 you’ll have slept for 15 years. Does that scare you?”
‘“Yes,” I replied.
‘“Well, then, shut the fuck up, sleep for four hours and by the time you reach 60 you’ll only have slept for ten.”’
As a still sleepy commis chef, the first rung of the career ladder for newly trained workers, Gordon was paid one of the lowest wages allowed by the French government – even though he was working in arguably the greatest French restaurant in the world. Like Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman’s characters in the film Moulin Rouge, Gordon and his girlfriend lived in a bedsit on the top floor of a classic tenement block near the Paris Opera. ‘Romantic and, better still, cheap’ was how he described it at the time.
On his one weekly day off Gordon got a second job in the neighbourhood. He served coffee and emptied ashtrays at La Bastille, the grand old cafe opposite the Opera. But, while the tips could sometimes be generous, survival was still pretty hard. Every now and then, Gordon recalls, he would empty his pockets and wonder about what might have been. He reckons
he was making a maximum of around £100 a week when some of his former teammates at Rangers were not only collecting £5,000 but also enjoying the adulation of thousands of fans. ‘It was hard and it hurt to think of it,’ he says. ‘But I became even more determined not to fail again.’
His determination to learn and to carry on paying his dues was also as strong as ever. So he left Guy Savoy to work for another celebrated Frenchman: the Michelin star-holding Joel Robuchon, who had recently been named ‘Chef of the Century’ in Paris. And Gordon admits he had a very bad start. On his first day in Robuchon’s kitchen, the chef threw a plate of langoustine ravioli at Gordon’s head – because his foie gras sauce had spilled and the presentation was not up to scratch. ‘I was 24 then – what could I do?’ Gordon later said of the incident. ‘Should I have thought that I was too good to take that? I wanted to learn from this guy, he was the best chef in the world and that was the price you pay. My ears got burned by the cabbage and I had all the stuff in my hair but I just said, “I’ll make you another one right away, chef.” I certainly didn’t start crying on the phone to my mum. I just got on with it.’
Back in Britain, the powers that be had started to notice Gordon – and they approved of his desire to learn from the masters in France. He won a minor award as a top young apprentice and headed back to London to collect the prize and, more importantly, the prize money. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to supplement his subsistence wages in France and it allowed him to stay there for another year. It was, he says, time well spent. ‘The two and half years I had in France were the most important cooking years of my life,’ he said later. ‘The French have cooking at the forefront of their psyche and I was encouraged to feel the same. I built some fantastic foundations for my future in those years.’
And still the learning went on. Desperate for money rather than big kitchen experience, Gordon took Marco Pierre White’s advice again and agreed to a well-paid private commission. He headed out to live on a yacht as personal chef to Reg Grundy, the Australian television magnate famous for giving the world Neighbours and Kylie Minogue. They sailed around the Mediterranean from the chic ports of Sardinia and Sicily to Corsica and Cannes and even crossed the Atlantic to the glorious British Virgin Islands and Antigua. As a crewmember, you can be fantastically busy when the boss, his family, friends or colleagues are on board. But at other times you can live like a king, get a great tan and experience the good life.
The job gave Gordon the diving bug, a sport he still loves today. It also helped him repay some of his debts, showed him how the other half lived and made him even more determined to become his own boss and make his own money. As soon as possible.
What he knew he wanted more than anything at this point was a restaurant of his own. A place in London where he could take on the masters and prove he had learned all their lessons. A place where he could make a real name for himself.
But, when you are a boy from a council estate in Glasgow who has had to wait at table just to afford your rent, it is hard to see how this kind of dream can become a reality. Setting up a London restaurant could cost hundreds of thousands of pounds even then. Gordon knew he had to try to call in some favours. He would beg and borrow the money. If it came to it, maybe he would even steal.
Interestingly, bearing in mind how volatile their relationship was to become in the years ahead, it was Marco Pierre White who came up trumps and helped Gordon into his first restaurant. A site had become available at 11 Park Walk, in Fulham. It was set on a side street off the noisy, traffic-filled Fulham Road. And it had bad vibes and a tricky history. Many a restaurant had opened there and soon closed after failing to attract enough paying customers. Big hopes in that corner of west London had often led to big losses – which is one reason why the plot was vacant yet again back in early 1993.
Everyone in the industry knew it would take something special to go against the trend and defy history. Could 26-year-old Gordon provide the X factor? Marco had lined up some other financial backers to help raise the funds for the venture, and Gordon himself borrowed as heavily as the banks would allow him. Everything he had, and a lot that he didn’t, would be going on the line over the next 12 months.
Picking a name for a new restaurant is never easy. But Gordon and the team got that job done quickly. They wanted a single word that suggested health, freshness and something very slightly different. They reckoned they had it when someone suggested the name of a vegetable that was also a colour. Gordon’s favourite colour, as it turned out – Aubergine.
Even Gordon himself says now that he’s not sure exactly what it was that made the place such a big hit. In fitting out the room, he and his partners had tried to make it as airy as possible and give it a Mediterranean feel. When it came to the food Gordon’s keyword was simplicity – and, years ahead of the rest of the world, his twin aims were to use as little fat in the dishes as possible and to keep the flavours as light and natural as he could. ‘People come here for a three-course meal but I don’t want them to feel heavy or overly full at the end,’ he said. What he did want, though, was to come up with a personal signature. ‘Over the years I have begged for as many menus from other places as possible to try and work out what they were all about. Now I want my cooking to be able to say: “That’s me on the plate.”’
One way he set himself apart was by taking simple, surprisingly cheap ingredients and somehow turning them into something special. ‘How many London restaurants have mackerel on the menu?’ he asked once when trying to make the point. His choices – of eight dishes for the main course, five of them fish – changed every three months, though what had turned into his signature dish, ‘roast seabass with braised salsify and jus vanilla’, tended to keep its place, as loyal customers asked for it even when it wasn’t available.
The one thing that was always there was Gordon himself. ‘People spend big money for a meal for two to know that I’m cooking the food,’ he said. ‘My chefs don’t want to see me upstairs drinking Champagne. People don’t wait for two months to eat cock-up food that hasn’t been checked by me personally. It has to be perfect.’
To make sure it was, he tended to arrive at the restaurant at 8.30 in the morning to look at the day’s menus, check the fresh food that was coming in, go over the books and the paperwork from the night before and deal with any management issues that needed tackling. Then came the food itself, as he got going on the lunch and then the dinner service. Most nights he would still be at 11 Park Walk nearly 18 hours after he had first arrived – and less than seven before he would be back in the kitchen to do it all again. It was relentless, exhausting, but exhilarating. At just 26, Gordon was head chef in his own London restaurant. He was living his dream. And the world was starting to notice both what he cooked and what he looked like.
Earning recognition for his food was the most important thing for him. And Fay Maschler, the celebrated restaurant critic of the Evening Standard, was one of the first to give him the seal of approval – something she might have regretted years later when Gordon turned on her in one of his periodic attacks on the critics. ‘Certain dishes are straight copies of the masters but come excitingly reasonably priced. It’s couture cooking at off-the-peg prices,’ she wrote back in 1994 in a long, positive review. Perhaps equally important to Gordon’s vanity was the sudden interest in his appearance. And he decided he might as well milk it as much as possible to get extra publicity for his restaurant.
‘Gordon Ramsay is 6ft 2in, beefy, with natural fair hair and electric blue eyes. He talks about deep-sea diving, squash and working out. He doesn’t smoke nor, interestingly, does he drink. Unless you have seen him in his chef’s apron you would never guess that he cooks, or that he is about to become London’s most chic chef,’ wrote Pauline Peters, also in the Evening Standard. ‘He is about as opposite to his mentor, the pallid and volatile Marco Pierre White, as it is possible to be.’
Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph said Gordon looked more like ‘a sportsman in fancy dre
ss’ with ‘muscles straining against his chef’s whites’, rather than the traditional image of a well-fed restaurateur.
It hardly matters now whether it was Fay Maschler’s review of his food or Pauline Peters’s description of his looks that did the trick. The phones at Aubergine had started to ring – and for a long time they hardly stopped. After his six-year apprenticeship, Gordon had become an over night sensation and his momentum seemed unstoppable. For ten straight months, he says, there was hardly ever an empty table at dinner – and one night he had 75 people on his waiting list for a restaurant that had already filled every one of its 45 seats. Long before eBay had been invented, some clever people were trying to cash in on Aubergine’s sudden success by making Saturday-night bookings and placing adverts in London papers saying the reservations were now on sale to the highest bidders. Even his mother, who wanted to turn up and surprise him on his birthday during one of her rare forays into London, had to hang on the phone and wait for a cancellation.
Throughout all this, Gordon was thriving. But he admits his personal life was suffering. He split up with his latest girlfriend within six months of the restaurant opening when she refused to put up with his long hours. ‘It was tough but it was inevitable,’ he explains. ‘In this job you have to be a little selfish. I can’t take three nights off a week to sit with her or take her out to dinner. I can’t be anywhere else but in my restaurant.’
Even on the very rare nights when he was elsewhere, he was worried sick. One of his business partners wanted to take him on a trip to America for the Italy versus Brazil World Cup Final in 1994, but Gordon only agreed to go if he could fly to LA and back in a day. ‘It was great but I couldn’t really settle,’ he says. ‘The whole time I was nervous about what was happening back in London.’
And, by the end of that year, Gordon had a lot more than just Aubergine to worry about. Always a man in a hurry, he was ready to sign a host of other deals to make his name, build his empire and earn some cash. One restaurant had never seemed enough for his heroes like Marco Pierre White, the Roux brothers, Raymond Blanc, Jean-Christophe Novelli and Nico Ladenis. So it wouldn’t be enough for him either.