by Neil Simpson
‘The pictures are nice and glossy but what use are all the recipes for posh nosh like pheasant and quails’ eggs and asparagus? Where does he think we are going to get that kind of stuff? Down at the local Spar?’ asked another unhappy reader.
Despite the criticism, the book won the Glenfiddich Award as Food Book of the Year and that gave Gordon enough confidence to break the habit of a lifetime and take a holiday. He was going to leave Aubergine, the other restaurants and all his business affairs behind for a couple of days and go away with Tana. He had a question for her.
For her part, Tana had a feeling about what was coming. ‘Everything had changed for both of us when we had started going out and I think we both very quickly knew that this was it. There was no point in hanging around.’ So, in the South of France, Gordon proposed. Tana admits it was hardly the most romantic of events. ‘He just said, “It’s such a nice relationship. Let’s get married.” I said “Yes” straight away.’
Neither wanted a long engagement and they set a date just five months ahead. On the big day, Tana was just 21 while Gordon was 29. The ceremony took place in a tiny church in Chelsea and they were then driven over to the Cafe Royal in Regent Street for the reception. ‘It was the last Saturday before Christmas, it was cold and frosty, all the lights were up and all the shoppers stopped to look when the wedding cars arrived,’ recalls Tana. ‘The whole thing was just magical.’
Married life, however, was not exactly conventional. They had moved into a top-floor loft apartment in a converted school building in far from glamorous Stockwell, in south London. There, in the couple’s bedroom, sat a giant stuffed frog. ‘Did that used to belong to one of you as a child?’ a friend once asked Tana when he saw it. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘It’s Gordon’s. He bought it on our honeymoon.’ And, having proved himself to be one of the least romantic men around, Gordon said that while he and Tana spoke on the phone several times every day they hardly ever saw each other during the week. And he admits that he would frequently fall asleep on their Sunday dates at the cinema or in rival restaurants.
‘Tana is so patient, she understands that I have to put my life on hold for this,’ he said when asked about how married life fitted in with the demands of Aubergine and his other businesses. ‘I have no social life, really, but I am building for our future together.’
What he didn’t know back then was that within little more than a year that future would be on the edge of collapse. At 31, he had achieved so much. And it suddenly looked as if he was going to throw it all away.
FIVE
STARTING AGAIN
The crunch came in early 1998 when Gordon Ramsay and Aubergine were firmly established as serious players on the London restaurant scene. Both the man and the restaurant were seen as potential money-makers. And people were lining up to get a piece of them. Gordon was being swamped with job offers, business propositions and promotional opportunities. As a hot young chef, he could put his name to anything from pots and pans to frozen peas. He knew he could cash in, spread himself as thinly as required and make as much money as he could in the shortest possible time.
Or he could play the long game. He could continue to develop his craft. He could become more professional, more disciplined, more demanding. He could win that third Michelin star before his 33rd birthday, setting a new record in the process. He was convinced that if he stayed focused he could become one of the greatest and most influential chefs in the world. But, just as Gordon decided that this was the route he should take, everyone else tried to persuade him differently. Desperate though he was to stay in the kitchen, his bosses and backers all seemed to want him in the boardroom.
When Marco Pierre White bowed out of Aubergine after helping Gordon raise the funds he required to set it up, a private company became one of the largest shareholders in the venture. It was A-Z Restaurants, a mainly Italian-owned catering company, and for years everyone was happy with the way Gordon’s business was being run. The money men could hardly complain about their chef’s level of commitment or his award-winning professional achievements. But A-Z Restaurants had expansion plans that threatened to change everything.
The bosses had decided that the international restaurant scene was ripe for rationalisation. They felt a single winning formula could be created and relaunched in a series of different locations. If the company didn’t get the funds for this sort of venture from a new partner, there was a plan to float the firm on the stock exchange. Either way, it looked like a chain of Ramsay-inspired eateries was on the cards. There was talk of Aubergine Paris, Aubergine New York and Aubergine Bermuda being rolled out. Even a range of Aubergine Pizzerias for British high streets. Gordon, not surprisingly, was horrified.
‘I would have had to replicate everything at Aubergine as a concept in catering,’ he said. ‘But restaurants of this nature are personal, not concept. My choice was to be an individual. I don’t want to produce clones.’ To do so could have made him rich. At one point, a potential partner came forward with an offer to buy out the company’s current owners, valuing Gordon’s stake in the firm at £1.5 million. In cash.
But the man who had been forced to ask a charity for help when he needed to buy chef’s knives and whites for his college course says money was the last thing to motivate him. Fed up with spending so much time in business meetings with A-Z’s owners, he resigned as a director of the company while he looked around to see if he might prefer to run another restaurant elsewhere – though he had no intention of leaving his treasured Aubergine. Or at least he hadn’t until he saw how much pressure his friend and colleague Marcus Wareing seemed to be under at L’Oranger.
The company wanted Marcus to sign a four-year contract there to reassure potential investors about the company’s medium-term stability. But Marcus wasn’t keen on the direction the company was taking either, so he refused. At which point, he says, he was sacked. Gordon resigned in protest and all hell broke loose.
During Gordon’s contractual week-long notice period, his staff at both Aubergine and L’Oranger were horrified at what was going on. Far from living in fear with what ITV had called ‘Britain’s worst boss’, they were in fact hugely supportive of the chef who had taught, given and inspired them so much. They wanted to stay with him. So, when Gordon finally walked through the restaurant’s doors for the last time, an extraordinary 46 of them joined him. ‘Overnight, Ramsay has effectively closed down two of London’s most celebrated restaurants,’ wrote Times journalist Susan Chenery. They stayed closed for several weeks as the owners tried to recruit new workers, and customers decided that if neither Gordon nor Marcus was going to be in the kitchens they didn’t want to hold on to their bookings.
For Gordon, these were tense, difficult weeks. He felt a huge responsibility to the 46 staff who had left good jobs to support him – and who wouldn’t be able to last long without a replacement wage. But what could he do next? Psychologists say that in times of crisis people tend to think big or think small. Those who think small batten down the hatches, look for the safest options and lick their wounds in private. People who think big decide that if life has messed everything up they might as well make one more gamble and to hell with the consequences. Gordon was thinking big. Aubergine had been a fantastic opportunity and he had made it work. He knew he could do it again. But this time he wanted a place with his own name above the door.
Marcus joined him as he continued to scour London for ideas, possible premises and generous partners. What inspired them the most was the site of a famous but recently closed restaurant, La Tante Claire, in Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea. La Tante Claire had enjoyed a glorious 21-year history and won three Michelin stars under chef Pierre Koffman before being moved to new premises in the Berkeley Hotel in Knightsbridge. French-born Pierre was frequently called ‘the chef’s chef’ and tended to come top of the list when professionals were asked to pick their dream kitchen team for a fantasy restaurant. He, his restaurant and his reputation would be a hard act to follow. But Gord
on and Marcus decided to go for it. They would do whatever it took to buy the site, go hell for leather to get it ready and reopen very soon under a new name: Gordon Ramsay’s name.
Raising the money for a venture like this was the first major challenge and both Gordon and Tana were prepared to gamble everything they had on its success. Every penny of their joint savings went into the fighting fund and they got a group of estate agents round to value their flat. Picking the keenest-looking of the bunch, Gordon told him to sell it as fast as possible to provide even more ready cash. He and Tana had agreed they would go back to renting for as long as it took to get the new restaurant off the ground. Meanwhile, Tana’s dad, Chris, got on the phone to find other backers and helped set up a massive loan from Bank of Scotland.
From the very start, a huge amount of money and hope was going to be riding on this deal – and the pressure started to show straight away. Within months of trying to secure the premises and the finance, Gordon went from 15 to 17 stone as comfort eating and lack of exercise took their toll. ‘I let myself go because I was totally possessed and totally obsessed with getting the place right,’ he says.
Once he had got the keys to the old La Tante Claire building, almost £250,000 was spent on the refit, and among other items used to decorate the rooms were mirrors and ornaments he and Tana had found on trips to New York and Venice. Those people who today dismiss the man as a television star rather than a genuine restaurateur need only look back at the kitchen work he did then to see just how wrong they are. Obsessed by creating a newer, better menu, the former footballer threw himself into the intricacies of food. He went back to basics in the early hours, recreating purees, sauces and soups so that his next menu would be uniquely his. The man brought up on egg and chips was putting ‘pot au feu of pigeon served in a cepe bouillon with chou farci’ through its paces until it tasted as good as it looked.
‘Gordon is obsessed and he can – and does – talk about a simple cooking stock such as vegetable nage for hours on end,’ said food expert Thane Prince, who watched Gordon at work on his new recipes. She, and everyone else, also saw Gordon’s extreme impatience as the opening night of the restaurant named after him approached. ‘I am incredibly excited, the feeling I have for this place is just massive and I just want to look forward now, to get in my kitchen, shut the door and concentrate,’ he said with days to go.
But, when the big moment came, it all very nearly ended in disaster. ‘We had 52 people in the restaurant and the air-conditioning went down in the kitchen. I just couldn’t afford to close. So we had to cook in temperatures of 150 degrees – people were dropping like flies. It was absolutely horrendous, one of the worst nights of my entire life,’ he said later. But it was also a personal and a professional triumph.
The big gamble had paid off. Gordon Ramsay the restaurant was attracting all the customers who had been loyal to the chef for the past five years. People wanted to be seen there and, with the air-conditioning working again, Gordon could focus on new menus to surprise them.
Meanwhile, things were not going so well back at Aubergine and L’Oranger. At one point, it was reported that the owners were losing £15,000 a week by keeping them closed while they tried to recover from seeing Gordon and Marcus disappear. When they reopened a month later, after cancelling an unprecedented three months of future bookings, the owners said takings never approached their former highs. The magic and the loyal, high-spending customers had gone. Someone had to pay for it and it looked as if that someone was going to be Gordon.
A High Court writ arrived on his desk early the following year. He was being sued for an estimated £1.5 million and his reputation was about to take a battering. As well as complaining about the financial losses, A-Z Restaurants had some other allegations to make. Most shocking was that Gordon and Marcus had made a ‘night-time raid’ on L’Oranger the day after Marcus had been sacked – and that in the course of it they did £30,000 worth of damage. As well as sabotage and theft, Gordon in particular was accused of breaking the terms of his old employment contract by ringing up some of the group’s key staff and asking them to resign alongside him.
‘Every aspect of this case will be contested all the way,’ Gordon declared from his new restaurant when news of the massive writ broke. But he never got his day in court. Just before the hearing was to begin, both sides agreed to settle their differences – on terms that have never been revealed. ‘I can’t go into great detail because every time I mention it I get inundated with horses’ heads on the doorstep,’ Gordon joked afterwards about the agreement he had made with his former bosses. Anyway, by this point he had several other, more pressing events to deal with. One of them was good, one of them was bad and one would take his life in an entirely new direction.
The good news was the birth of his first daughter, Megan, which took place while Gordon was a long way from the maternity ward – of which a lot more later. But, as he and Tana had wanted to start a family as soon as possible after getting married, he was over the moon to be a father so quickly. And he was determined to make a better job of it than his own dad had.
Gordon senior, who had disappeared to Spain nearly a decade earlier, had only rarely been heard from since. Gordon’s mother, Helen, had remarried, and Gordon says her new husband, Jimmy, had proved to be a better man from day one. It was obvious by 1998 that the Ramsay family was getting on just fine without any echoes from the past. But, having just become a father himself, Gordon found he could no longer stop thinking about his own father, and of what might have been.
‘I began to long for him to meet Tana and Megan and I kept wondering what he would make of it all. Would he at last admit his son was a success – even in a profession for which he had no respect? I knew I wanted to hear him say just once, “Well done, son, you’ve done great. You made the right decision all those years ago. Who needs football?” But I was giving up hope of ever having that conversation.’ Until one day, out of the blue, it looked as if all those wishes might be granted.
‘I suddenly got a call from Dad asking to see me – he was back in England to see a doctor and was staying in Margate in Kent.’ They arranged to meet up the following week, but when Gordon arrived he could hardly recognise the old man standing in front of him. ‘I was shocked at how much older and frailer he looked. He was in such a pitiable state that I felt more sorrow for him than anger. We went for a walk along the pier and I told him that he had to sort himself out and try and make a living for himself. He was 53 years old, was effectively living out of the back of a van and owned nothing in the whole world.’
Trying to recreate the past, the pair went to a cafe by the pier for a full English breakfast. And straight away the old tensions began to show. ‘I asked for toast instead of fried bread and Dad told me not to be such a snob. I tried to tell him about the kind of fat that places used for fried bread but he wasn’t interested. We were in different worlds.’ But father and son still parted as close to being friends as they had been since the days they had sat quietly fishing on the banks of the Tay.
‘It was as if we had resolved something that day. Finally, we had begun to feel close again,’ says Gordon. ‘I gave him £1,000 to put a deposit down on a flat to rent and we arranged that he would come to London the following month, not only to meet Tana and his grandchild but also to eat for the first time at my restaurant. The last thing I remember is looking back after we had said goodbye and feeling sorry for him. He was staring after me, crying.’
The big day when Gordon senior was due to arrive was set for 25 January 1999 and Gordon says he was as thrilled and excited about it as a child waiting for Christmas. ‘I just wanted to see him sitting at the table with a smile on his face. Even if he had sat there and got pissed I would have forgiven him.’
But it was never to be. Gordon senior had a massive heart attack on New Year’s Eve and died within 24 hours. Anger and frustration bubbles up in his son’s mind to this day. ‘No one should die at just 53. I am so angry at him
for dying so young and for not looking after himself. And I couldn’t believe I would never now get the fatherly seal of approval I so longed for. I had managed to have that one frank talk with him in Margate before he died. But I really wanted to ask him much more. Was he relieved about what I had done? Was he proud? I never got the chance. I got the feeling of unfinished business that will probably be with me for the rest of my life.’
Gordon remembers helping carry his father’s coffin into the church on the day of his funeral. ‘Stay strong, stay strong, stay strong,’ he mumbled to himself as the whole family suffered with the mixed emotions of guilt, anger, loss, love and, perhaps, relief.
When 25 January came, the table for two where Gordon’s dad and his new girlfriend were to have eaten sat empty as a silent tribute to the man Gordon had both loved and feared, respected and despised.
As well as never getting to meet Tana or Megan or eat his son’s food, Gordon senior was also to miss the other event which was to reshape Gordon’s life that spring: his debut on national television. A production company had approached him more than a year earlier about a project they had been planning for some time. Inspired by an explosion of interest in cooking, the company wanted to show what really happened inside a high-pressure, high-class commercial kitchen. They wanted fly-on-the-wall cameras to follow the life of a personable, charismatic, possibly even volatile chef to show diners what was really happening on the other side of the kitchen doors.
But which chef to choose? Marco Pierre White was one obvious choice as his own roots in a broken home in Leeds gave him the street cred that the producers were looking for. Some of the older names were also in the frame, though the aim was to introduce viewers to a new generation of chefs rather than rely on those from the past. The likes of Gary Rhodes, Rick Stein and the heart-throb Jean-Christophe Novelli also went under the microscope.