by Neil Simpson
But it was only when the producers first heard about Gordon that they knew they had hit the jackpot. Back then, he had won his first batch of awards and was desperately hungry for more. He was the ex-professional footballer, the boy from the ugly Glasgow council estate who was making some of the most exquisite food in London. And he was under a hell of a lot of pressure.
When the producers first came over to discuss the project, Gordon was still at Aubergine in Fulham. It was booming, but Gordon was still having sleepless nights about the money everyone had borrowed to set it up, and about the famously fickle restaurant trade. Celebrities and every other type of diner were keeping the tables filled for every lunch and dinner service. But Gordon knew there were no guarantees that a rival restaurant wouldn’t make some headlines and steal them all away overnight.
Friends and colleagues said Gordon was crazy to let the cameras in on his life. But at 31 he thought he had no choice. Any publicity was good publicity, he believed. So he signed on the dotted line. His life was going to be public property like never before.
Channel 4 was overjoyed. ‘We chose Gordon because he’s the best chef in Britain and because he makes great television,’ a spokesman told the Mail on Sunday just before the series was aired. What they had loved most about him during filming was that he was the classic good-looking, angry young man, full of passion, contradictions and surprises – a genius chef with hooligan tendencies. Better still, he didn’t care if all of it was captured on camera.
When the show’s producers looked at the early tapes, they knew straight away what the series should be called: Boiling Point. Shown over nearly two months, it covered Gordon’s final days at Aubergine as well as the high-stress opening of Gordon Ramsay in Chelsea. As promised, it also opened the door on the reality of life in a kitchen and on the take-no-prisoners style of this particular chef. Gordon was shown yelling and swearing viciously at almost every member of his kitchen team from the moment the opening credits had ended. ‘Episode One ended with an employee cycling away in tears after being fired, Ramsay muttering: “I don’t give a shit,” as he went. For Episode Three, a special occasion in which the president of Michelin visited the restaurant, Ramsay rose to the occasion and wheeled out the c-word,’ was how one newspaper summed it up.
Throw in some gratuitous insults of the people who supplied the restaurant with food, Gordon’s extraordinary fury when he found out a turbot had been overcooked by 30 seconds and his relentless demands for better work, and a television phenomenon was born. ‘Every dish, every meal, every day has to be perfection’ became Gordon’s mantra on the show – repeated endlessly and with an ever-increasing choice of key adjectives in almost every episode. ‘Is your brain in your fucking arse, you fucking fat bastard?’ he had screamed, to give one example from the first show. ‘You’re going to lose your job, dick-head,’ he crowed in the next. ‘What about opening your big French eyes, arsehole?’ he roared, rounding things off nicely.
What also made headlines was Gordon’s uncompromising attitude to the food his staff were creating. Any imperfections and it was thrown back at them – sometimes literally. Whole platefuls, and often the plates themselves, were flung into the bin every evening. It was like no kitchen viewers had ever seen before.
‘The man is clearly an ogre and rarely has television witnessed anybody being so vile to their staff,’ said one reviewer.
Others found they had an even stronger reaction. ‘Shortly after watching Boiling Point, about Britain’s most brilliant and furious young chef, I had to go out for a walk, just to cool down. I was seething with directionless rage, catching it off Ramsay, whose profanities tumble out of his gob in a hailstorm of abuse, firing off invective which seems to be both deeply personal and yet random, as if the whole world needs bollocking all the time,’ wrote Charles Jennings, television reviewer of the Observer.
And readers of the tabloids were getting pretty much the same message – though in shorter words they could tailor to their own purposes. Gordon says a group of brickies, scaffolders and other workmen taking their lunch breaks on London’s Tottenham Court Road took to shouting: ‘Table Nine, you fucking arsehole!’ whenever they saw him heading down the road to work, for example.
Long famous for his four-course meals, Gordon had a new trademark: his liberal use of four-letter words. He tried to laugh off the criticism, saying he was using the language of the industry and had nothing to apologise for. But not everyone agreed.
Viewers had flooded the broadcasting watchdog the Independent Television Commission with complaints about both the language and the events in Boiling Point. Gordon’s ‘persistent use of the f-word’ triggered most of the complaints but, as the ITC explained, ‘Some viewers also felt that scenes in which he bullied his staff and indulged in unhygienic kitchen practices gave the impression that such behaviour was acceptable.’
The complaint about strong language was the first to be rejected, however. Attempts by Channel 4 to bleep out the worst of the language had not worked, the report said, because ‘Strong language was indivisible from Ramsay’s excitable and aggressive persona at work’. The ITV ruled that Channel 4’s strong warning about what was to come at the start of each show should have alerted any sensitive viewers. It also dismissed the broader complaints about what went on in Gordon’s kitchens because ‘No encouragement was given to regard Ramsay’s behaviour as normal or acceptable’.
While some may have seen a statement such as this as a pretty strong insult, Gordon said he was just pleased to be able to carry on as before. But, before he could do so, he had to face some fire from his peers. David Wood, chief executive of the Hotel and Cater ing International Management Association, said the ITC wasn’t the only organisation being inundated with complaints about Gordon’s onscreen antics. ‘I am getting phone calls from parents saying their children are no longer going to become chefs,’ he said. ‘There are so many positive portrayals of chefs but Ramsay pushes it all down the pan. I wish he were still in football. Then we could send him off.’
Anne Walker, managing director of catering recruitment company Springboard UK, said, ‘At a college last week, students were saying that they were so horrified by what they had seen that they were no longer sure that this was the kind of industry they wanted to go into.’
After dealing with Gordon, some existing workers found they couldn’t get out of the industry fast enough. In fact, in the summer of 1999, Gordon was actually arrested for allegedly beating up one of his staff – 22-year-old pastry chef Nathan Thomas. The row, of all things, had begun over the shape of a banana parfait.
‘Ramsay kept going on about it not being ball-shaped enough,’ Nathan told the police. ‘He just went berserk. When I said I was quitting, he went mad, telling me I was ungrateful. He’s a bully. A genius, but a monster.’
Police confirmed the arrest and Ramsay was bailed to appear at Chelsea police station the following month. Fortunately, by then, all sides had accepted that it was a storm in a restaurant teacup and the case, with all charges, was dropped. Gordon’s tough-guy reputation, however, had moved up another gear.
One final person was ready to speak out against the way Gordon was acting and the language he was using in 1999: his mother Helen. ‘She rang me up and told me that my language is appalling. I said, “Mum, you should have been sat in the dressing room at Rangers when we were losing 2–0.” When I’m working I get upset and I tried to explain that to her. All I am using is the language you hear in every kitchen and she does seem to accept that. Everyone swears in kitchens if they want to produce the best food. If a kitchen is silent and everyone says “please” and “thank you”, then you’d never hit the heights. I’m focused on producing the best and, if swearing makes that happen, then I’ll keep on doing it.’
The good news for Gordon was that his diners seemed to like the fact that their food was being prepared with passion. As its popularity grew, the restaurant became a fixture of the gossip columns and saw a near-endless stre
am of famous names pass through the doors, sometimes a little worse for wear from drink. And the rest of the world had also started to wake up to the Gordon Ramsay phenomenon – though the man himself continued to take it all in his stride.
‘There was one American critic who demanded a free meal for a review and said she could only come at 8.30pm that Friday night,’ he recalls. ‘The restaurant was fully booked and the critic refused to accept that paying punters who may have made their plans months ahead could not be excluded just to make room for her and her companion.’
In the end, Gordon said he could offer the critic the table she wanted at 8.30pm on the Saturday night instead. What he ‘forgot’ to tell her was that Gordon Ramsay didn’t open on Saturday nights. ‘It was wicked, I know,’ he says. ‘I wanted to drive round in a car with tinted windows to see what happened when she turned up.’
This fearless attitude to critics, opinion-formers, celebrities and all the other people that chefs normally suck up to was yet another way Gordon drew himself apart from his peers. It had always been part of his personality; now it had become part of his appeal. And it was on full display on the infamous night that Joan Collins came to dinner.
SIX
JOAN COLLINS? YOU’RE OUT
To this day, Gordon says he never intended to throw Joan Collins out of his restaurant before she had even tasted her starter. His problem, he says, was never with her. It was with the man sitting opposite her, the restaurant critic AA Gill.
Gill is easily one of the most acerbic and idiosyncratic restaurant reviewers in the business. His pieces are often hilarious – sometimes focusing almost entirely on himself, his companions and on his journeys to and from the restaurant in question, with just a brief mention of the food or the atmosphere tacked on to the end. Readers have always loved it – but restaurant owners and chefs are not always so keen.
One of Gordon’s contentions was that Gill veered too far and too frequently from discussing the food or the ambience of a restaurant and ended up commenting on the one set of people Gordon saw as above approach: the customers. For someone with an ever-growing reputation as an angry, aggressive and frequently unpleasant perfectionist, Gordon always felt genuine warmth towards the paying punter, and after all it was his wish to please the customer that made him so demanding of his staff.
‘One night a lady ordered the caramelised duck with a puree of dates,’ he says, to illustrate his attitude towards diners. ‘She asked for the duck to be well done and Jean-Claude, my manager, asked me, “How do you feel about that?” I said, “Jean-Claude, she’s paying, she can have it fucking raw if she wants. I’ll serve the neck if she likes and she can have the feet to take home for a consomme.”’
Gordon didn’t believe that AA Gill was always quite so respectful of the general public, however. ‘Bloated Godalming plutocrats and their popsies’ was just one unpleasant image of Gordon’s typical customers recently conjured up on Gill’s keyboard. In a bid to stop things escalating and provoking more verbal attacks, Gordon went over to the critic one night when they were both eating at the Ivy, in London’s theatreland. He told him that if Gill didn’t stick to criticising the food and the service he would no longer be welcome at his restaurant.
That, Gordon thought, was that. The journalist thought differently. Shortly afterwards, AA Gill booked into Gordon Ramsay under an assumed name, as he always did, and took his seat with his girlfriend and the actress Joan Collins. Sensing a potential problem, the maitre d’ went into the kitchen to tell Gordon who was there, and the chef came out to tackle the problem head on. He shook the critic by the hand to say hello, no voices were raised and no threats were made. He simply asked Gill and his guests to leave and they did so.
The newspapers, of course, didn’t see things so simply. They went wild when they heard that Joan Collins was among the three diners ousted from the restaurant and the story even made it on to The News at Ten. As the affair continued to make headlines, everyone wanted their chance to explain what had really happened. And Gill was first into print, giving his side of the story in the next weekend’s Sunday Times when he began by posing the question: ‘Why should Gordon Ramsay take against me?’
‘In the past, I have reviewed three restaurants he has been associated with: Aubergine, where I said the food was good, but the service and the atmosphere were shocking. Then there was L’Oranger, where he didn’t cook but was executive chef. I gave that a rave review. And there was some club run by a footballer where Ramsay had lent his name to the menu, which was so-so. I pointed out that in general restaurants he didn’t cook in were nicer than ones where he did (and Glasgow Rangers were doing quite well now he’s not playing for them). Well, that’s obviously enough. Gordon says this is personal.’
Saying that it was nothing of the sort, Gill went on to claim that in Gordon’s opinion he had only brought Joan Collins along to try to stop him being thrown out. ‘I understand that the concept of having friends may well be novel to Ramsay but I’m not yet reduced to touting round Hollywood for bodyguards to protect me from kitchen staff,’ was his response. Now on fine form, Gill had a whole lot more to say. ‘Ramsay said he was pleased it was the first restaurant I’d been thrown out of, because it was like losing your virginity, which tells you a lot about his attitude to sex,’ was one of his other good lines that weekend.
But for all the humour there was a darker side to the critic’s comments. Describing Gordon as ‘the vastly self-important, self-regarding narcissist of the culinary world’, he went on to put forward his own theory about the real reason for the night’s events. ‘We are looking down the maw of a recession and the restaurant business is too fat and has borrowed too much money in the belief that there would be no end to the rich suckers who will always take a table. It may well be that cold fear lay behind Gordon’s tantrum. This is not a good time to have invested a huge amount of your family’s money in a very small and frankly hideous restaurant in a backwater in Chelsea with no passing trade. Ramsay says it’s been booked solid since he opened and is full up a month ahead. Well, we got a table, booked under a false name, that afternoon. Perhaps we were just lucky. Gordon’s right to be frightened. He has a million reasons to be frightened and only 40 covers between him and a sandwich round.
‘What’s really so sad is that Ramsay is a very good cook. He has two well-earned Michelin stars. The cult of celebrity chef was the worst thing that could ever have happened to him. In the kitchen he’s brilliant. In the dining room he’s barely house-trained.’
Gordon, not surprisingly, refused to accept any of Gill’s criticism – and he enjoyed a temporary bookings boost when diners rang up and specifically asked to sit at the table from which Joan and AA Gill had been ejected. On the night in question, however, Gordon claimed that Gill had been rude to the staff from the moment he had entered the restaurant. And that, alongside being rude to his customers, was utterly against Gordon’s moral code.
‘People said I threw him out for the publicity. Utter crap. I’m protective of my family and my staff. If it was the food he was complaining about, I would take it on the chin and say I’d fucked up. I don’t mind if people criticise food, or even call me a failed footballer. But over the past two or three years he’s become personal and vindictive. He’s a powerful journalist and I don’t think journalists should write for egotistical reasons. So I just got pissed off and threw him out. But I asked him in a very polite, well-mannered fashion. Not in an arrogant, stomping, swearing fashion. I just shook him by the hand and asked him to leave. That’s all. It got blown out of all proportion.’
It did, however, get Gordon in trouble with his mum. ‘Oh, Gordon, you shouldn’t have put Joan out, she’s such an example to ladies over 50,’ Helen told him over the phone when he admitted what he had done.
But even this didn’t make him change his ways or stop him speaking his mind. Months later, when Joan Collins did finally brave his restaurant a second time – without Gill at her side – Gordon was happy to
serve her. But he was hardly complimentary afterwards. ‘She was very white,’ he said ungallantly. ‘I think it was the make-up. She looked like she was performing in The Mummy Returns.’
Collins, for her part, was prepared to give as good as she got that night. She asked the maitre d’ if Gordon was in the restaurant on the night she was there.
‘Of course,’ she was told. ‘Would you like me to get him?’
‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Keep him in the kitchen, where he’s best.’
Having weathered the storms from broadcasting watchdogs, the catering profession, the critics and Joan Collins, Gordon had one final challenge to address before the year was out. Of all people, a group of apple farmers from Kent had started to picket his restaurant and were threatening to take him to court.
Their problem was simple. Nine months earlier, when money was tight, Gordon had accepted £3,500 to replace Denise Van Outen as the celebrity spokesperson for British Bramley apples. As part of the deal, he had agreed to come up with a new recipe for the apples which he was to perform on television. But, when the show aired, it turned out that he had used French Granny Smiths instead – and, worse still, he had said that diners wouldn’t know the difference.
‘Ramsay was very quick to take our money and very quick to stab us in the back,’ said Jo Rimmer, spokesman for the English Bramley Apple Growers’ Association, afterwards. ‘We paid him £3,500 and he said on screen that it was the easiest money he had ever earned for half an hour’s work. Now we feel we have been cheated.’
Afterwards, Gordon blamed the poor quality of some of the British apples for the problem. ‘I am a perfectionist and the second crate they sent was not perfect. I was left with no choice but to use the Granny Smiths.’
Unwilling to accept this, the farmers, whose chairman, Ian Mitchell, had been called ‘a plonker’ during the broadcast, decided to picket Gordon’s restaurant. ‘Down the King’s Road they trekked, all these apple farmers from Kent shouting: “Ramsay Out, Bramleys in!” Then they sat outside my restaurant, covered in manure, eating sandwiches,’ said Gordon.