Gordon Ramsay

by Neil Simpson

  Dealing with Winner also means agreeing to his requests, however difficult, as another of Gordon’s favourite anecdotes illustrates. ‘He came in a couple of months ago and said to our maitre d’, Jean-Claude, “I’d like that table over there.” And Jean-Claude said, “Oh, la la, Monsieur Winner, that table is booked and it is for six and there’s just two of you.” He said, “Jean-Claude. I. Want. That. Fucking. Table.” So Jean-Claude came running up to me in the middle of service and said, “Oh, la la, Monsieur Winner is being difficult.” I said, “What’s fucking new?” We explained that the table was booked for six people and Michael said, “Well, put them in the bloody bar, serve them Dom Perignon and tell them they are here as my guests. I. Want. That. Table.” So he did it. And were the customers happy? Over the moon. Six free dinners. He is the most generous 60-something man in Britain.’

  To his credit, being accommodated like this doesn’t ensure Winner will automatically give people like Gordon good reviews, however. The critic must have had too much time to think about things when he next ate at Claridge’s, as he wrote off the new Gordon Ramsay restaurant as ‘considerably worse than what was there before’.

  At the very top of the culinary establishment, not even the legendary Egon Ronay was safe from Gordon’s sarcasm. When the 89-year-old doyen of restaurant guides brought out his first book in seven years in 2005, he gave a great mention to the flagship Michelin-starred Gordon Ramsay in Chelsea – something most chefs would have celebrated. But Gordon could hardly have been less impressed. ‘I’m not particularly bothered about being in the guide. I mean, who exactly is Egon Ronay and what does he know about haute cuisine? Doesn’t he usually write about pubs and motorway service station food?’ was his instant putdown to reporters.

  Speaking his mind like this seemed ingrained in the Scotsman’s DNA. Keeping quiet to keep the peace seemed impossible for him. If he thought it, he said it. And to hell with the consequences. ‘I suppose I am too honest. But I don’t have to take rubbish from anybody and I don’t have to lick anyone’s backside just for the sake of it,’ he said, as a way of defending himself. In theory, this should have made Gordon a whole army of enemies – and he was once ranked alongside Chris Evans and Mohamed Al Fayed as one of the worst people to work for in an ITV show called Britain’s Unbearable Bosses. In reality, Gordon enjoyed a fantastic relationship with his staff, and he was keen to thank them as often as possible.

  ‘I know that after the TV documentary Boiling Point people saw me as a foul-mouthed chef who was rude and arrogant with his staff. But without their loyalty and understanding I would never have been so successful. The real secret of success is the right people, without whom I would not be where I am today,’ he said after collecting his first Chef of the Year ‘Catey’, for example. And behind the scenes Gordon proved to be a sensitive as well as an inspiring boss. He happily offered a job to a young chef who showed promise but was able to work only one day a week because of his heart condition. He also set up a scholarship for aspiring chefs where the winner gets £5,000 and a series of apprenticeships in his and other restaurants – with the possibility of a full-time job at the end. Running the scheme, let alone looking after the winner, takes time, effort and money. But Gordon reckons it is one way for him to repay his debts to the industry that took a chance on him when he was starting out.

  ‘This is a great job to be in when you are in the premier division, but underneath it sucks, it’s the pits,’ he said when he was asked why he had launched the scheme. ‘It’s a pressured lifestyle but even when you earn just £100 a week you have to be on your edge and dream of playing alongside the best. It’s really tough for chefs trying to set up in business today.’

  The chefs who do end up working with Gordon tend to stay with him, however. Some 75 per cent of the staff who had been employed alongside him in Aubergine in the mid-1990s were still working with him in one restaurant or another a decade later. Many were in top jobs, building up top reputations and winning Michelin stars under the Ramsay umbrella but in their own names. Marcus Wareing at Petrus, Mark Sargeant at Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s and David Dempsey at Amaryllis are just a few examples.

  Yorkshire-born Jason Atherton was to be next in line. Gordon was making Jason head chef at Verre, the new restaurant he was opening at the Dubai Creek Hilton Hotel in the United Arab Emirates. And the chef said the real Gordon Ramsay was very different from the public perception of him. ‘He’s certainly not a nightmare to work for. In fact, he’s brilliant because he’s straight-talking and he helps you move up the ladder. Too many other chefs are threatened by talented, younger staff, but if Gordon sees a talented chef he takes them under his wing and then, when they are ready to fly, gives them their own restaurant.’

  ‘I want to have the Manchester United of kitchens and I love watching chefs who I have taught go on to be independent young businesswomen and businessmen,’ said Gordon of his various proteges. ‘Some of the big chefs don’t seem to nurse the talent in their own kitchens. They just want to roll out branded chain restaurants that could be staffed by just about anybody. But I don’t want to do that. I want to roll out the talent instead. The way I see it, if the people I’ve taught don’t go on to be big stars in their own right I’ve fucked up. People think I struggle for staff because I’m an arsehole to work for. But I guarantee my staff complete honesty which is important when you spend so many hours a day together. I know my guys put their lives on hold for me, so I want it to be worth their while.’

  As part of this policy, Gordon tries to ensure staff can do a full week’s worth of hours over four shifts, not five, so they can get ‘one full day to sleep, then two days for a proper break’. Tips are shared between kitchen as well as waiting staff and even the insults are handled well. ‘He knows how to bollock you and still be your mate,’ was how footballer Tim Cahill described former Millwall boss Dennis Wise. Exactly the same was said of ex-footballer Gordon Ramsay.

  Of course, that didn’t mean that life was always easy in a Gordon Ramsay kitchen. While trying to be fair and inspiring, Gordon made no bones about being a fantastically demanding boss with a tough-love approach to teaching. ‘The waiters know that I charge them for breakages, for example,’ he said of his company-wide policies. ‘I pay for the first breakage, but after that they have to pay and it is surprising how long it takes to break that second plate. I pay for perfection, not accidents and mistakes.’ Step further out of line than just breaking a plate and even worse can be in store for you. ‘There was a cook once who came in to work in my kitchens in London and stole my recipe book,’ he said. ‘I gave him a chance and asked if he was stealing and he said no. Well, I searched his bag and there it was – my recipe book. So we stripped him, wrapped him head to toe in cling film and left him outside the front door. He certainly didn’t steal again for a long time, that’s for sure.’

  Anyone horrified about the way Gordon treated the people he worked with or competed against were also in for a shock in 2001. He was about to broaden his verbal broadsides to lay into a whole host of new targets. Just because Gordon didn’t know you personally didn’t mean he wasn’t ready to insult you. As traffic wardens, taxi drivers, women drivers and, in fact, women in general were all about to find out.

  Traffic wardens were the first to feel the Ramsay wrath. Calling them ‘cockroaches’, he reckoned he paid them up to £1,000 a week in fines – but never got as much as an acknowledgement in return. ‘I have never met a pleasant traffic warden. I have never met a smiling one, a happy one, someone who actually says “Good Morning” to you. They are all just standing there, lurking in the bushes waiting to give you a ticket. And the better the car, the more they like ticketing it. The worst thing about the congestion charge in London is that the fucking cockroaches are infesting the streets even more than they did before it was introduced. They creep out of the concrete sometimes. I even check the boot to see if there is one skulking inside. If I’m three minutes over time for a meter out jumps a fucking cock
roach. I’d rather work for the Vegan Society than be a traffic warden.’ And all this is said with him hardly drawing a breath.

  Next in line for a roasting were London taxi drivers, who he said drove him up the wall with their unwanted opinions, high prices and work-to-rule attitudes – though he soon regretted that outburst when he found out that none of them would pick him up on the street any more. ‘I didn’t win any mates with that,’ he admitted afterwards. ‘Now I’m running a marathon to raise money for the cab drivers’ children’s charity to apologise.’

  And still the random criticisms came. When Chelsea and England footballer Frank Lampard was photographed shirtless with his chest and armpits shaved, Gordon was right in there with an opinion. ‘Lampard looked absolutely ridiculous. You could never have got anything like that when I was playing football. The England team should be thinking more about football and less about their appearance, considering how they did at Euro 2004. Footballers are turning into women.’

  Ah, women. Over the years, Gordon Ramsay’s various musings on women have become legendary and it all began when he decided to speak out about women drivers. ‘They frustrate the hell out of me and there’s only one way to cut down on traffic congestion,’ he told Paul Merton on BBC TV’s Room 101. ‘Give women drivers alternate days on the road. Have you seen them trying to get into a small space? They’re stressed. They’re flustered. They’re on the mobile talking while taking seven or eight goes just to get into the space. Maybe if they could just drive on a Sunday and leave the roads to us from Monday to Saturday it would be a lot easier.’

  Female workers were next in line for some shocks. If women work in a kitchen you can never get to use the toilet because they will always be in there crying, sorting out their make-up, gossiping with each other or resting from PMT, Gordon once said. Women at work also took time off because of ‘morning sickness and women’s troubles’ and ruined all the banter with male staff in the kitchen. ‘Men talk about totty all the time in my London restaurants but women don’t enjoy that kind of talk,’ he complained. Oh, and he said he could never have married a female chef because of her ‘stinking of food all the time in bed’ and claimed that the sight of women in the workplace might put him off sex. ‘Just the thought of women sticking their hands up a pigeon’s arse – it’s not what would make your sex life fruitful,’ was his considered opinion.

  Professional women, not surprisingly, were outraged by what they heard. ‘Ramsay is a brilliant chef but he makes me angry. It sounds like he is the one suffering from permanent pre-menstrual tension. A lot of women have been held back in the industry because of attitudes like Ramsay’s,’ said Lorraine Ferguson, one of the country’s few female success stories, who had worked at the top restaurant L’Escargot in London.

  ‘It sounds as though Ramsay is scared because there are wonderful women chefs and cooks around. To suggest that women are too emotional to work in his kitchen is pathetic,’ added Lady Claire Macdonald, a former judge on television’s Masterchef.

  Finally, Sally Clarke, the legendary female chef whose Kensington restaurant Clarke’s has been a foodie favourite for more than two decades, had a subtle dig of her own to make against Gordon and the other male super-chefs. ‘Of course there are women in the industry. It is just that they are not clowning about as celebrity chefs on television or staring out of the pages of the colour supplements, so you are less aware of them,’ she said. The last point was particularly well aimed. Gordon hadn’t just been staring out of the pages of Sunday supplements in any old photographs recently. He had just been posing naked save for a well-placed conger eel in yet another bid to drum up publicity for his books and his businesses. (He joked with the paper’s reporter that only the conger eel had been big enough to preserve his modesty and he enjoyed hinting yet again about the real reason why he had been nicknamed ‘the Horse’ by his Rangers teammates as a teenager.)

  Joking aside, Gordon was actually more of a mischief-maker than a misogynist. Making outrageous statements to reporters made him laugh, kept the press happy and got him through the day. And back in the kitchen he was, in fact, very female-friendly. One of his longest-standing colleagues, Angela Hartnett, was being groomed for great things – soon to follow Gordon’s other proteges with a restaurant of her own. And Gordon said he was ‘over the moon’ when 20-year-old Gemma Blow – the only woman among the five finalists – was announced as the winner of the first Gordon Ramsay Scholarship in September 2001.

  One subject Gordon was less able to joke about was the general standard of cooking in Britain. When it was done badly, or when the industry was brought into disrepute, he really could let rip. ‘I’ve just read about a hotel in Scotland that has gone public announcing the fact that they are doing a deep-fried sandwich full of Nutella,’ he told reporters, appalled. ‘I mean, Christ! Seventy-five per cent of my staff are French. They look at me like I’m some kind of twat because my Scottish brothers are launching two slices of bread with a fucking inch of Nutella between them, battered and deep-fat fried. Now what the fuck is this country coming to? What are we doing to ourselves? That has to be abolished. Here we are, progressing tenfold, buying the right bread, real croissants, we’re making fresh muesli and we understand what a great cup of coffee is. And then some idiot brings out a deep-fried chocolate sandwich.

  ‘I want to find the bastard that put that idea together. I’ve got the most amazing charcoal grill in my new kitchen. I’m going to sit his butt on it and criss-cross my name on his bloody arse cheeks to remind him. Is he fucking stupid? When these things hit France, the French just have a field day laughing at us. So I’m looking for that scumbag. I’m going to brand him with a hot iron like a little calf or a lamb. I’m going to put “Ramsayfield” on his butt so every time he wakes up in the morning he thinks, Fuck, I shouldn’t have done that. That man is my new target and I’ll find him.’

  ELEVEN

  BACK TO WORK

  ‘On a warm summer evening in a restaurant kitchen in Chelsea, London, there is something resembling a ballet going on. A strange surreal ballet of 15 blokes in striped aprons, chopping, stirring, arranging with meticulous care, moving with such precision, such orchestrated timing, that they are almost as one as they count down the crucial timing on a dish of lobster tail ravioli. Out in the front of house, where immaculate staff are discreetly attentive and the decor is muted, there is an air of anticipation among those who seek the ultimate dining experience; an uneasy sense that at any moment something dangerous and exciting could happen. For this is Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant and the artiste is not a predictable man.’

  Reporter Susan Chenery of The Times perfectly summed up the tensions that lay beneath every meal at one of Gordon’s restaurants. ‘With every perfect, pricey plate comes a tale of human suffering,’ she wrote. ‘There is a frisson of fear in the foie gras and a sous-chef clamped in a half nelson etched into the passion fruit cornetto.’

  By the spring of 2002, Gordon Ramsay was already as famous for his anger and his volatility as he was for the quality of his food. So, while his latest restaurant was an obvious choice when Cherie Blair was planning a party for her husband’s 49th birthday, it was still making the Prime Minister’s protection team a little nervous. One wrong word from someone at the table could start the insults or the food flying, they feared. And, to make matters worse, the table Cherie had chosen wasn’t exactly a standard one. She had booked ‘the chef’s table’ – set directly in the kitchen and only yards from where Gordon himself would be screaming out his orders, wielding the knives and directing the entire lunch service.

  The idea behind a chef’s table is to give diners a dramatic and totally unique dining experience and it had been a huge hit with customers since Gordon had introduced it at Claridge’s the previous year. By the time the Blairs made their booking, it had already been used by Andrew Lloyd Webber, chat-show hosts Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan, Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood and models Jade Jagger and Kate Moss. Everyone had also paid h
eavily for their experiences: accounts showed that this one table alone generated around £1.2 million a year for Gordon’s company coffers.

  To reach the table, customers have to walk through the hotel’s main art deco restaurant and follow the staff through the swing doors into the kitchen. There, backed on three sides by frosted-glass walls, is the slightly raised table surrounded by rich leather banquettes. As ringside seats go, you can’t get any closer to the heat or the action and, while a dressed-down Tony Blair didn’t take advantage of the opportunity, you can also have a full tour of the kitchens during your meal. No less than you might expect when your table’s bill for lunch comes in at an average of £480 before drinks.

  ‘Mr Blair stood up from time to time to get a better view of what was going on. He was particularly interested when a little fracas broke out between a couple of the sous-chefs,’ one onlooker told the papers afterwards.

  The Prime Minister also had a different shock a little later. Cherie had spotted Cilla Black in the main dining room and had asked her to burst through the kitchen doors to shout: ‘Surprise, surprise!’ halfway through the lunch. Ever the self-publicist, Gordon was happy to provide the Prime Minister’s verdict on the experience when the four-hour celebration was over. ‘He absolutely loved it. He was very relaxed and ate all the food we offered him. He was very interested in the way the food had been cooked and he seemed to enjoy watching all the chefs at work.’ Even the Blairs’ vegetarian security guard, it seemed, had been happy with the meat-free tray he had been presented with as he sat guarding the doors.