by Neil Simpson
Back at home, the Ramsay family was still growing – not bad for a man who had said at the start of his marriage that he had a low sperm count because of spending so much time in front of hot ovens. At first, Gordon had an unorthodox name in mind for his third daughter. ‘It sounds daft, but she looks like a Coriander. That’s the name that came into my head as soon as I saw her.’ But in the end he agreed with Tana that the name Matilda might raise fewer eyebrows in later life.
But what was both raising eyebrows and making headlines in the meantime was that once more Gordon had failed to be at his daughter’s birth. Missing Megan’s birth in 1998 could be put down to an oversight, the newspaper columnists and commentators seemed to feel. Missing Jack and Holly’s birth on New Year’s Eve 1999 could be seen as an accident. But missing Matilda’s as well looked like a little more than just carelessness.
And, upfront as ever, Gordon was happy to confirm to everyone that a deliberate pattern had in fact emerged. He hadn’t been at the latest birth because neither he nor Tana had wanted him there. And neither of them saw any reason to apologise for their decision.
‘We have a very active sex life and we both contemplated over a bottle of wine that it wasn’t good for our sexual relationship for me to be at the childbirth. I told her that I would feel squeamish seeing that level of mess. It’s like sending 25 vegans into a kitchen with meat in the blender. So I was very relieved when Tana said, “I don’t want you there. I won’t feel attractive.” I said, “Thank God for that.” If Tana had turned around and said, “I want you there, it is an awful position and I need someone I deeply love by my side,” then of course I would have been there. But that wasn’t the case. She didn’t want me to witness her distress. The truth is that I am a control freak. And in the delivery suite I wouldn’t be in control, would I? I’d be standing there, useless, amid all the blood and the pushing and the sweating, like a useless prick.’
For her part, Tana says she knew her husband too well to expect him to cope properly with the reality of childbirth. ‘I just wanted to get on with it and have Gordon there afterwards,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to have the babies clean and wrapped in a blanket and then be able to present them to him. He’s squeamish enough when he cuts his finger after all.’
For all this, the couple continued to be roundly criticised for their unconventionality – and for their honesty. Gordon in particular came in for a lot of flak after going public about his views and his perceived chauvinism. But he remained defiant – even to his friends. ‘There are dads I know who say, “I can’t believe you missed the most momentous time of your marital life.” I’m like: “Has your missus told you to say that? Is she wearing the trousers in your relationship?” Let me decide what I want to do at childbirth. The children’s birthdays are phenomenal. The first time I took Jack fishing was phenomenal. But childbirth? It’s like being stuck in a room with a thousand skinned rabbits.’
Or worse – because, when it came to labour, Gordon’s imagination had clearly gone wild and he was prepared to come right out and say what most of his friends were too afraid to admit to thinking. ‘I had images like something out of a sci-fi movie whenever I thought about childbirth – skinned rabbits and conger eels coming at me from everywhere. I didn’t want that to be in my memory. Seeing a woman in distress, screaming at the top of her voice, pushing, pushing, pushing and sweat, sweat, sweat? I’d rather be stark bollock naked in a steam room with 50 vegans,’ he said – his worst nightmares coming back around to food, as they always did.
With four children and a growing fortune, the Ramsays had long since moved out of their top-floor converted flat in grimy Stockwell. They now lived slightly further west, in a massive 11-bedroom home in the altogether leafier borough of Wandsworth. The new home had cost an impressive £3.5 million and the couple had spent an estimated £1 million refurbishing it and fitting it out before moving in. The biggest job was converting the building’s four flats with an external staircase back into the glorious single-family home it would have been in Victorian times. And, when that was done, one of the Ramsays’ first tasks had been to sort out the one design feature that would set them apart from almost every other house in Britain. For, while an increasing number of well-off couples now boast ‘his and hers’ bathrooms, the Ramsays can point to separate kitchens as well. Tana’s was on the lower ground floor – Gordon described it as ‘an MFI job’ from where she could cook family meals and run the house. It was also where she frequently stocked up the family fridge with Jamie Oliver’s ready meals from Sainsbury’s – just to wind up her husband.
Gordon’s kitchen was different. Nearly £500,000 different. His state-of-the-art room included a £67,000 main oven which was the size of a car and had to be lifted over the whole house and into the new kitchen by crane. Around it are cupboard-door handles based on Ferrari gear-sticks and costing £350 a piece, double dishwashers and a £480 silent extractor fan that Gordon said ‘makes Megan’s hair stand on end when we put her underneath it’. Then there is nearly £110,000 of limestone flooring, a sound system loaded with 2,000 hours of music, the best black Zimbabwean granite worktops money could buy – the list could go on and on.
What that list would also include, if Gordon had had his way, is a lock on the door. This mega-kitchen was to be his personal, private domain. No one else would be allowed to cook or mess about there. It would be where he works on new recipes and food combinations; where he indulges in his original love for food, without having to worry about customers on the other side of the wall or his children’s dirty fingerprints and spillages. Because, having avoided being at the birth of all four of his kids, Gordon was deter mined to avoid a whole lot of their other inconveniences and irritations as well. ‘I will never be a hands-on father,’ he admitted unashamedly when asked about his home life and drawing a firm line between it and his professional world. ‘I don’t contact Tana when I can’t get hold of scallops and I don’t want to know if she runs out of Pampers.’
It was an interesting admission, because Gordon was also prepared to admit he only had the very sketchiest idea of what Pampers actually were. Triggering what seemed like an endless amount of criticism, he said he had never changed a nappy in his life – and didn’t intend to start now. ‘I hate the smell of poo,’ he offered as a very simple justification. ‘I can’t go back to work and get excited about pesto if I’ve been smelling poo. I love all my children dearly, but wiping bums? That’s not for me. I can put my hand on my heart and say I have never scraped pureed mango from a nappy. I can’t get involved in that at all and I won’t.’
Luckily for him, Tana was happy to accept her husband’s unfashionably unreconstructed male attitude. ‘It has always surprised me how much it bothers other people that he has never changed a nappy,’ she said as the children grew up. ‘He is constantly criticised for it to this day but it never bothered me in the slightest. We have never had a situation where he has actually needed to do the changing. When the children were in nappies, Gordon was out working and I was at home being a mum and totally enjoying it. That was my job.’
In those early years, Gordon’s view was that it was also Tana’s job to get up in the night whenever any of their four children needed anything. ‘If the babies cry in the night, my head is firmly stuck under the pillow. I have very little sleep anyway, so when I do sleep it has to be consistent. The babies have one bottle feed during the night. I can’t come back from the restaurant and have to start looking around for powdered milk or Horlicks or whatever it is they put in there.’ To his credit, Gordon was always entirely upfront about these uncompromising attitudes to raising his children – and he wasn’t going to act a part in public which he didn’t live up to in private. ‘Tana once mentioned those bag things for carrying babies on your front and I said, “You’ve got no chance, sweetheart, if you think I’m walking through Battersea Park wearing one of those. Thanks, but no thanks.”’
Nappies, sleepless nights and baby-slings apart, domestic life c
hez Ramsay continued to be happy. And work continued to be busy. After a lot of soul-searching Gordon had agreed to take part in another fly-on-the-wall television documentary in 2002 – some three years after Boiling Point had made him one of the most famous chefs in the country. This time the show, on BBC2, had a slightly different focus. Trouble at the Top was part of a series following business people facing big challenges. Gordon’s latest professional challenge was to extend his restaurant empire into the dining rooms of yet another luxury hotel. And, as usual, he wanted all the publicity he could get.
The hotel in question was the grand old Connaught Hotel in the heart of Mayfair. Named after Queen Victoria’s third son and described as ‘a country manor in the heart of London’, it was famous for its hushed, utterly discreet service and antique-filled public rooms. A Gordon Ramsay restaurant was going to be a massive wake-up call for its rich, aristocratic regulars. And it wasn’t to be just any Gordon Ramsay restaurant – the man the Daily Telegraph called ‘a hitherto unknown champion of women’s rights’ was putting his long-time protege and colleague Angela Hartnett in charge of the kitchen there. It was the latest in a long line of promotions for Gordon’s loyal lieutenants and it made Angela the first female head chef at a British five-star hotel.
Gordon, however, remained as politically incorrect as ever when asked if this choice proved he had changed his mind about women chefs. ‘If people think I have a pair of balls, they should wait until Angela gets going,’ he told reporters as the new restaurant prepared to open. ‘It’s a real turn-on when she lets rip. You just close your eyes and think of her dressed up in boots and fucking cling film … nude.’
Angela, ignoring the latter description, was the first to admit that women chefs had to leave at least some of their femininity at the kitchen door. ‘You have to become hard, you have to become tough,’ she said. ‘You learn to swear like a trooper with a thesaurus. I swear so much more than any other woman I know.’
It was Gordon who was to be swearing (under his breath and at himself, for a change) a little later, after the new restaurant at the Connaught had successfully opened. Angela was cooking up a storm there, the Trouble at the Top cameras had gone and the show had aired with decent audience figures and Gordon was looking forward to his 36th birthday. In typical fashion, he wasn’t planning any major celebration, just a typical 18-hour shift at his flagship, Gordon Ramsay. But the night was to end very badly.
While Gordon was overseeing the final cleaning of the restaurant at nearly 3am, a customer who knew it was his birthday sent a bottle of Champagne into the kitchen as he left, saying the staff should share it and toast their boss’s health. After doing so, Gordon helped lock up, got in his new Aston Martin and headed home. Two things then went awry. First, he took a wrong turn and started driving the wrong way down a one-way street. Then he realised that halfway down the street was a police station – outside of which two officers were standing having a cigarette and watching him carefully. ‘They pulled me over, asked me whether I was aware I was driving the wrong way, then they breathalysed me and said I was over the limit. I was horrified, devastated. I had literally only had a glass of Champagne and I didn’t even finish it.’
A procedural error meant Gordon escaped a drink-driving charge and a ban, however. Having taken him across town to London’s West End Central Police Station in the early hours, they had failed to offer him the chance to take a urine or blood test – both of which are more accurate than a simple breath test. So the charges against him had to be dropped.
Gordon, saying he was ‘absolutely mortified’ and that he would ‘never get in a car knowing I was over the limit’, had been lucky. Unfortunately, his run of good luck was about to change. Just when so much in his life was going well, something terrible would bring him crashing back down to earth, as it always did. The man who had so nearly lost his younger brother to drugs was about to lose his closest friend in exactly the same way. The friend was fellow chef David Dempsey. And the way he died is something Gordon says he will never forget.
In many ways, David was a mirror image of both Gordon and his brother Ronnie. He too had been born amid some of the meanest streets of Glasgow. He too had had a distant, difficult father: his French-Mauritian dad had left the family home and moved to England when David was just five. And, like Gordon, David saw restaurant kitchens as an adrenalin-filled escape from everyday life, a place where he could take control, head up a team and create something truly special. Most of all like Gordon, David was fiercely ambitious and famously hard-working.
His work ethic had begun when he was working full-time at the New Maharajah restaurant in Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street. Like all major kitchen jobs, it was a tough, relentless and exhausting experience. But, instead of walking away on his days off, David agreed to work unpaid in a series of other city-centre restaurants and hotels in order to boost his CV and his experience. And after exaggerating the credentials on that CV – just as Gordon had done – David too got out of Glasgow. He blagged a job at Raymond Blanc’s iconic Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons restaurant in Oxfordshire, where his education really began and his life would change for ever. For it was on a rare night off from his job there as a chef de partie, or senior section head, that an exhausted David flicked on the television and saw the infamous Boiling Point documentary about Gordon Ramsay. Just as Gordon had made an instant decision that he had to work with Marco Pierre White back in 1986, so David made the instant decision to work with the wild, angry, passionate man he could see on his television screen.
He got the number for Aubergine and rang every day until he finally got to speak to Gordon himself. ‘I’ve seen you on the television and I want to work with you,’ he said, getting straight to the point in typically blunt fashion. Gordon had to laugh – almost everyone else was telling him they had seen him on television and wanted to lock him up in a mental hospital. Right from the start, he wondered if he could find a kindred spirit in the ambitious young Scot on the phone. So he offered him the chance to work a single shift at Aubergine to try to prove himself.
David’s first task that early morning came when Gordon handed him a box of leftovers from the night before. ‘I watch new chefs and, if they show those trimmings respect, as they would a main ingredient, then you can tell that they care about food and aren’t just blase about only cooking foie gras or white truffles,’ Gordon says. His next test for potential new chefs is even more prosaic. He likes to see them make a simple omelette, believing that you cannot go on to build far greater things unless you have the right foundations in place for the basics.
Within two hours of arriving at Aubergine that morning, David had passed his first two tests. When Gordon found out that the man was there on his first day off after working 14 consecutive shifts at Le Manoir, he passed his third. This kind of ambition, energy and dedication ticked every box on Gordon’s mental recruitment sheet. ‘I saw the potential in David, right from the start,’ Gordon said, so he offered him a job as commis chef at Aubergine. It was one step down the ladder from Le Manoir but both men saw it as a potential springboard to better things. Both of them were right, and over the years their mutual professional respect and their friendship grew.
‘The only thing we have ever disagreed on is football. He supports Rangers and I support Celtic,’ David once said of his boss. Talking about women was another thing that brought the pair together. They would sit in the empty restaurant long after the final customers had left some nights, chewing the cud about relationships, life and love, winding down after the long, high-pressure shifts that inspired but exhausted them.
Elevated to the role of junior sous-chef at Gordon Ramsay by the start of 2001, David was to get a huge shock when Gordon sat him down at the end of one typically late night. ‘How do you fancy heading back to Glasgow?’ David was asked. Gordon was offering the 29-year-old the role of head chef at Amaryllis and David couldn’t say yes fast enough. ‘It was an opportunity I would probably never get again. Gordon has do
ne more for me and my career than anybody else ever had or ever will,’ he said of his mentor and friend.
A massive eating tour of Scotland followed, as the pair checked out the competition before agreeing the style and the menu for Amaryllis. And David had high hopes for the future. ‘It has been my ambition since I was young to achieve Michelin-star status and to be able to come back home and do it is obviously important to me. And once I’ve got my first star I will definitely want to push for a second.’ Once again, the two men could hardly have been closer.
When both men were running restaurants, it became obvious that their temperaments, too, were similar – as one unhappy diner found to his cost when he questioned the food he was served at Amaryllis. Maurice Taylor, a restaurant and hotel owner of 40 years’ standing, said his main course of pigeon was underdone. David, to put it mildly, did not agree. Maurice said he and his companions were then shouted at and effectively frog-marched out of the restaurant – in front of all the other diners. ‘He came storming out of the kitchen asking what my problem was and coming on very strong. I am not used to being spoken to like that. And to have someone come out of the kitchen in his dirty whites to shout at us was unbelievable. Mr Dempsey could be a talented chef but his customer-relations skills are zero. It is very disappointing that he cannot handle hearing another point of view.’
‘It seems as if Gordon Ramsay’s fiery temper and intolerance of criticism has been passed on to his staff,’ wrote the Daily Mail when it took up Maurice’s story.
The diner agreed. ‘Gordon Ramsay has done a great deal for the quality of food in Scotland and is a very talented and creative chef. But he has a reputation as a bully and it looks as if members of his staff are a reflection of their boss,’ he concluded.