by Neil Simpson
‘Gordon needs to be handled with all the care of a truckload of nitro-glycerine,’ a spokeswoman for Channel 4 admitted when asked about his temperament. Unfortunately for them, however, she didn’t seem to have passed that warning on to Neil Farrell and Richard Collins at the Glass House restaurant in Ambleside, Cumbria. In 2004, this was to be the second restaurant featured in Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. And it would end up making almost as many headlines as the first.
In his defence, many of the problems at the Glass House were not of owner Neil’s making. For example, the restaurant had opened just days before the foot-and-mouth crisis temporarily made much of the Lake District off limits. So his anticipated tourist trade wasn’t able to get to his restaurant and the locals had a lot more on their minds than trying out his unique garlic popcorn. With a frightening VAT bill outstanding and too many empty tables in the evenings, Neil was at crisis point. So he reckoned he had nothing to lose by calling in the cameras. ‘I felt I had already been to hell and back, so why not invite Mr Hell himself?’ he said of Gordon.
And Mr Ramsay turned into Mr Hell within hours of arriving at the restaurant for the ten-day assessment and advice period. Having ordered two deep-fried duck cakes, Gordon was presented with what he described as ‘something looking like a pair of camel’s bollocks. A pair of dried camel’s bollocks.’ And worse was to come when he bit into the restaurant’s signature dish, nearly broke a tooth and then choked on a bone. Having been watching what else went on in the kitchen, Gordon was ready to let rip with some of his favourite language. ‘Some idle mother fucker had been too lazy to bone the duck properly. Then the dozy twat accuses me of planting the fucking bone. Then he started to make pesto. He ran out of pine nuts so he says, “Just stuff in almonds, the punters won’t know.” So he starts walloping in almonds. Then the fucking owner says my Caesar salad is crap. We are in the middle of service and he is fucking ranting on. So I tell him to fuck off.’
Which is when things got even more heated. ‘What happens next is I let rip,’ Gordon told Olga Craig of the Sunday Telegraph afterwards. ‘One hundred and eleven fucks worth of rip. I mullered him. We came close to blows.’ The squaring-up happened in the courtyard behind the kitchens, and production company staff ultimately kept the two from getting too physical. But the verbal battering went on. Head chef Richard Collins was close to tears most of the time and one of the kitchen porters with a phobia about raw fish was teased by Gordon so much that he quit.
Once more, it was great, passionate television. But, once more, some serious advice came as soon as the expletive-laden assessment period was over. And this time some worrying allegations were made as soon as the show was broadcast.
On the advice front, before the staff at the Glass House did anything else, Gordon demanded a massive clean-up of the kitchen. While the Ambleside restaurant had one of the cleaner kitchens he saw, he says a lack of basic hygiene was what shocked him the most about many of the others visited when researching and making Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. ‘I was horrified, genuinely appalled by the standards I found.’ And, apart from the clear health risks in some restaurants, he said he couldn’t understand how chefs could have pride in their food and their profession when they were surrounded by rotting ingredients and grime.
Back at the Glass House, Gordon then argued that the menu Neil and Richard were offering was too long, too confusing and too unfocused for their target market. Do people who eat in country restaurants really need to pick from up to 90 different dishes at dinner? Gordon reckoned diners, the waiting staff and the chefs were all being overwhelmed by the vast amount of choice and suggested offering just six starters, six main courses and up to six puddings in the evenings. In typical fashion, he said they should also go for a simpler, fresher lunch menu of healthy open sandwiches. Inside the kitchen, Gordon reckoned he had found some real gems among the junior staff – and, as usual, he was keen to encourage them to step forward and make the most of their potential. Unfortunately, he reckoned that they could do so only if Neil sacked his £25,000-a-year, Claridge’s-trained head chef Richard – something the owner threatened but never quite managed to do.
So does Gordon turn the Glass House around? The food is simpler, the kitchen staff are happier and the takings are up by a fifth when he returns to check on progress. But when the show is finally broadcast Neil has plenty to say about what happened – or didn’t happen – when the cameras had stopped rolling.
He accused Gordon and the producers of misleading him about the ultimate title of the series and refusing to let him see an advance copy of the show – a claim also made by Sue Ray of Bonaparte’s. And he says they also hyped up and exaggerated his financial situation to create a false sense of tension for the show. ‘Gordon Ramsay did a voice-over at the start of the programme and said I was in so much financial difficulty I had turned off my phone because I was being hounded by suppliers. But that was untrue. The reason I had turned it off was simply that I was with my family. I had told the production team that I don’t want to be disturbed at home. It had nothing to do with suppliers and I am not in any financial difficulty.’
Neil also raised doubts about the real reason why Gordon had been so keen for him to ditch his head chef – a man praised in The Good Food Guide for his ‘dazzling’ desserts and ‘clever’ use of wine while at the pre-Ramsay Claridge’s. In Neil’s view, the chef had simply been a ratings-boosting scapegoat. ‘They carefully edited the programme and portrayed the head chef as the weak link. But he and Gordon got on very well together. There was never a cross word between them off camera. I had no intention of sacking Richard but it would have made good television. And that is the only reason they wanted me to do it.’
Gordon, of course, stood firm and continued to argue his case in characteristically blunt language. ‘He’s a slob who lacks inspiration. If I had a fat, lazy head chef like that who couldn’t cook for toffee, I would sell up and get out of the business,’ was his final word on the subject.
Neil, however, hadn’t finished. ‘As far as I am concerned, the whole thing is about making Gordon Ramsay look good,’ he said of the show. ‘I admire his ability as a chef, but as a person not at all. The whole thing was a nightmare and I couldn’t wait for him to go. We wanted to be on the show because we reckoned we had nothing to lose and I wanted to have Gordon Ramsay in my kitchen. But if I had known they had a pre-set agenda I would have had nothing to do with it.’
Media analyst Dr Cynthia McVey, who has spent years studying the reality-television phenomenon, said it is increasingly common for people to be angry after seeing themselves on the small screen. ‘People want to take part because they are genuinely excited about being on television. They may even see it as a path to stardom, but when people see the result it can be very different. People think they have control and then they find that they don’t.’
Wresting control back from Gordon Ramsay was something one other restaurateur tried to do in that first record-breaking series of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. ‘You have to find the courage to confront him,’ said Francesco Mattioli, the new owner of the formerly celebrated restaurant the Walnut Tree, in South Wales, who disagreed with almost all of Gordon’s advice. ‘He can bombard you. Your head spins. But in the end I retaliated. I have great admiration for Gordon, but, let’s put it this way, he was doing his programme. This is my restaurant. I don’t take that rubbish from anybody.’
Gordon, of course, refused to accept that anyone could ignore his advice. When he came back to the Walnut Tree to check on progress, he found that Francesco hadn’t spruced up the menu, hadn’t cut prices and wasn’t performing much better. And, after trying to get his message across one more time, another big row developed. ‘I’ll fuck off home and you can continue struggling. Let’s leave it like that, you stubborn fucker,’ were Gordon’s final words before he did as he had promised.
As it turned out, the Walnut Tree wasn’t the only restaurant that Gordon couldn’t wait to rush away from as so
on as the cameras had stopped filming. ‘The title of the series, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, was absolutely right. I still have recurring nightmares of some of the situations we encountered. I was mortified, really shocked on the customers’ behalf, because you should never, in a professional kitchen, take a customer for granted. It was all a big eye-opener for me.’ The bad attitudes he had first seen at Bonaparte’s seemed to have made the most impression on him. But the words he used to describe what he had seen there could usefully be applied to other failing restaurants across the country. ‘I find it hard to come to terms with people portraying themselves as senior chefs who clearly aren’t and putting people’s livelihoods at risk in the process. I didn’t think it was possible for chefs to be so far up their own arses that they are totally oblivious to what the customers want, and so focused on satisfying their own egos that they are cooking what they wanted in the type of place where nobody wanted that sort of food. And, even if the customers had wanted it, some of these chefs didn’t actually have a clue how to cook it.’
What also appalled the famously hard-working, early-starting Gordon was the short hours that many of the out-of-town chefs seemed prepared to put in. ‘I discovered that too many of them roll into work at 10.30. But how the hell can you contemplate creating something special when you don’t get to your kitchen till then?’ he asked, genuinely amazed. ‘I had a work ethic forced into me from the very first time I worked in a professional kitchen. I learned that you can’t do this job with half your mind. That’s what seems hardest to get across to some of the tossers who think it might be glamorous and social to run a restaurant. It isn’t. It’s hard fucking work day in and day out and I can’t believe how many people haven’t woken up to that yet.’
So would he film another series of the show? ‘When I was first asked about a second series, I said I didn’t know if I could do that to my fucking palate. I value that like there’s no tomorrow. It used to be my left foot that I treasured and now it’s my tongue.’ But as it turned out Gordon decided his taste buds could survive another battering and he agreed to go back on the road for a new series of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares to be broadcast in 2005. But before then he had an even higher-profile, higher-pressure challenge to face. It was time for him to enter Hell’s Kitchen.
THIRTEEN
WELCOME TO HELL’S KITCHEN
‘We’re going to be running a sophisticated venue, not a burger van on the A3. We won’t be cooking fish and chips, steak and ale pie or a nut fucking risotto. It’s going to be fine dining, exclusive, the best restaurant in London for two weeks.’ Gordon certainly had the highest of hopes for Hell’s Kitchen.
Television production companies had been deluging him with programme ideas ever since Boiling Point more than five years earlier. And, as the reality-television boom gathered momentum, they were keener than ever to find a way to use ‘the ogre at the Aga’ – one of the few men in Britain who could always be relied upon to speak his mind. But what kind of show should they make?
Gordon and fellow chefs like Marcus Wareing and Mark Sargeant would often bounce ideas between them after their long restaurant shifts had ended. And Gordon in particular had been keen to come up with something more serious than a standard celebrity-based reality show. Two key thoughts kept going round and round in his mind during these late-night conversations. One was of his own life story: the boy from nowhere who had been turned into an award-winning chef. The other was of Ed Devlin, the Faking It contestant who had also gone from zero to hero and proved himself as an effective and convincing head chef after just a few weeks of intensive instruction.
So could Gordon recreate those sorts of transformations on a far larger scale? Could he teach a group of people how to cook and run a top-quality restaurant in a matter of weeks? He decided he would like to have a go – and the production company Granada International decided to put up the money and let him.
The ultimate idea behind Hell’s Kitchen turned out to be almost as simple as Gordon’s initial late-night musings. While cameras watched every move, ten celebrities with little or no experience of cooking would go on a culinary boot camp with him. He would try to pass on a career’s worth of information and knowledge so they could create meals fit for a Michelin star. And they would serve them in a specially created restaurant where real diners would be expecting the very best.
Getting a project like this up and running was going to take a huge amount of time, effort, money and planning. ‘Viewers normally have no idea just how much goes on behind the scenes on shows like these,’ says television production manager Alison Sheppard, who has worked on major reality shows for ITV and Sky One. ‘You can often summarise the show in a couple of sentences but the actual logistics of turning those words into reality are terrifying. With something like Hell’s Kitchen, where the contestants are effectively on set 24 hours a day, you need a really strong team of planners to consider every eventuality. And you really need to get the contestants and the other onscreen players right.’
Early on, Gordon decided to keep his side of the show in-house. He wanted Angela Hartnett and Mark Sargeant, two of his longest-standing colleagues, to come on board to help train up the contestants, though Angela in particular wasn’t keen. ‘It could have opened us up to a lot of criticism and in the first place I didn’t want to do it,’ she says.
But in the end both chefs were won over by Gordon’s enthusiasm. ‘I pretty much knew Gordon wouldn’t dive into anything that was wrong,’ said Mark. ‘The big scare about this was: “Oh my God, it’s a reality show.” But this was so different. You weren’t just sitting around doing nothing waiting for someone to have sex. It was about running a proper restaurant and that was exactly what we did. There was no set-up. No farce. It was real.’
The next challenge was deciding which celebrities should be Gordon’s guinea pigs. ‘You need to walk a dangerous tightrope here,’ says Sheppard. ‘You need people who are soft enough in some ways so viewers get to like them, but hard enough to create some tension and some controversy as well. You need some of them to be opinionated, some of them to be a little bit wild, you need plenty of sex appeal and as much baggage as you can get into the room. A little bitchiness doesn’t normally go amiss either.’ Fortunately, former MP Edwina Currie was ready to provide that from the start when she ran through a list of her fellow chefs. ‘In all there were three actors, two singers, a comic, a disc jockey, an ex-Olympic runner and me. Oh yes, and Abi Titmuss,’ she said disparagingly.
Gordon was hoping that among that mixed bunch there would also be someone else – a great chef. But finding them sounded like it would be a painful, gruesome process. ‘If people take my advice and put away their own egos, we could have a magical kitchen. I’ll strip away everything they know then build them up from scratch and discover their inner strengths. Among the ten, I know that there will be a naturally gifted cook, a real surprise. I want to show them the blood, sweat and tears that go into creating memorable food – and the drama of day-to-day life in a kitchen. I want them all to get turned on to the passion of cooking, to smell the fragrance of herbs, to see a pan of live young eels jumping, to chop liver, remove a pigeon’s heart, disembowel a prawn, put a knife through a live lobster.’
It was starting to sound a lot like the worst bush-tucker trials in I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here! And as the celebrities arrived for the first day of training Gordon finally admitted he was nervous. Nervous as in terrified.
‘I’m crapping myself,’ he admitted. ‘There is a lot resting on it for me, not just because I’ve got three Michelin stars, but because the show is going to be live. I don’t really know what I have let myself in for. This is turning out to be one of the most daunting tasks I have ever had. We have ten individuals and fifteen days, so we don’t really have any excuse to fail. But I am already having nightmares about it.’ He also had low expectations of the behaviour he could expect from the celebrities – and typically forthright, if illegal, ideas of how he woul
d deal with it. ‘I expect to encounter laziness, lack of ability and bad attitude every day. I don’t expect to be questioned and, if anyone rubs me up the wrong way, they’re going to get pummelled. They’ll have their backsides seared on the charcoal grill. I’ll brand them – criss-cross their butt on the burner.’
Unaware of the painful threat that was hanging over them, the whole group got together for the first time at Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College’s restaurant Taste – coincidentally, the place where Jamie Oliver had recently filmed the far more critically acclaimed Jamie’s Kitchen, of which more later. The ten celebrities were having their first few days of back-to-basics, preparatory training in the student kitchens and they were the exact mixed bunch that Sheppard had predicted. Gordon stood back and looked at them, the frown lines on his forehead even deeper than usual.
Alongside Edwina Currie and Abi Titmuss stood the three actors, Gimme Gimme Gimme star James Dreyfus and Amanda Barrie and Jennifer Ellison, formerly of Coronation Street and Brookside respectively. The two singers were Belinda Carlisle and Matt Goss from Bros. The ‘Pub Landlord’ comedian Al Murray was standing next to controversial former sprinter Dwain Chambers. The veteran investigative journalist Roger Cook was the last of the group, though after falling and injuring himself during the initial cooking lessons he was replaced by the equally veteran DJ Tommy Vance.
Gordon’s first task was to explain how tough things were going to be. ‘You will have to sweep the floor ten times an hour, peel a bucket of onions, cook for the staff. You will also scrub clean your own pans because this stops you from burning things. You’ll be amazed how careful chefs are if they know they have to scrape the burned gunk off the bottom of their own saucepans. I don’t give a damn about diplomacy or delicacy. The more honest I am with you the better you will become.’