Gordon Ramsay

by Neil Simpson

  When the children are in bed, Tana and Gordon say, they are not different from any other set of parents. ‘Like any couple with young children, we argue, of course we do,’ says Tana. ‘I actually think that’s important. It might be when he leaves his clothes on the floor thinking that the laundry fairy will come along and pick them up, or when he walks through the house in muddy trainers, not thinking that I’ll have to clear up after him. But we both speak our minds, so problems don’t get a chance to brew.

  ‘Gordon can be fiery at work because he’s a perfectionist and passionate about his job, so he takes it badly when things go wrong. But he doesn’t shout and swear all the time at home, so I don’t tend to see that side of him. The time when he is most relaxed is lying on the floor with the kids crawling all over him, just being Daddy. When the children were babies, they terrified him. He thought they were so tiny and helpless. But he’s great with them now. Playing with them is how he relaxes.’

  As the children got older, he also started, almost subconsciously, to take them into account when making business decisions at work. Would he ever serve ostrich and kangaroo meat in his restaurants? he was once asked by a catering student. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Because what are you meant to say to your kids when you take them to the zoo and they see all those animals running around? How are you going to explain that?’

  Both Gordon and Tana also think long and hard about their children when they plan their very rare, very short holidays – because neither wants to spoil them. ‘My childhood holidays were spent in Blackpool, Scarborough, Bognor Regis and Loch Lomond and I didn’t get on a plane till I was 21, so doing so meant a lot to me. I don’t want the kids to be blase about all those things,’ says Gordon. So, while they have multi-millionaire parents, the Ramsay children still spent one of their first family holidays at Butlins in Minehead with their grandmother to ensure they keep their feet firmly on the ground. Other more upmarket family treats managed to leave Gordon cold. ‘Bores the crap out of me,’ he told BA’s in-flight magazine High Life about trips to Disney World.

  What interested him a lot more were the secret ‘boyfriend and girlfriend holidays’ that he and Tana take once a year. Saying the breaks are vital escape valves that help keep them both sane, the couple fly off for just a few days alone together while Tana’s parents and Gordon’s mum take turns to look after the children. ‘It’s like dating again,’ says Tana, who tries to recreate the holiday mood throughout the rest of the year as well. ‘It’s important to allocate time just for you as a couple. So, on Sunday nights, for example, when the children are in bed, we hire a babysitter and either go to the cinema or Gordon cooks dinner for me. I find it healthy that we are not in each other’s pockets all the time. Maybe that’s why we are still so passionate about each other.’

  And, according to Gordon, ‘passionate’ is exactly the right word to use. Over the years, he has missed few opportunities to discuss the couple’s sex life, his own prowess between the sheets or sex in general. ‘Food is a very sensual thing. When you have a turbot in front of you, you can’t help but think along the lines of making a woman feel happy in ways that she wouldn’t believe,’ he said, bizarrely, at one point. ‘There’s something strangely sensual about making ravioli,’ he said at another, before admitting, ‘Cooking is like having the most massive hard-on plus Viagra sprinkled on top of it and it’s still there 12 hours later.’ And then there was the time in Hell’s Kitchen when he said he wanted the celebrities to take a stick of salsify or an artichoke to bed. ‘You will be surprised what you learn from it,’ he said, slightly worryingly, without going into any more details.

  But absolutely nothing goes unsaid or is left to the imagination when Gordon starts discussing his and Tana’s own personal lives. ‘I ring Tana up from the restaurant and ask, “Are you up for it?” Then, in the middle of the chat, there will be a fuck-up in the kitchen, I’ll get angry with one of the staff and Tana will go, “Ooh, can you come home right now, that sounds amazing!” So, if I can, I head right off.’ Gordon also claimed that Tana likes him to keep his chef’s outfit on while they make love – something she has never publicly confirmed.

  What Tana has found is that, when your husband talks to journalists about your sex life at the drop of a chef’s hat, you then get all the same questions when you give interviews yourself. And, while she is far more discreet than Gordon, Tana does back up a lot of his claims. ‘Sometimes, if we’re at a party, he will look across the room and wink and I just think, Hello! Yes, the chemistry is still there and we do have a very passionate sex life,’ she says when questioned directly on the subject. ‘But I’d really rather keep it to myself. I say to Gordon, “You do realise that my parents might be reading this?” I think he is finally getting the message that I feel a little bit embarrassed and I’m not comfortable with him bragging about it all.’

  What neither Gordon nor Tana brags about is the work they both do for charities. For example, they regularly make quiet visits to the shelter for battered wives where Gordon’s mother had sought shelter from her husband when Gordon was living in London. ‘They never make any fuss but they always bring down some of the children’s old clothes and toys,’ says Helen. And in London, Gordon’s old clothes and size-12 shoes are taken to a centre for the homeless and people with alcohol problems.

  In a more high-profile manner, Gordon has managed to raise well over £100,000 for a host of different charities over the years through his marathon running. A regular at the London Marathon (where he was once humiliated to learn that television gardener Charlie Dimmock had beaten him by eight minutes), he has picked causes ranging from the women’s refuge and the Food Chain, which offers meals to people with HIV, to the premature-birth charity Tommy’s and Sport Relief, which helps youngsters in inner cities and other areas channel their energies into sport rather than crime or drugs.

  Running marathons has always been a favourite activity for Gordon, and one he shares with Tana. It seems a strange choice because the training takes up so much time and time is the one thing Gordon has very little of. But it is obvious when you consider his background as the utterly driven, fiercely competitive son of a sports-centre manager. Fitness was clearly vital for Gordon as a professional footballer. And when he became a chef his nightly runs brought two other key benefits. First, they allowed him to clear his head and freshen up after long hours in the hot, humid, noisy and angry kitchen environment. Second, and very simply, they offered him a convenient and cheap way of getting home after a late-night shift when public transport was thin on the ground and he was surviving on rock-bottom wages.

  ‘I would run down along the Thames totally alone, watching the patterns on the water from the embankment and from the bridges. It’s so quiet when there’s not much traffic, a magical, beautiful experience,’ he says. ‘Running gives me fresh air, freedom and quiet time to myself. It’s the best way of de-stressing.’ Running also helped him woo Tana in the early days of their relationship. With next to no spare time, they turned Sunday-morning jogs into dates, pretty much running, talking and falling in love all at the same time, according to Gordon.

  The man who has spent a lifetime testing, proving and pushing himself was never going to be content just jogging at the weekend, or running home from work in the week, however. He started entering races when he was still working with Michel Roux at Le Gavroche, not knowing that years later he and his mentor would both be running in the same London Marathon. (To his embarrassment, despite a massive media interest in the rivalry between the two chefs, Gordon’s finishing time of three hours eighteen minutes would put him behind both Michel and fellow runner Tana in the cold and rainy 2004 event.)

  Over the years, Gordon has kept running and competing in order to fight off the downside of kitchen life. ‘Chefs don’t sit and eat proper meals during the day – we graze – and that’s a bad way to live and eat. By running, I am able to enjoy eating without putting too much weight on.’ He wasn’t alone. Over the years, he has persuad
ed scores of his colleagues to join him out on the road. In the seven most serious months of pre-London Marathon training, they tend to run two nights a week, normally Tuesdays and Thursdays, as well as doing half-marathons on Sundays. On the big day, Gordon has sometimes had at the starting line with him up to a dozen staff members, from wine waiters to dish washers, plus his equally dedicated father-in-law.

  Tana’s dad often arrives at the Ramsays’ front door in his running kit early on a Sunday morning to see if either his daughter or son-in-law is ready for a pre-breakfast race. And, unable to compete with his own father, Gordon is almost always prepared to compete with Tana’s. That could go some way to explain why, having realised he is unlikely to match the 50-plus marathons Chris has finished, Gordon decided to try to beat the older man at a slightly different game. In 2001, he decided to take up double marathons, including the ferociously testing ‘Comrades’ challenge that takes place every year in South Africa. ‘It is 59 miles and the terrain is as tough as the distance,’ says Gordon. ‘You need to give it everything you have from the start because, if you don’t finish the first marathon in less than a certain amount of time, you are pulled from the competition.’ In his first attempt, Gordon made the cut and crossed the finishing line in ten and a half hours.

  But, in 2004, he wasn’t as successful and had to stop at the 30-mile point before being taken to hospital by helicopter suffering from leg injuries and exhaustion. So, with 40 just a couple of years away, was Gordon’s body no longer up to the challenge? Not surprisingly, he was having none of it. As he became increasingly notorious for his expletive-strewn television appearances, he says, the problem was that, if he could train at all, he had to try to do so in disguise – even in the early hours of the morning. ‘There always seems to be groups of builders in white vans yelling out: “Table Onze, you fucker!” if I’m not hidden away under a cap,’ he says.

  Heading to the ‘big five’ hills around Durban for the Comrades challenge wasn’t the only trip Gordon made to Africa, however. The Comic Relief charity asked him to visit a village in Tanzania alongside Lenny Henry in December 2002. At first, pairing the two men seemed like great fun. In the 1900s, Lenny had famously created the character of Gareth Blackstock for his sitcom Chef! Gareth was described as ‘The enfant terrible of culinary art, impossibly difficult to work for, anally fastidious about his creations and possessing a volcanic temper and savage tongue.’ It is like looking in the mirror, the pair had joked when they had first met shortly after the show had aired. But they both found very little to laugh about when they got together again for the Comic Relief fundraiser.

  The idea behind the trip was for Gordon to use local ingredients and cook as good and nutritious a meal as he could for around a hundred street children – but he and Lenny had to do so without a kitchen, without running water and without outside help. What they saw in Africa shocked them from the moment their plane landed. ‘It was Christmas in London and eight and a half hours later you are in the bleakest place in the world,’ said Gordon. ‘We saw kids of three or four sleeping in the gutters by a sewage pipe with no caring adults anywhere around to look after them. It was awful, just awful,’ said Lenny.

  Determined to hide their feelings, the pair threw themselves into the job in hand, chopping wood, building fires, putting together the huge pot of flour, oats and water to make ugali, the street kids’ favourite food, then washing everything up to stress the importance of basic hygiene.

  The men said none of it was easy, either mentally or physically. ‘I know it probably sounds a bit wet, but I cried for four nights on the trot,’ Gordon said afterwards. ‘I was close to tears, big time, during the day, but I was determined not to cry in front of the kids. So you needed to break down in the evening, after you’d finished work, to get it off your chest so that you could get through the next day. To make matters worse, it was not just the poverty that was so terrible. The kids sniff glue to comatose themselves when darkness falls, because that’s when they get attacked and abused. Guys terrorising youngsters, waiting to pounce. Come midnight, it’s evil. Night-time in Arusha is like Baghdad in the middle of war.’

  As is so often the case in such terrible situations, it was the individual stories that hit home the hardest. ‘I met a young guy called Alex who had been sexually abused by his grandfather. His dad had got another woman and his mum had run away, so he was on his own. We just clicked when he grabbed my hand, tried to speak in broken English. He was dying for his mum – he described her as his best mate – and he hadn’t seen her in seven years. I know how important my mum is to me. But I made a big mistake. I gave him some money to buy shoes and he was beaten up for it.’ Later, when serving food to the villagers, Gordon gave Alex some seconds – and nearly caused a riot. Throughout the short trip, Gordon says he was haunted by the contrast between life in rural Tanzania and life back in London.

  ‘I had come from Claridge’s just before Christmas, where it was all Champagne and caviar. Yet, when we cooked for these kids, it was the first time many of them had eaten properly in so long. The culture shock was extraordinary and, while I don’t regret anything I have ever done in my life, I wish I had experienced something like this a little earlier on. It has taught me so much and given me so much new perspective.’

  Feeling physically sick, unable to eat surrounded by such poverty and suffering, and unable to forget what he had seen once he was back in London, Gordon says he ultimately lost two and half stone as a direct result of the experience. When Alex Ferguson came into his restaurant one day shortly afterwards, he said the chef looked ‘as rough as a gypsy’s dog’. And, as a consequence of it all, Gordon changed the way his family ate at home as well.

  ‘Little Alex is a legend in our house now. I told the kids all about him and we all watched the videos from Africa so they know how fortunate they are. They know they’re lucky to have food. Megan had a bowl of Honey Nut Loops but she only ate half of them and I got upset. Waste now makes me sick, knowing how appreciated that would be over there. So Tana and I decided that we’ll give the kids half portions. If they want more, they’ll ask.’ That Christmas, having seen and heard about Alex and the other children in Africa, the Ramsay children were also asked to give up some of their own toys for charity before being given their presents. Gordon says he nearly cried again when none of them hesitated for as much as a second before doing so.

  ‘Come on, Doodles.’ More than three years after his African experience, Gordon swings a giggling Megan on to his shoulders before taking her to the local public pool for a Sunday-morning swim. Sundays are her morning – after Gordon takes Jack to his tiny tots’ football training on a Saturday. And, whatever Megan, Jack, Holly and Matilda do, Gordon tries always to remember to praise and support them.

  ‘What happened between me and my dad will never happen between me and my children,’ he says, his voice uncharacteristically quiet, his intention clear. ‘I hope to be the one they will remember as having always been there to pick up the pieces for them. Not as one who said “I told you so” when things when wrong. Whatever they choose to do in life I will be behind them one hundred per cent. All I want for them is that they’ll be happy, doing whatever it is that they themselves choose to do. Kicking a football. In a kitchen. Whatever.’

  That said, Gordon’s fatherly advice for his son, in particular, can still be typically blunt. ‘I tell Jack if he doesn’t eat spinach his widger won’t grow’ is just one nugget of Ramsay wisdom that leaves Tana rolling her eyes at tea-time.

  ‘The Gordon Ramsay that strangers read about or see on their televisions is not the Gordon I see at home’ is how Tana sums up their unconventional but successful domestic life. And she says her famously rude, insensitive and chauvinistic husband really does have a sensitive side. ‘He tells me he loves me several times a day. And when one of the children says, “I love you, Daddy,” he always has the same reply. “Not as much as I love you.”’

  SIXTEEN

  MEETING MOMMA CHERRI<
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  Several thousand delegates representing the cream of the country’s restaurant trade were on the P&O cruise ship Oriana in 2005 when they were asked which famous chef they thought was the most positive role model for their industry.

  ‘Jamie Oliver,’ said six out of ten.

  ‘Gordon Ramsay,’ said one in ten.

  ‘Well, that’s a load of bollocks,’ said Gordon himself, who was one of the keynote speakers on the cruise and left the boat shortly after the survey results had been announced. More than a decade after starting his catering career, Gordon was as ready to speak his mind as ever.

  His problem, however, was persuading people that his straight talking always came from the heart. ‘With Hell’s Kitchen I was in danger of becoming a caricature of myself,’ he realised after watching the tapes and reading the press coverage. All the onscreen anger and the frustrations had been genuine, but he detected a whiff of Anne Robinson in some of his putdowns and people were asking if he was acting for the cameras rather than really caring about the quality of the food. His lifelong fear of losing credibility resurfaced – and this turned out to be one of the major reasons why he turned down ITV’s £1-million offer to host a second series of the show.

  Giving up such a huge pay cheque was made ever so slightly easier by the fact that an even bigger rival offer was waiting in the wings, however. Channel 4 had stumped up a reported £1.2-million deal to take in more Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares and any other shows the chef wanted to make. ‘It let me out of the straitjacket,’ he said when asked why he accepted it. He also said he loved the pure challenge of Kitchen Nightmares: heading out on the road, finding out how close the chosen restaurants might be to disaster and working out if they could be saved. Fortunately for everyone, the next set of restaurants the producers had found for him turned out to be crackers.