by Neil Simpson
‘He’s back, and he’s as angry as ever,’ screamed the posters as the second series of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares prepared to hit the screens in the summer of 2005. For once, the advertisers weren’t exaggerating, and the first show of the series introduced viewers to a chef who would become almost as infamous as Tim, from Bonaparte’s, a year earlier. ‘The show casts Gordon, quite unmistakably, as Freddy from the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise,’ wrote Pete Clark in the Evening Standard after watching a preview tape. ‘Freddy, you may recall, invaded the dreams of impressionable young people in order to butcher them. My understanding was that the Gordon Ramsay franchise was a kinder and more caring operation, but there were times last night when it seemed likely that Alex, a young and impressionable chef, was about to make history by being served to his customers, pan-fried in his own juices.’
Alex, it turned out, had big dreams, the main one being to produce ‘modern Italian food in a modern style’. Unfortunately for his customers, this seemed to involve taking vegetables straight from the local Tesco to his microwave, using packet sauces and failing to fully defrost any of his puddings. ‘This is about as authentic as a fucking Chinese takeaway’ was Gordon’s initial assessment of Alex’s La Lanterna restaurant in Letchworth, Hertfordshire. And things soon got worse.
‘It looks like two penises on a plate,’ Gordon said when the 29-year-old chef put one of his favourite sausage dishes in front of him. He also found out that Alex’s taste buds left a little bit to be desired. From his early twenties, Gordon had been obsessed by training his palate to recognise the best foods and the finest flavours. Alex, it is fair to say, had never really thought much about his palate. So, when Gordon conjured up a fantastic piece of television theatre and arranged a blind tasting test where the youngster had to pick the best between a Gordon Ramsay signature dish and a Pot Noodle, the result was never really in doubt. Alex said he much preferred the Pot Noodle.
He also refused to accept Gordon’s criticisms of his food. ‘I learned everything from a well-respected Italian chef,’ he claimed, outraged that his Italian dishes weren’t considered up to scratch. Not quite believing it, Gordon tracked the man down – and found him working as a taxi driver.
Maybe all this would have been just about acceptable to Gordon had Alex been more aware of his shortcomings. But, with the cameras rolling, he found out just how out of touch the youngster was – he had paid a fortune to attach the number plate A1 6HEF to his car, even though Gordon said he was a million miles from the A-list. It was the final straw and Gordon was ready to let rip with his early assessment of everything he had seen. ‘The whole place is straight out of an eighties fake trattoria,’ he said in despair. ‘The food is fucking disgusting and this place is in such meltdown that he’s even let the most basic standards of hygiene slip. It’s a breeding ground for rats, mice and all kids of pests. The biggest one is Alex. He’s been scurrying around in his own filth for far too long. And I’ve got a good mind to get that number plate off his car and stick it up his arse sideways.’
As usual, what he did instead was to coach and coerce Alex into raising his game. The pair started off with a massive cleaning job in the kitchen and a clear-out of the long, fussy menu that Alex could never hope to handle. All the staff – including the unlikely combination of Alex’s best mate and his ex-girlfriend, who were in charge of the front of house – got shouted into shape. Amazingly, one of Gordon’s chief rivals inadvertently stepped in to help. Gary Rhodes opened his chequebook when Alex agreed to sell his A1 6HEF number plate to help pay off the restaurant’s ever-growing overdraft and provide some funds for a relaunch. But would it all work? As usual, one of the best parts of the programme came when Gordon returned six weeks later to see if the nightmare was over. And at La Lanterna it looked as if it was.
‘This is exactly the kind of food Alex should have been serving all along,’ said Gordon, stunned and happy when he returned to find the chef making fresh ravioli, spaghetti with meatballs and genuine Italian desserts.
Alex was smiling just as broadly. ‘It has been an amazing experience. Where we were taking in £2,000 a week we have now doubled it and are beyond our break-even point. I hadn’t seen the first series of Kitchen Nightmares when I signed up to take part but friends who knew the show said, “Are you mad? He’ll slaughter you.” But I am so glad I did it. Gordon’s an amazing guy and he’s helped me save my business.’
But not everyone was as happy. As part of the original turnaround of La Lanterna, Gordon had gone out into the street offering pizza to passers-by to try to show Alex how well they would respond to simpler, better Italian food. On camera, Gordon assured one vegetarian volunteer that the pizza on offer was meat-free – before admitting that the base was in fact covered in Parma ham. ‘Good luck with the Vegemite,’ he yelled after the pedestrian, triggering a massive wave of criticism. As fate would have it, the programme was aired in National Vegetarian Week and the Vegetarian Society was up in arms. Its top brass said they believed Gordon had broken European law by tricking the vegetarian into eating meat on camera and were desperate to trace the man. ‘We’d like him to get in touch as there could be a test case under the European Convention on Human Rights,’ said a spokesman.
While nothing ever came of the claim, it wasn’t the first time Gordon had annoyed the Society’s members. A couple of years earlier, he had joked about telling a table of vegetarians that the artichoke soup they were eating had been made with chicken stock rather than vegetable stock, even though it hadn’t. He had also defined a bad day as ‘one where 25 vegetarians turn up unannounced’ at one of his restaurants and said people who don’t eat meat are ‘a real pain in the arse’.
Over the years, his views had mellowed enormously, however, and he had introduced vegetarian menus into all his restaurants, and says he loves coming up with new ideas for them. And, while analysts and anoraks totted up that Gordon still swore roughly once every 40 seconds in this second series of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, he did seem to be making more friends than enemies. The biggest, brightest and most memorable of them turned out to be Charita Jones, the owner of Momma Cherri’s Soul Food Shack, buried deep in the winding Lanes of Brighton.
‘Y’all gotta come to me. Ain’t no one like me in the country. You gotta come see me,’ she had begged the show’s producers when they were looking for restaurants in need of the Ramsay touch. But, when they agreed, she laid down her ground rules from the start. ‘When Gordon came round, I told him, “Listen, I am a churchgoing woman. You’d better mind your language.”’
Unfortunately, this wasn’t going to be an easy request for Gordon to stick to. Because he soon found a lot to swear about.
For once, though, the problem wasn’t with the food. Gordon sat down, read the menu, looked at the food, tasted it and loved it. ‘He didn’t look that impressed when he walked in the restaurant but I fixed him catfish goujons with pineapple salsa and a cornbread with vegetable I call hush puppies. Then he had meat jambalaya, baby back ribs with barbecue sauce, a sweetcorn and broad beans dish called succotash plus coleslaw and salad. His plate was just piled up. And when he handed me back his plate it had just four bones on it. I grabbed my camera and took a picture. I said, “Whether y’all do this film or not, Gordon Ramsay cleaned his plate in my restaurant!” He said, “I feel like I’ve been to my mother’s,” and I took that as a big compliment. Even if I had to close tomorrow, that did it for me.’
But Gordon did want to do the film with Charita. And he could tell she needed help if she wanted to stay open. She might well be serving the best soul food in Britain but her restaurant hadn’t made a penny in profit in four years and, with her debts topping £65,000, the banks were closing in.
The key reason, Gordon said, was that she was too nice to her staff, paying most of them more than she paid herself and putting up with any number of unexplained absences and sudden departures. Too many of them, he said, were part-timers who showed part-time commitment. And none seem
ed to really know what they ought to be doing. ‘I hate to ruin a good party but, if you want to run a good business, then the terms “laid-back” and “professional” don’t mix,’ said Gordon, foreshadowing Sir Alan Sugar in The Apprentice. ‘The food is not the problem here. It’s the way you are running everything. You are too much of a mother. You baby all your staff. You let them get away with murder.’
In one bit of classic television, he found out that Charita’s chef was at home with childcare problems, leaving her to do all his work that day. Stopping Charita in her tracks as she tried to make excuses for her chef, Gordon and the film crew headed out to the chef’s home with all the ingredients he should have been preparing. Off camera, they continued to talk through his problems, tried to find solutions – and got him to work on the food at the same time to take the pressure off his boss.
What Gordon also did was to persuade Charita to play to her own formidable strengths. He told her to leave the kitchen to the others and get out into the dining room and into the streets of Brighton to drum up business. An entire new menu was also created. It was simpler, cheaper and, with the new name ‘Soul in a bowl’, it was a whole lot easier to promote.
So, six weeks later, had it all worked? In the second half of a feel-good episode that matched Gordon’s Faking It show with Ed Devlin of nearly four years earlier, it turned out that it had. Charita had managed to stick to most, if not all, of Gordon’s instructions. And, while her debts would take years to clear, more customers were at last coming through her doors. On one memorable night, all 40 seats in the restaurant were full and people were being turned away – something that had never happened before.
‘I was like a sponge, taking in what Gordon said and giving everything a try. He had my chefs sweating but it was just the push they needed. I thought all I had to do was cook food and put it on plates. Gordon taught me how to kick ass. He taught me I don’t have to be so nice,’ said Charita. And he was certainly the right man to teach that particular lesson.
The episode also served to silence the critics who said Gordon was playing to the cameras and only interested in humiliating and embarrassing the chefs and restaurant owners featured in it. Instead, he proved that he really could help turn ailing businesses around – with some brilliant entertainment thrown in. So, at the end of this episode, Charita and Gordon were incredibly close, with the ever-sassy Charita just about holding on to the upper hand.
‘Will you adopt me?’ Gordon asked the woman who over the years had fostered more than 30 kids and raised two of her own.
‘Yes, I will,’ she replied. ‘But you’ve got to wash your mouth out first.’
Unfortunately, not everyone Gordon had met while filming Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares over the years would stay in such good spirits. The bosses of D-Place in Chelmsford could be forgiven for a sense-of-humour failure: their ‘global cuisine’ restaurant had shut its doors even before Gordon returned to check on progress six weeks after giving them his survival strategy.
But one other restaurant had closed in even more acrimonious fashion. In Silsden, West Yorkshire, a ‘For Sale’ sign was hanging outside the premises of Bonaparte’s – the first restaurant that Gordon had tackled in the previous series of the show a year earlier, where the world had been introduced to 21-year-old trainee chef Tim Gray. During and immediately after filming, the owner, Sue Ray, said she was pleasantly surprised by Gordon’s manner. ‘He is really a sheep in wolf’s clothing. He does not pull any punches, but he’s really charming and good fun, quite the opposite of how he normally appears on television. We had a bit of a laugh with him and he’s actually a very pleasant guy.’
One year on, she had changed her mind completely and said dicing with the kitchen devil had been a disaster from start to finish. ‘They said they were here to help. They said the show would make the restaurant profitable but in the programme they just focused on the negative and made a laughing stock out of me. They certainly didn’t say there were going to call the show Kitchen Nightmares, make a fool out of me and destroy my business. It was very cruel,’ she said of Ramsay, the producers and the edited version of the show that had been broadcast about her.
Tim was equally unhappy. ‘I think I came out of it worse than anyone and it wasn’t all down to me. A friend called me afterwards and asked me how it felt to be the biggest twat in Britain?’
Unable to make the restaurant pay despite trying to introduce the changes Gordon had suggested, Sue had shut it down and was now struggling just to run a bar in the same building. When the second series of the show was about to be broadcast, she warned anyone else against taking part, telling the Daily Mail that the experience had ruined her life, left her with £500,000 of debts, the prospect of bankruptcy, deep depression and a desire only to move to live in a camper van in Spain. ‘Gordon Ramsay was extremely negative and destructive with me. The programme crippled me and I am just waiting for the axe to fall from the bank. I have been on tablets for depression, we were getting hate mail, the programme had terrible repercussions. I currently have a flat above Bonaparte’s but when the building is sold I am out of house and home. The bank will repossess it if it is not sold and even if it is I won’t see a penny of the money because I owe so much. Ramsay has taken everything from me. I am thinking of going down to London and sleeping outside Claridge’s to embarrass him.’
The producers advised her not to and the show’s publicist, Julie Pickford, rejected Sue’s claims that she had been stitched up. ‘We invited people to apply to the show if they felt they could benefit from the wisdom Gordon could offer. There were big issues at Bonaparte’s restaurant and they were discussed at the beginning of the programme when Sue told Gordon the reasons for inviting him in. She had full opportunity to have her say. Gordon’s reputation precedes him. It’s not as if people didn’t know what to expect with him.’
Once bitten, twice shy, Sue was outraged when Gordon subsequently turned up to try to film a follow-up programme. ‘How dare you? I thought. You cheeky bastard. You’ve done enough damage.’ Gordon, however, remained convinced that, despite all the drawbacks, Bonaparte’s could be turned into a success. ‘I still believe Sue could make it work but she has to learn that to run a restaurant she first has to run a clean kitchen,’ he said.
He believed she should also take on board that nowadays all publicity really can be good publicity. Charita Jones believed it, and so too did Neil Farrell, who had nearly come to blows with Gordon when the Glass House was featured a week after Bonaparte’s in that first series. ‘Halfway through the actual programme, we had 10,000 hits on our website and within a week of it ending we had 183,000 hits,’ he said. ‘That’s when I thought, This isn’t so bad. It’s easy to swallow your pride when you see a positive effect on your business.’
While he had laid into Gordon’s professionalism in the first few days after his episode had been broadcast, Neil ultimately softened his views. In the end, he even had the story of the show written up on the back of the restaurant’s menus to drum up even more publicity and interest. ‘Overall we have gained more than we have lost and that is down to Ramsay giving me a kick up the butt,’ he said. Neil was also ready with some secret advice for anyone following in his footsteps by taking part in the show. ‘Out of the blue one night, I got a call from the owner of one of the restaurants being featured in the new series,’ he says, though he won’t reveal who it was. ‘He was in floods of tears and Gordon had only been there for one day. He was crying, “How can I get rid of this terrible man?” All I could say was: “Don’t let the bastard see you cry.”’ Neil also tried to persuade his caller that it was worth staying the course and listening to what Gordon had to say, however painful that might be.
The experts agreed that there were long-term advantages to getting Gordon’s advice, and that there was more to the show than just good television. ‘Gordon creates drama to identify with,’ said Professor Kim James of the Cranfield School of Management. ‘But the ultimate test of a leader is the
ir legacy and Ramsay’s greatest gift to the restaurants he turns around will be to leave them capable of good theatre when he is no longer the star.’
Gordon was also hoping that customers would do some of his work for him in other underperforming restaurants, though he despairs of the fact that British diners are strangely incapable of fighting for their rights. ‘I don’t think customers are tough enough. Food, on the whole, is getting miles better in this country. Shops and supermarkets have improved, we’re moving forward as a nation. But we lack the confidence to question the standards in a restaurant. You’re paying for it, though, so it’s your right. If you go and buy a car, you make sure you get value for money, a three-year warranty, a service history, and you look at securing part-exchange three years down the line. You scrutinise everything. But going out to dinner, we just sit there like lambs to the slaughter and just accept what’s given.’
Or do we? Some experts had credited Gordon with changing that as well, identifying a ‘Ramsay effect’ that was making us a more demanding nation. Advertising firm Publicis said we had seen how Gordon and the likes of Sharon Osbourne got results by being direct, and were following suit. ‘We are following their examples, rejecting the stiff upper lip and becoming more volatile and more verbally and emotionally demonstrative,’ said Paul Edwards. ‘We’re no longer so ashamed of making our views clear and we’re getting angry in public more often.’
What Gordon was also doing, when the cameras had stopped rolling, was to try to change the lives of some of the talented and hopeful chefs that he met while filming his various programmes. Relatively experienced workers such as Spencer Ralph at the Walnut Tree and Andy Trowell at Moore Place in Esher, Surrey, were given some behind-the-scenes encouragement to help them develop their careers, while those at the very bottom of the catering pile were also offered a lift. Claire Porter, the 24-year-old part-time chef at the Glass House in Ambleside, was a prime example of the latter. Claire had never been to catering college, was running a bookshop as her day job and only ended up in the Glass House’s kitchen after trying to earn some extra money by working evening shifts in the front of house. Gordon, however, said he knew she had potential from the start, and that she reminded him of Angela Hartnett, one of his most successful proteges, who was now heading up his restaurant at London’s luxury Connaught Hotel. After long, private pep talks with Claire, Gordon persuaded her to consider catering as a full-time career. She left Cumbria for London, where he helped her get an interview and then a job on the Connaught’s garnish section alongside Angela herself.