by Neil Simpson
With the month-long filming schedule completed and the editing done, the first show hit American screens on Memorial Day weekend, the official start of the American summer, when huge numbers of people switch off their televisions and head outside or into the country. Ratings were decent, if unspectacular. But, as Gordon’s behaviour started to get talked about, Fox got the audience lift it had been hoping for. By the time the two-hour finale was aired, Hell’s Kitchen was the top-rated show of the week in the 18–49 age bracket that television companies – and their advertisers – are desperate to attract. Gordon Ramsay had become a household name, of which a lot more later.
In the first episode, with its opening shots of the night-time LA skyline, Gordon started as he meant to go on. Having arrived at the restaurant, the 12 contestants had 45 minutes to make their signature dishes, which ‘Chef Ramsay’ proceeded to dissect. Andrew, a 24-year-old office assistant from Livingston, New Jersey, was first to step forward for the analysis. And very soon he wished he hadn’t.
Gordon tasted the pasta dish, grimaced, leaned to his side and spat the mouthful out into a bucket. ‘That is absolute dog shit’ was his initial conclusion. But the transcript shows there was another shock to come.
‘Have a taste,’ he challenged Andrew.
‘It could use some salt,’ the trainee chef replied.
‘You think you’re smart, yeah?’
‘I have my moments.’
‘And how long have you been cooking?’
‘Ten years.’
‘What a waste of ten years. Get back in fucking line.’
So there it was: the first f-word of the show. A massive shock for American television audiences. The country’s squeamishness about what goes on television has long surprised Europeans, who could never really understand why such a fuss was made after Janet Jackson’s ‘wardrobe malfunction’ at the 2004 Super Bowl. That one brief flash of Jackson’s flesh had triggered public apologies by television network chiefs and a huge fine and led to the introduction of time delays on similar broadcasts in the future. So no one could quite believe that Gordon could get away with such unwholesome language on a prime-time reality show. But somehow he did and, as Hell’s Kitchen continued, the insults and the honesty would continue to fly.
‘If I had known you were coming, I would have put lobster in,’ said one of the next contestants after Gordon tasted her signature dish of Chinese sausage.
‘You did know I was coming. Get back in line’ was all it took to dismiss her.
And then there was the glorious-sounding ‘pan-seared chicken breast, stuffed with Portobello mushrooms and goat’s cheese’ from 25-year-old purchasing manager Jimmy from Williston Park, New York. ‘It looks like a dehydrated camel’s turd’ was Gordon’s description, before that sample too was spat into the bin and Gordon started throwing some of the food back at its creator to see if he was agile enough to catch it. He wasn’t, which led to another shock for American audiences.
Gordon was also ready to speak his mind about a different television taboo: size. ‘For as long as Jimmy weighs 250 pounds, he is never going to make a great chef because he is too clumsy’ was Gordon’s initial verdict on the contestant he would endlessly refer to as ‘big boy’ and once as ‘one big, fucking overgrown muffin’.
Next up was 26-year-old Ralf, whose job, he said, was ‘Number One in a restaurant’. Gordon was unimpressed. ‘Number One? With this shit? Back in line’ was all he needed to say.
The contestants soon learned that answering back was a bad idea – as proved by Colorado chef Michael. ‘It’s really not that bad,’ the 27-year-old countered feebly, after his dish was rejected.
‘Not that bad? Let me tell you something, you have a palate like a cow’s backside, that was disgusting,’ he was told.
Gordon’s overall verdict when every dish had been tasted was not good: ‘a pile of shit’ was just one other pithy description. But he repeated his belief that anyone could be transformed into a master chef with the right instruction, encouragement and passion. He would do so with at least one member of this group. And since he had scattered a few compliments among the criticisms it was possible to believe him.
Off set and off camera, what Gordon couldn’t believe was the way the American contestants seemed to have been shielded from the truth all their lives. ‘In my London restaurants, if someone makes a mistake there can be no: “Hey, let’s sit down and discuss this, and never mind, you’ll get it right next time,”’ he said. But, as Simon Cowell had found when filming American Idol, ‘never mind, you’ll get it right next time’ seemed to be the American way. Genuine criticism seemed off limits, with everyone desperate to accentuate the positive and gloss over any shortcomings. In LA, negativity seemed to be a bigger sin than swearing and Gordon reckoned his hopeful chefs had been over-praised for too long. On his television debut there, he wanted to give everyone a very loud wake-up call.
Unfortunately, within days of starting the show, Gordon was to get a wake-up call himself. A very minor scuffle took place off camera when Gordon got too close to one of his trainees, who then stumbled back and injured his ankle. In most parts of the world, it would have been bad luck, soon forgotten. In America, it triggered a legal crisis that threatened to bring production of the show to a shuddering halt – much to Gordon’s disgust. ‘The problem with Yanks is that they are just wimps’ was his conclusion on the matter. ‘I’ve never punched anyone in a kitchen, but I have been punched. You stand there like a man, you don’t wimp out and run crying for your mum. In America, they run for their attorney. I’m Gordon Ramsay, for goodness sake. People know I’m volatile. But I didn’t mean to hurt the guy.’
The injured contestant allegedly wanted to sue Gordon and his producers for $3 million but after a series of meetings Granada was said to have sorted the matter out with a $125,000 out-of-court settlement. Other experts said Gordon and Granada might have been putting themselves in line for a different set of legal problems owing to the confrontational nature of the show. ‘Back in Britain, a barrage of criticism and insults could undermine an employee’s confidence and lead to accusations of unfair constructive dismissal and big compensation claims,’ said Iain Patterson, partner at law firm Browne Jackson. Triggering the same events across the Atlantic in the most litigious country on earth was not worth contemplating. So lawyers, on all sides, were kept busy for the duration of Gordon’s stay.
The final group of people who were open-mouthed at Gordon’s attitudes and language were the hopeful diners who came to Hell’s Kitchen expecting a decent meal. They were in the most service-driven economy in the world, confident that in America the customer was always king. Or at least that is the way things had been until now. In Gordon’s little corner of America, the head chef was king – and the customer had to wait until the chef was happy before they got their food.
‘Can you just shut the fuck up for 30 seconds?’ he yelled at three blonde women who had been waiting more than 45 minutes for their starters and very reasonably came into the kitchen to ask when they might be arriving. ‘Just ignore those bimbos,’ he told his staff as the women gave up and returned to their table. An hour and a quarter later, when the foursome had been served their starters but were still waiting for their main courses, they came back to the chef’s window again – for a second slice of classic Ramsay.
‘Mr Chef, you hurt my friend’s feelings,’ one of them began, again perfectly reasonably.
‘I hurt your friend’s feelings? How?’ Gordon asked, unable even to pretend that he cared.
‘She is very upset because you told her to fuck off.’
‘Oh really, did I? OK, will you tell her that I meant it?’ was his perfect putdown before asking the maitre d’ to ‘escort these women back to plastic surgery’.
The two American chefs who were heading up the red and blue teams in America admitted to being staggered at the way Gordon spoke and acted from the first moment they met. ‘The first time I was introduced to him, he was
clearly the biggest guy in the room,’ said Scott Leibfried, himself a bruiser of a chef whose day job was at the celebrated Napa Valley Grill in Los Angeles. ‘I haven’t heard stuff like he is dishing out in a very long time. In the state of California, that sort of thing is actually illegal. You can’t cuss at your staff.’
But, as Gordon cussed away, the jury was still out on whether the show would be a hit. At first, the American critics were unimpressed, just as the British ones had been. ‘It’s a cooking show that’s hard to stomach,’ said the Washington Post amid a sea of equally negative culinary cliches. ‘Ramsay is a cartoonishly abusive snot,’ said the show-business bible Variety. But, as the episodes rolled by and the trainee chefs shaped up, viewers were starting to love the show. Gordon had picked up the nickname G-Ram and was starting to become a household name. Or at least he was in households where swearing was allowed, which seemed to be an awful lot more than some straight-laced critics had imagined. Mike Darnell, one of the senior executives at the Fox network, said Ramsay’s ‘acerbic’ style was the peg that had helped get American viewers hooked. So after the heavily tattooed chef Michael had won the show – getting an offer to work at Gordon Ramsay in London as part of the package – the man himself was immediately signed up for a second big-money series.
And the money certainly was big. Simon Cowell, Anne Robinson and even tough ‘Supernanny’ Jo Frost have all found that speaking your mind in America can do wonders for your bank account. Gordon had been edging his way towards inclusion in most of the newspaper Rich Lists for the past five years. By the summer of 2004, he was valued at £20 million and hit eighteenth position in the list of Britain’s wealthiest ‘craft millionaires’ – people who had made it to the top without going to university. Top of that list was Phones 4U founder John Caudwell with a hard-to-beat fortune of £1.28 billion. By 2006, Gordon had made it on to the mainstream rich lists, however, and this wasn’t just due to the entertainment money coming in from America.
When the cameras were not rolling at home and abroad, Gordon had been busy expanding almost every other aspect of his culinary empire. The core restaurants were still working as strong cash generators: in 2005, it was revealed that his Claridge’s site was making a profit of nearly £1.5 million a year after nearly £7 million went through its tills in just 12 months. The Savoy Grill and the Gordon Ramsay restaurant were each making profits of more than £400,000 a year and Petrus added nearly £300,000 to the cash pile. Ramsay restaurants at the Connaught and Berkeley Hotels also made profits of more than £13,000 a month. In the year in which losses of up to £800,000 from the closure of Amaryllis in Glasgow were still being absorbed, Gordon’s holding company still made a record profit of some £3.8 million, with analysts saying the whole business could be worth a staggering £50 million.
While all the cash tills had been ringing, Gordon had turned into a major employer – his staff numbers rise by at least a hundred a year, depending on the number of restaurant launches, and topped one thousand by the middle of 2005. But what got the accountants really excited were all the spin-off business ventures that added millions more to Gordon’s total income. And these were about as varied as you can imagine. Gordon’s willingness to keep taking his shirt off during Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares had won him a surprising new fan base, so the tired-looking 38-year-old took the unexpected step of posing for his own glossy calendar in 2005. Flatteringly, he saw it outsell many of the more predictably popular offerings from the likes of Peter Andre, the ‘Hollyoaks Babes’ and the ‘Soap Hunks’.
Gordon was also estimated to sell up to £4 million a year of his own-label chocolates, even though these had been launched pretty much on a whim and never given any proper publicity or marketing. A signature line of fine bone china was being planned and a new range of ready meals for supermarkets was being considered.
A subtle change of direction had also given Gordon’s publishing income a boost. His early cookbooks – A Passion for Flavour, A Passion for Seafood, A Chef for All Seasons and Just Desserts – had come in for some widespread criticism for demanding too much of their readers. The public perception was that the books sometimes read like instructional manuals and didn’t make cooking seem much fun because when you tried to follow the recipes you spent too much time worrying you might be getting things wrong. And Gordon’s schoolmasterly attitude seemed out of step in an era when the likes of Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson were hamming it up, showing that exact measurements didn’t always matter and that almost anyone could make good food. Conspiracy theorists said that Gordon deliberately made his early books overly complicated so that readers would make mistakes at home and end up spending big money in his restaurants to see how things should really be done.
Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Heaven was Gordon’s first attempt to boost book sales and redress the balance. First published in 2004, it was unashamedly linked to the Kitchen Nightmares show and included a brief mention of many of the good and bad things he had seen while filming. It included more than a hundred new recipes but, despite Gordon’s attempts at a lighter touch, some buyers continued to be turned off by the overall tone.
‘It is an interesting if a bit light on content cookbook,’ wrote one London-based reviewer on Amazon. ‘A short word of warning though to less-than-confident cooks. Many of the recipes assume a reasonable level of culinary skill which may have some starters a bit lost. Delia Smith it ain’t.’
Another reviewer agreed that Gordon’s book came off worse than Delia’s in the value-for-money stakes when the number of recipes in each was added up. Others repeated the old claims that the recipes were made unnecessarily hard just to try to make the chef who created them look good.
Having taken comments such as these on board, Gordon finally came up with a very lucrative back-to-basics response: Gordon Ramsay Makes It Easy. The idea was to write a book that would ‘do what it says on the tin’ and bring a whole new generation of nervous cooks into his fold. In a bid to create the practical, real-world edge that people said had been missing from his early books, Gordon and his team researched and wrote the new book in his family kitchen. It was a bit of an eye-opener for a man who had got used to the most lavish restaurant kitchens money can buy. ‘It’s hard, cooking at home,’ he admitted when he talked about these latest recipes. ‘You’ve got no brigade. You have to prep, cook and wash up and the space is limited. You have to be more clever in buying the ingredients because you’ve got less refrigerator space. Recipes have to reflect all this.’
And it turned out that the new, simpler ideas did just that. The book hit the hardback top ten within weeks of its publication in 2005 and became his best selling book to date. And this wasn’t the only money Gordon was making from publishing his recipes. He had signed what was thought to be the best-paid newspaper deal in Fleet Street when he agreed to produce an average of three colour pages of recipes and comment for The Times’s Saturday magazine each week. No one has said publicly how much his contract was worth. But industry experts put it at around £2,500 a week – or £500 per well-photographed recipe.
With so much going on, it was little wonder that Gordon increasingly started to rely on others to run huge parts of his life. ‘Chefs are the worst businessmen in the world,’ he said once. ‘I have never made the mistake of believing that I am a chef and a businessman at the same time. That way trouble lies – the two just don’t mix.’ Trusting his entire financial affairs to his father-in-law, Chris, left Gordon free to focus on his new set of career mountains in America and beyond. It was a policy that had paid huge dividends in recent years. But as 2005 got under way, both Gordon and Chris faced a series of warnings that the gravy train might not run for ever.
The first came when a newspaper used the new Freedom of Information Act to obtain documents proving that the ill-fated Amaryllis in Glasgow had failed basic hygiene and cleaning tests before being closed down. Meanwhile, critics were circling over several of Gordon’s more successful London restaurants with claims that th
ey were starting to lose their spark. But the most worrying rumours of all suggested that at least some of Gordon’s hard-won Michelin stars could be at risk if he carried on playing for the cameras around the world and left his kitchens to fend for themselves.
It was serious stuff and Gordon and Chris knew they had to tackle it straight away. Television and America would have to go on hold for a while, Gordon decided. For the next few months, he had work to do in London.
EIGHTEEN
NO LIMITS
‘Stay close to the kitchen.’ That had been the simple, five word piece of advice Gordon had been given as a fiercely ambitious twenty-something trainee chef in Paris. Back in London in the early summer of 2005 he knew he had to start living up to it again. Over the past few months, a series of unflattering reviews of his flagship restaurants had been published and posted on internet websites. It looked as if his prolonged absences from the restaurants that bore his name were starting to cause problems and everyone feared that the consequences could be far more serious than they looked.
With massively high fixed costs, Gordon was acutely aware that once restaurants hit the skids they could fail faster than almost any other business. And he knew that once customers lost faith in a restaurant they hardly ever came back.
‘To me, Gordon was my God until I ate here,’ a Moya King wrote on one website about his eponymous Chelsea restaurant. ‘Food was lacking any of the passion I expected, celeriac soup was a creamy glue, two courses back to back contained peas and broad beans, desserts were not pleasant, panna cotta was tasteless and chocolate tarte so bitter I couldn’t eat it, and service was lacking any kind of warmth and leadership. After hearing all he preaches on television Gordon would not have been happy dining with me that evening. Save your money,’ she advised other diners.