Gordon Ramsay

by Neil Simpson

  But a worrying number of other people already seemed to share Moya’s opinions. ‘Not the best place we have been to. I was expecting 100 per cent for the price we were paying but service wasn’t up to standard, the food was just OK and the desserts were naff. Won’t be going there again, sorry Gordon,’ came from Anna O’Neill towards the end of June 2005. ‘I had the set lunch and as a former restaurant reviewer I have to say that this is not extraordinary cooking,’ wrote another diner, while phrases such as: ‘Too expensive and too pretentious’, ‘No atmosphere and the food was average’, ‘Not worth the money you are spending’ and ‘This proves that hype can override quality,’ littered a host of other customer comments that summer.

  Over the years Gordon had been criticised by everyone from broadcasting standards officers to cookery school teachers. None of it had bothered him. ‘I will only start worrying if my customers start complaining,’ he said in the late 1990s. Nearly a decade later, having read some of the comments while surfing the web in the offices deep within Claridge’s Hotel, Gordon wondered if that time had finally come. He walked down to the staff toilets at Claridge’s and passed the Bafta award he had won the previous April for his performance in Kitchen Nightmares. Collecting it had been a fantastic honour. But no amount of entertainment gongs would dull the pain if he lost some of his even more valuable Michelin stars.

  ‘Don’t judge me, judge my food,’ he had once said in defiance of a critic who said his x-rated diatribes on television were dragging the industry down. But could he in all honesty say he was as involved in that food in 2005 as he had been five or ten years earlier?

  Fortunately two recent incidents had reminded Gordon that his love of kitchen life was as strong as ever. The first had become apparent in America during the filming of Hell’s Kitchen – the very thing that was being blamed for letting his mind wander. ‘I was doing the nightly service at Hell’s Kitchen. It was torture, but it was self-inflicted torture. I realised that the last time it had felt like that to me had been in the early days of Aubergine when it was chaotic. I like that roughness. I need to feel that stuff. It’s back to school, the challenge is there, there’s the struggle to get it right which I hadn’t felt for two or three years. It was all the old questions of what everyone on the team was thinking, how they are feeling, who is going to ****up, who is going to perform. I realised I missed the adrenaline, I missed that kind of buzz,’ he said immediately afterwards.

  The second reminder came when he came back from a brief ‘boyfriend and girlfriend’ holiday with Tana. ‘When we landed I thought: “It will be so nice to see the kids, I can’t wait.” But I just saw them for 15 minutes and then I went back to work. It was only after I had been back in the kitchen at Claridge’s for 20 minutes that I started to mellow out and feel I was coming back to life again.’

  Desperate to keep these feelings alive and to kick-start his restaurants, Gordon went on a whistle-stop mid-summer tour of his kitchens and dining rooms across the capital. And he immediately realised that he had to regain control over the way his restaurants felt, as well as over what they served. One of the reasons he said Amaryllis in Glasgow had lost money and been forced to close was because Gordon felt the head chef there had got too carried away with making fancy, self-indulgent food that confused and intimidated potential customers. If there was any danger of this trend being repeated in London he realised he would have to act fast to nip it in the bud.

  As a man born and brought up on a council estate Gordon had always been determined to make sure that people from a similar background could feel comfortable in every one of his restaurants. ‘I have always hated all that pompous, farty intimidation stuff that you used to get in every hotel restaurant in the world. I had to change all that in mine,’ he says. And he thinks fair and impeccable service is the best way to make sure these changes stick. In a Ramsay restaurant he says everyone has to be treated the same and everyone has to be treated well – and after a few weeks back in the London hot seats he was certain he was fulfilling the promise. ‘This month I have served Kylie Minogue, George Clooney and my little sister. They all got the same treatment as every other customer. The other day a couple from Yorkshire also came all the way down to London to eat lunch at one of my London restaurants for £70, accompanied by a carafe of tap water. They were treated no differently from any so-called VIP client or the businessmen who once spent £44,000 on dinner at Petrus.’

  That said, a few favoured customers did qualify for a little extra attention. When Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares’ Charita Jones and her family came to his flagship restaurant in Claridge’s to celebrate her foster daughter’s 21st birthday she enjoyed a special welcome. ‘Gordon sent bottles of champagne to us and treated us like royalty,’ says Charita, whose Brighton restaurant was still thriving more than a year after Gordon had arrived to troubleshoot it.

  Sitting alone at Claridge’s after another late night service had ended Gordon took stock of the state of play in his own business. There had, perhaps, been shortcomings in some of the attitudes and standards he had seen over the past few weeks. But he was convinced he had managed to nip the worst of them in the bud and re-inspire his staff about what they could and should be achieving. He was confident that his teams were back at the top of their games. And that was important because the Ramsay empire was in for yet another massive period of expansion. It would be some time before he could spend so much time in his kitchens again.

  On 25 May 2005, when the first episode of the second series of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares had been broadcast on Channel Four, for example, Gordon hadn’t actually had time to watch. Instead he had been hoping to see the Beckhams and a host of other celebrity invitees at the launch of Maze, his 8th London restaurant. Billed as a New York style diner, Maze is squeezed into the Marriott Hotel in Grosvenor Square, just around the corner from the heavily fortified American Embassy. The idea behind the restaurant was a real departure from the relatively formal dining structures at Gordon’s other hotel restaurants. Instead of choosing a standard starter, main course and desert, diners at Maze pick any number of small ‘tapas style’ dishes at around £11 a time. Gordon said he was fusing French and Asian cuisine on the menu, which included the likes of foie gras and apricot pizza, lamb with cinnamon roasted sweetbreads and bayleaf and Alsace chard. And if you fancy an unusual pudding then his sea salt and almond ice-cream is pretty hard to beat.

  Gordon says that these off-the-wall menu ideas – half of them created in the kitchen in Gordon and Tana’s home, half created at Claridge’s – are what keeps him enthusiastic about food and what drives him to keep opening new restaurants. A dish of scallops with a spiced raisin puree and cauliflower might not work at Gordon Ramsay back in Chelsea, for example. But by opening Maze, Gordon reckoned he and his head chef Jason Atherton had found somewhere suitable to serve it.

  Gordon has always been a voracious consumer of information about what other chefs were doing – at home he has stacks of boxes where he files his 3,500 strong (and growing) collection of menus from around the world. ‘Whenever I hear from a guest in one of my restaurants that they are going somewhere new I ask if they might get me a menu,’ he says. ‘One of my favourites is from the three Michelin star Louis XV in Monaco.’ He will also spend big money checking out the competition. ‘Any time a good new restaurant opens up, anywhere in the world, we check it out,’ he told a London management conference which had asked him to share his business secrets. ‘Five years ago we could afford to do this just in Britain. But now, to stay in front we have to respond to the amazing changes happening in, say, Asia and Australia. I send teams of 4-6 people to these places, not just chefs, but waiters too, and they check out everything, even delicatessens and cooking stores. Then we start incorporating the best ideas into what we do.’

  Not surprisingly the man who says he has no time to read books, except for the occasional sporting biography, also keeps tabs on the industry through a vast collection of rival cookbooks. And in 2005
he needed all the new ideas he could lay his hands on.

  Having conquered American television screens Gordon was searching for a site in New York so he could try and conquer the famously demanding diners of Manhattan. And before then he had another huge challenge – amidst the equally expensive skyscrapers of Tokyo. The Japanese job had come to Gordon via Jan Monkedieck, the German general manager of the brand new and extraordinarily luxurious Conrad Toyko hotel. ‘Within minutes of learning that I would be running the hotel I knew I had to get Gordon,’ says Jan. So Gordon grabbed some red-eye flights to the Far East to discuss the opening of the 80-seater Cerise by Gordon Ramsay. In the process Gordon tried to defy the critics who said he was only a figurehead to vanity projects that borrowed his name but neither his time nor his attention. Furnishing a dining room could be as satisfying as furnishing a plate, he said. And to the joy of his fellow professionals he could be just as demanding of both tasks.

  ‘There is nothing worse than someone saying: “I want a restaurant. Let me know when it’s finished,” and walking away,’ says designer and Ramsay client Keith Hobbs of United Designers who helped Terence Conran design the massive Quaglino’s restaurant and has since worked with most rival restaurateurs. ‘It helps if clients make a real commitment to a project and that’s why we like working with Gordon Ramsay and others such as Marco Pierre White. They do show the commitment, they know what they want and they know how to run a restaurant.’

  In Tokyo, running a restaurant takes even more skill and care, however. The whole culture of Japan is based on doing things right, so an extraordinary attention to detail is required if you are to succeed there. And in 2005 Gordon was not the only big name chef trying to make a mark in the Far East – once more he would find himself competing against his former mentors, in this case Joel Robuchon who had an established luxury restaurant in the city.

  Convinced that his name would win more attention, and generate more Yen, Gordon put his head down and continued to work on the launch. He admitted that the language barriers in the kitchen were causing difficulties and that the humidity was causing problems with the desserts. But he said both challenges were exciting, rather than insurmountable. As usual Gordon’s strategy was to take a near obsessive control of the set-up stages of the new venture, before handing over the reigns to one of his young lieutenants – in this case 28-year-old Chelsea and Claridge’s graduate Andy Cook.

  What Gordon did, with shades of Richard Branson and EasyJet’s Stelios, was ham things up to win headlines when the opening night arrived – he wore a flowing Japanese cape and happily smashed open the traditional barrel of saki for luck. In his typical unrestrained style Gordon was also ready to shout down any of his critics who said he was spreading himself too thinly and that standards in Cerise would fall the moment he left Japan.

  ‘If you’re such a hands-on chef, who’s going to do the cooking when you are not there?’ This time it was an American journalist who asked the question during the launch celebrations in Tokyo.

  ‘The same person who is going to do it when I am there. And can I ask you a question? Is that an Armani suit you are wearing?’

  ‘Yes it is.’

  ‘Cost about five hundred quid?’

  ‘No, $2,500.’

  ‘That’s a lot of money for a suit. When you bought it did you ask if it was ****ing Giorgio who did all the stitching? Next question.’

  The press conference, Gordon says, didn’t last much longer and with his point made he shook Andy by the hand one more time and left him to follow his training, spin the Ramsay magic and hopefully win some fantastic reviews. Gordon himself had more work to do elsewhere.

  ‘Chicken or beef, sir?’

  On his way back from Tokyo, Gordon got a little more than the standard meal time question from the cabin crew. He got the chance to choose from half a dozen of his own meals, each of which had been created as part of a lucrative and long-term deal to oversee the Business and First Class catering of Singapore Airlines. The restaurants in Dubai and now Tokyo meant that you could eat Gordon’s food in the Middle and the Far East as well as in Europe. The Singapore Airlines deal meant you could eat it as you travelled between each of the territories. Getting his name above a door in New York, Las Vegas or Miami would put yet another continent under Gordon’s belt. And as he headed back to London this was to be his next big challenge.

  ‘It has always been my ambition to come to America and open a restaurant. But you’ve only got one shot at it, so you have to get it right,’ Gordon said as the search for a perfect site went on. He was acutely aware that few British chefs had made a real go of things in the states. So as usual he wanted to be the one to do it first and then break the mould. Getting the food right to succeed in America would be as important as getting the location right, however. And it was here that Gordon was hitting some unexpected difficulties.

  Nearly two decades earlier as a hard-up trainee chef Gordon had been unable to afford to check out the competition by visiting any of the day’s great restaurants. In 2005, with millions in the bank, his problem was eating out without being hassled by other diners and the master chefs themselves. ‘Eating out can be a pain in the arse. Nowadays I tend to get offered four or five courses I don’t want. It’s kind of the chefs, but they always ask your opinion. The minute you don’t finish a dish completely the chef wants to know what it was about his food you didn’t like. I’m flattered they offer me all these dishes but to be honest I always end up waiting 45 minutes for my starter and the another hour for my main course,’ he said of his experiences eating out in Britain. Since Hell’s Kitchen had gone on national television in America the same was happening on that side of the Atlantic. ‘Everything’s gone wild over there and I can’t get off the plane without people wanting to talk to or own a part of me.’

  Not surprisingly Gordon says the biggest problems arise in his own restaurants – effectively making their dining rooms off-limits. ‘I know that I would lose all respect from my staff and customers if they turned around and saw me over-indulging and the diners in particular want to see me downstairs cooking their food rather than sitting with them eating it,’ he says wistfully. ‘But it’s really weird to be in this situation as they are good restaurants and I would love to eat in them some day.’

  Sending Tana out to scout around for him was becoming almost as hard as her public profile was edging up as well. Having done the obligatory ‘at home’ shoots for a series of celebrity magazines she had taken advantage of her skills as a former nursery school teacher by filming a week-long stint on GMTV sharing parenting tips in Ramsay’s Toddler Nightmares. The idea had been for her to try and help a family run ragged by their badly behaved kids. ‘I consider my children well behaved but they still test my patience now and again so I am not saying that if I show you ways in which I have dealt with problems that everything will be perfect for you,’ Tana began. ‘But if you have some basic rules and you’re consistent with them you can deal with difficult situations a lot quicker and a lot more easily.’ Telly nannies Jo Frost and Dr Tanya Byron could hardly have put it better themselves.

  But was this GMTV picture a true reflection of family life chez Ramsay? Tana had to admit that it was a relief that the cameras hadn’t been there on any of the many occasions her husband tried to bring their kids into line by threatening to cook their pet rabbit, Daisy, for example. Fortunately the Ramsay children could always tell when their dad was joking, and they knew exactly how to twist him round their little fingers. A few years earlier Megan had surprised her pre-school friends by telling them: ‘My dad’s a cooker’. Now she was well able to distinguish between the ‘the yukky man on television’ and the big softie who had finally given in to her request for a chocolate brown Labrador called Dudley, which she helped walk in the five acre private gardens that backed on to their London home.

  What Megan and the other children couldn’t do was follow their dad into work. Gordon and Tana were both determined not to raise either food
snobs or rich kids who didn’t know the value of money. As usual there was a rash of disapproving publicity when Gordon said his kids were banned from Claridge’s and his other restaurants until they were at least 16 – chefs from Europe in particular said that doing so would mean Britain raised another generation of kids who didn’t respect good food and didn’t know how to behave when they ate out in public. But Gordon refused to bow to the demands for a re-think – and added that high prices meant he wouldn’t be taking them for afternoon tea in any grand London hotel either. ‘I could never take my children and spend £22 a head just to sit and have afternoon tea, it’s not apt, it’s wrong and I can’t think any differently. My mum would be mortified. Then there’s my Uncle Ronald, who runs a newsagent in Port Glasgow and gets 3p a paper. What would he think if I took the kids to a hotel to have afternoon tea for six at those sort of prices? He would think I had gone mad. My mum still works for social services, my sister is a single parent. I know what it is like to earn £100 a week and pay your rent and save up £50 to take your partner out to dinner. I haven’t lost the plot and I don’t want anyone else to either.’

  As usual with Gordon every relatively serious public pronouncement he made tended to be followed by a more humorous follow-up, however. So after saying his children couldn’t dine in his restaurants he did suggest that if he and Tana had another baby they would all be allowed to get jobs in his kitchens. ‘Five kids would be amazing,’ he said. ‘One each on fish, meat, hot starters, cold starters and the desserts. We could have a whole brigade and run our own restaurant.’

  Adding humour to the mix alongside his serious statements is only one characteristic of Gordon’s extraordinary life. Another is the fact that amidst all his good times, potential tragedy is never far from the surface. The sudden death of his abusive father, the worst relapses of his drug addicted brother, the death threats, the suicide of his best-friend in the kitchen world. Each awful incident had come at times when almost everything else in Gordon’s life had been going well and he had begun to relax about the future. It was a disturbing and seemingly endless pattern. So a tiny part of him may have been expecting the phone call that came during the brief family holiday he took in the late summer of 2005.