Gordon Ramsay Read online

  Whether it is swimming or soccer, Gordon also likes to join in with his kids. Now in his forties, he is proud to be as fit as ever. He ran the London Marathon for the ninth time in 2008. He has an unlikely passion for burgers (he admitted that In-N-Out burgers in LA were his secret vice – and that he once ate one in the restaurant then bought a second in the drive-through to eat in his car). But he still works out as often as he can – and reporters say it shows.

  ‘I arrive at Soho House at breakfast time and Ramsay bounds in, an aspirant Popeye with muscles bulging out of a blue T-shirt. He was named as television’s scariest personality in a recent Radio Times poll because of his talent for turning big men into trembling cry babies on Hell’s Kitchen and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Yet he is starting this particular day in a positively charming mood, politely offering me tea and keen to know whether the flight from London was OK,’ recorded James Steen.

  Others agree that Gordon can defy all their expectations. ‘He is taller and thinner than you might expect, a bit less profane and very friendly,’ said the Telegraph’s Neil Midgley who met him for a quick cookery lesson when Channel Four’s latest Cookalong Live show was about to go on air. ‘Much as I plead with him to swear at me over my eggs he just won’t.’

  In truth, though, Midgely may simply not have known which buttons to press. If you want to hear Gordon swear then there remains one sure-fire way to raise the temperature. Call him a ‘celebrity chef’ and wait for him to let rip. It is the one description that he simply cannot bear. ‘I am a chef who happens to appear on television, that’s it,’ he says whenever the subject is raised. ‘I am a grafter. I work my arse off. So it is wrong to give me that title. Being called a celebrity makes a mockery of how hard I have worked. Someone comes out of Big Brother, they get a page in Heat magazine, they are a famous person. So why compare me to them? Without the telly I am a serious chef and on telly I am a serious chef.’

  That’s been true since the very first day he exploded on to all our television screens. Back on the day that the whole Gordon Ramsay phenomenon was born.

  ONE

  THE FIRST ****ING NIGHTMARE

  ‘You’re a total ****wit. A complete and utter ****er and you are seriously ****ing me off.’

  Four production staff in the television company’s editing suite sat and stared at the bank of screens in front of them in shocked silence. They had never been able to broadcast this much bad language before and no one thought that they would be allowed to start now. ‘Reel it along a bit so we can check the next part,’ said the producer finally. Maybe this had just been a one-off outburst that could be edited down before the show was aired.

  ‘Your service is crap and the food itself is a fucking disgrace. You should be fucking ashamed of yourself.’

  ‘Reel it on a bit more.’

  ‘Fuck off. I don’t want to discuss it any more. If I had my way, I’d fucking fire you on the spot and you’d never work in a fucking restaurant again if you live to be a fucking hundred.’ Gordon Ramsay stormed out of view and the screen went black. There was another long, shocked silence from the production team. As one-off outbursts go, this one was taking a long time to run its course.

  ‘Could we maybe beep it all out?’ asked the researcher hopefully.

  The group sat in silence once more as the sound technician did the work and then clicked on ‘play’. The angry blond-haired man on screen was back and his mood didn’t seem to have improved. ‘Beep hell. If you beep dare send food out in that kind of beep condition you deserve to be beep shot. I can’t beep believe this. Beep, beep hell.’

  ‘It’s not going to work, is it?’ said one of the production managers as the meeting ended. ‘All he does is swear, so if we lose the swearing we lose the whole show. Maybe we’ve just got to run with it. How bad can it be? With a bit of luck, no one’s going to notice.’

  But, as it turned out, everyone did notice on Tuesday, 27 April 2004 when the first episode of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares was broadcast to more than four million viewers on Channel 4. When they had done the sums, television critics said Gordon had used the f-word every ten seconds at the start of the programme and ended up swearing a staggering 111 times in the 50-minute show. That more than doubled the previous British record for bad language, which had been set with the screening of the gangster movie Goodfellas in 2001.

  ‘Ramsay swears five or six times a minute, uses “fuck” as a noun, an adjective and a verb, sometimes all in the same sentence, sometimes twice. It is a joy to watch,’ said the normally disapproving Times. ‘Gordon is a natural on television because he is so compelling, so passionate and so unbelievably rude,’ said Lucy Cavendish of London’s Evening Standard.

  Over the next couple of days, every paper would scream out its own opinions about Gordon’s unprecedented spate of bad language. Some hailed Gordon as a straight-talking hero and a true voice of the people. Others said he was going to be responsible for the end of civilised society as we knew it. Everyone, it seemed, had an opinion and Gordon refused to apologise to any of them.

  ‘You brought the catering industry into disrepute,’ said one critic immediately after the first show was aired.

  ‘Bullshit,’ replied Gordon.

  ‘You bullied and humiliated a hapless 21-year-old chef,’ said another.

  ‘Bollocks. I didn’t humiliate him. He made a fucking tosser of himself without any help from me.’

  Taking part in Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares in 2004 had been a huge gamble for 37-year-old Gordon Ramsay. When the producers first approached him about the show, he was one of the most successful and respected restaurateurs in the country. He employed more than 850 people, had millions in the bank and had won more Michelin stars in less time than any British chef in history. His name was above the door in some of the country’s most prestigious five-star hotels, with Ramsay restaurants at the Berkeley, Claridge’s, the Connaught and the Savoy.

  So would taking part in a reality-television show boost his reputation as he tried to take the Ramsay brand global and open restaurants everywhere from New York and Las Vegas to Dubai and Singapore? Or would it ruin everything if he was dismissed as a foul-mouthed bully who cared more about fame than food?

  Gordon says he agreed to do the show because he genuinely thought he could make a difference to the restaurants being featured. And he was determined to stop the programme being seen as a vanity television project with him as a figurehead presenter and everyone else doing all the work. ‘I wanted to be physical and from the start I told the producers I didn’t just want to be some bloke in a suit holding a clipboard. I went into those establishments hands-on at a thousand miles an hour and grafted because I wanted it to be a one-man crusade to turn those places around. What was unfolding at a lot of the restaurants was a worst-case scenario and we couldn’t have changed it if I’d only been there for one hour a day to show off for the cameras. I was serious about putting the hours in here and serious about turning these places around.’

  On a broader level, Gordon also thought he could do everyone a favour by getting involved in this extreme makeover project. ‘There are too many bad places to eat in Britain when there doesn’t need to be any of them,’ he said. ‘I’ve suffered and I’ve learned every day in my career and I think I’ve got enough knowledge to pass on to other people. Whether they take my advice or not is up to them. But I think I can prove I know what works.’

  The first restaurant in the series would put that confidence to its sternest test – and cement Gordon’s reputation as the hard man of British catering. It had been in the winter of 2003 that Gordon had first travelled up to Silsden in West Yorkshire to meet the owner and staff of the desperately troubled Bonaparte’s restaurant. The man who had invited him there, 21-year-old head chef Tim Gray, had seen an advertisement in a catering magazine asking failing restaurants to get in touch if they wanted help in turning their fortunes around. And very few restaurants could live up to the word ‘failing’ as convincingly
as Bonaparte’s.

  A few early statistics showed up the scale of the challenge. Owner Sue Ray had worked out that she needed to make around £2,000 a week just to cover her costs. But when Gordon arrived, she was collecting less than £200. The basement restaurant could comfortably seat 50 diners. But most nights they were serving no more than five. Sue’s bankers were getting twitchy and her staff were getting worried. Tim, in particular, thought his dreams of becoming a television chef and running his own chain of restaurants would be dashed if Bonaparte’s went under. The Ramsay touch was required.

  The thinking behind the new show was simple. Originally due to be called Cutting the Mustard, it was to feature Gordon arriving at and assessing a variety of different struggling restaurants. Over up to two weeks of daily work and filming, he would try to show the staff how to raise their game and turn things around. They would then be left to their own devices for a month before he and the film crew would return to see if the transformation had worked. The idea was to be reality television with a difference. Gordon wanted to be constructive rather than destructive, and to be compared to Troubleshooter’s quietly spoken Sir John Harvey-Jones rather than Pop Idol’s famously angry Simon Cowell.

  Unfortunately, his first impressions of Bonaparte’s head chef left no room for Sir John’s calm reasoning. ‘Ramsay does not merely eat Tim alive, he tenderises him with a mallet and then spatchcocks him,’ wrote the food editor of The Times after watching a preview tape of the show.

  The problems began when Gordon had to persuade Sue to offer free meals to diners just to get enough people into the restaurant so that he could see what £300-a-week chef Tim was capable of. It wasn’t a lot.

  ‘I see myself as cooking fine cuisine,’ Tim claimed unconvincingly.

  ‘Bollocks,’ Gordon responded. ‘Cook me an omelette so I can see how you do the basics.’

  But Tim didn’t know where to start. And when he put his strange, egg-based creation in the oven instead of on the hob, Gordon called a halt. Which was when the real television drama began.

  Tim was given free rein to create his ‘signature dish’ in an attempt to impress his new mentor and repair his reputation. The result became known as Scallop-gate. Without realising that the scallops he cooked alongside black pudding and hollandaise sauce had gone off, Tim proudly served his creation to Gordon. ‘Fucking minging,’ was all Gordon could say, before rushing outside to try to throw them back up in full view of the cameras.

  ‘It wasn’t exactly the best start it could have been. I felt a bit sick myself,’ Tim admitted afterwards. ‘I thought, Oh my God, I’ve poisoned Gordon Ramsay, and I felt terrible.’

  But the young chef would soon be feeling a whole lot worse. Next under the Ramsay microscope came the kitchen itself. And it turned out that the rancid scallops weren’t the only horrors on the shelves. Mouldy strawberries, rotting tomatoes, ingrained dirt, grime and grease. Having bitten his tongue to keep the nervous television producers happy, Gordon finally let rip.

  ‘I’ve got a good fucking mind to get hold of fucking Sue and just tell her to fucking shut the place. This is the fucking pits. I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire fucking life. This is a fucking disgrace and a fucking embarrassment to catering.’

  With these seven f-words in less than a minute, British television passed a new milestone.

  Tim, however, had more humiliations and X-rated ear-bashings in store. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, Gordon wanted to see if he could cook better at home than he could in the restaurant. But he couldn’t. With Tim’s parents and grandparents sitting alongside him, Gordon watched as the youngster let his croutons catch fire and saw his weekend roast end in disaster. The head chef who had started out washing dishes in a restaurant five years earlier appeared to have learned little of value since.

  Back at the restaurant, Gordon put Tim alongside his fellow chef and best mate Lee Symonds to see how well the pair really knew their food. The blindfolded taste test proved his worst fears. Having told the chefs that they had to decide which of the dishes put in front of them was a rare and which a medium steak, Gordon replaced the beef with a plate of pork and a plate of lamb. Neither Tim nor Lee could taste the difference.

  The locals in Silsden knew what they liked to eat, though – and it wasn’t the fancy cuisine Tim aspired to. After working out what nearby restaurants served and what they charged for it, Gordon said he thought Bonaparte’s should focus on simpler, traditional Yorkshire fare. Tim didn’t agree and another brilliant television moment was born. The pair headed out into the streets with a silver platter of food to see if the locals preferred Tim’s complex cooking or Gordon’s heartier beef and ale pie. ‘One-nil, you Fucker!’ Gordon crowed when the first customer picked the pie. ‘Two fucking nil! Three-nil, you tosser!’

  Then, with a final laugh, Gordon threw Tim’s rejected food into the river.

  Amazingly enough, as the humiliations went on, Gordon admitted that, despite all evidence to the contrary, he was actually holding himself in check. When he pushed Tim’s head in a basin of whisked egg whites as a punishment for yet another perceived misdemeanour, he admitted, ‘I only did it because I couldn’t exactly ram a rolling pin up his arse on television.’ And he says, when he got frustrated at the flamboyant way the youngster tossed a salad, he only just stopped himself from pushing the greens in the same direction.

  More seriously, what really bothered Gordon was a growing fear that Tim didn’t share his passion for food. For, without that, he felt he could never get through to him. ‘Before I arrived at the restaurant on that first day, I had been told that all I had to do was strip away Tim’s pretensions, that he had the makings of a great chef because he truly loved food. Did he fuck! He was in love with the notion of being famous, not with food. That seriously pissed me off. That sort of thing always has.’

  The show, however, had to go on. And with it came the twist that made Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares such compulsive television. The man who had shouted and sworn his kitchen companions into submission suddenly turned into their best friend and most loyal supporter. Nobody was beyond saving, he said. And he was ready to do whatever it took to do just that.

  At Bonaparte’s, that meant cleaning up the health-hazard kitchen and trying to give Tim some pride in his workplace. Next came a unique way to give the lacklustre chef some new drive and energy. ‘You’re fucking 21, for fuck’s sake! You should be getting 12 fucking hard-ons a day,’ Gordon yelled, dragging Tim out for a kickabout on a nearby football pitch. Swinging on the goalposts after scoring a goal, the former Rangers player tried desperately to fire up his young charge. And after a while he seemed to be succeeding.

  A quieter and more intense Gordon gradually persuaded Tim to find fresher, simpler ingredients and to pick less demanding, more suitable recipes. He offered a mini-masterclass on how to taste and season food. It was real teaching and as a result real progress was made and real results achieved. On Valentine’s Night, one of the most important dates in many restaurants’ calendars, a rush of marketing meant the normally empty dining room at Bonaparte’s was full. Diners seemed to like the new bistro look Gordon had picked, and the new, less fussy menu that reflected it. And in the kitchen a newly energised Tim and deputy Lee were firing on all cylinders, ready and able to serve 50 meals for the first time in their careers.

  It was uplifting, exciting stuff, marked by tears, hugs and genuine pleasure on all sides. The simple conclusion was that Gordon had done his job. He had seen the problems, sorted them out and turned Bonaparte’s around in less than two weeks. Show over. Or was it?

  Immediately after Valentine’s Day, a still outspoken Gordon headed back down south to leave the transformed Bonaparte’s crew to it. ‘They were lazy little fuckers and I had to go back to Claridge’s and just watch the kitchen run like a beautiful machine, the dishes passing before my eyes, before I felt calm again,’ he told friends afterwards.

  But things were not as calm in Yorkshire. A mo
nth later, Gordon and the film crew were back to see if business was still booming. It wasn’t.

  Tim and Sue were back fighting each other about the way the kitchen and the restaurant should be run. The dirt, the grime and the piles of rotting food were back behind the scenes. And the customers had all but disappeared. Tim was on his way out and Bonaparte’s, Sue said, was closing its doors for good.

  At this stage, Tim was taking it all on the chin – though a war of words between him and Gordon would soon be played out in the tabloids as the youngster tried everything from getting on GMTV to getting into Big Brother. ‘I can’t cook as well as I thought I could, clearly, but I can cook a bit otherwise I would never earn a wage,’ was his initial assessment of the lessons he had learned. ‘I have damaged my reputation but it is not true I was sacked from the restaurant. I had already resigned.’

  Interestingly enough, he and Gordon did share one surprising concern in the days after their show was broadcast. Tim was worried about what his mother would say now she had seen her son smoking on television, while Gordon was terrified about what his would say about his swearing.

  ‘Wherever he learned to talk like that, it certainly wasn’t at home,’ was her initial verdict when reporters asked her for her views. ‘I always make sure he says sorry if he uses any bad language in front of me.’

  What the show’s production company, Optomen, realised the moment the cameras had stopped rolling in Silsden was that in Gordon Ramsay they had a real, gold-plated star on their hands. So the show’s original title, Cutting the Mustard, was thrown out and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares was born. The swearing, they decided, would just have to be seen as part of the package and they would take any official criticism as it came.