Gordon Ramsay (10 page)

‘It was as if we had resolved something that day. Finally, we had begun to feel close again,’ says Gordon. ‘I gave him £1,000 to put a deposit down on a flat to rent and we arranged that he would come to London the following month, not only to meet Tana and his grandchild but also to eat for the first time at my restaurant. The last thing I remember is looking back after we had said goodbye and feeling sorry for him. He was staring after me, crying.’

The big day when Gordon senior was due to arrive was set for 25 January 1999 and Gordon says he was as thrilled and excited about it as a child waiting for Christmas. ‘I just wanted to see him sitting at the table with a smile on his face. Even if he had sat there and got pissed I would have forgiven him.’

But it was never to be. Gordon senior had a massive heart attack on New Year’s Eve and died within 24 hours. Anger and frustration bubbles up in his son’s mind to this
day. ‘No one should die at just 53. I am so angry at him for dying so young and for not looking after himself. And I couldn’t believe I would never now get the fatherly seal of approval I so longed for. I had managed to have that one frank talk with him in Margate before he died. But I really wanted to ask him much more. Was he relieved about what I had done? Was he proud? I never got the chance. I got the feeling of unfinished business that will probably be with me for the rest of my life.’

Gordon remembers helping carry his father’s coffin into the church on the day of his funeral. ‘Stay strong, stay strong, stay strong,’ he mumbled to himself as the whole family suffered with the mixed emotions of guilt, anger, loss, love and, perhaps, relief.

When 25 January came, the table for two where Gordon’s dad and his new girlfriend were to have eaten sat empty as a silent tribute to the man Gordon had both loved and feared, respected and despised.

As well as never getting to meet Tana or Megan or eat his son’s food, Gordon senior was also to miss the other event which was to reshape Gordon’s life that spring: his debut on national television. A production company had approached him more than a year earlier about a project they had been planning for some time. Inspired by an explosion of interest in cooking, the company wanted to show what really happened inside a high-pressure, high-class commercial kitchen. They wanted fly-on-the-wall cameras to follow the life of a personable, charismatic, possibly even volatile chef to show diners what was really happening on the other side of the kitchen doors.

But which chef to choose? Marco Pierre White was one
obvious choice as his own roots in a broken home in Leeds gave him the street cred that the producers were looking for. Some of the older names were also in the frame, though the aim was to introduce viewers to a new generation of chefs rather than rely on those from the past. The likes of Gary Rhodes, Rick Stein and the heart-throb Jean-Christophe Novelli also went under the microscope.

But it was only when the producers first heard about Gordon that they knew they had hit the jackpot. Back then, he had won his first batch of awards and was desperately hungry for more. He was the ex-professional footballer, the boy from the ugly Glasgow council estate who was making some of the most exquisite food in London. And he was under a hell of a lot of pressure.

When the producers first came over to discuss the project, Gordon was still at Aubergine in Fulham. It was booming, but Gordon was still having sleepless nights about the money everyone had borrowed to set it up, and about the famously fickle restaurant trade. Celebrities and every other type of diner were keeping the tables filled for every lunch and dinner service. But Gordon knew there were no guarantees that a rival restaurant wouldn’t make some headlines and steal them all away overnight.

Friends and colleagues said Gordon was crazy to let the cameras in on his life. But at 31 he thought he had no choice. Any publicity was good publicity, he believed. So he signed on the dotted line. His life was going to be public property like never before.

Channel 4 was overjoyed. ‘We chose Gordon because he’s the best chef in Britain and because he makes great television,’ a spokesman told the
Mail on Sunday
just before
the series was aired. What they had loved most about him during filming was that he was the classic good-looking, angry young man, full of passion, contradictions and surprises – a genius chef with hooligan tendencies. Better still, he didn’t care if all of it was captured on camera.

When the show’s producers looked at the early tapes, they knew straight away what the series should be called:
Boiling Point
. Shown over nearly two months, it covered Gordon’s final days at Aubergine as well as the high-stress opening of Gordon Ramsay in Chelsea. As promised, it also opened the door on the reality of life in a kitchen and on the take-no-prisoners style of this particular chef. Gordon was shown yelling and swearing viciously at almost every member of his kitchen team from the moment the opening credits had ended. ‘Episode One ended with an employee cycling away in tears after being fired, Ramsay muttering: “I don’t give a shit,” as he went. For Episode Three, a special occasion in which the president of Michelin visited the restaurant, Ramsay rose to the occasion and wheeled out the c-word,’ was how one newspaper summed it up.

Throw in some gratuitous insults of the people who supplied the restaurant with food, Gordon’s extraordinary fury when he found out a turbot had been overcooked by 30 seconds and his relentless demands for better work, and a television phenomenon was born. ‘Every dish, every meal, every day has to be perfection’ became Gordon’s mantra on the show – repeated endlessly and with an ever-increasing choice of key adjectives in almost every episode. ‘Is your brain in your fucking arse, you fucking fat bastard?’ he had screamed, to give one example from the first show.
‘You’re going to lose your job, dick-head,’ he crowed in the next. ‘What about opening your big French eyes, arsehole?’ he roared, rounding things off nicely.

What also made headlines was Gordon’s uncompromising attitude to the food his staff were creating. Any imperfections and it was thrown back at them – sometimes literally. Whole platefuls, and often the plates themselves, were flung into the bin every evening. It was like no kitchen viewers had ever seen before.

‘The man is clearly an ogre and rarely has television witnessed anybody being so vile to their staff,’ said one reviewer.

Others found they had an even stronger reaction. ‘Shortly after watching
Boiling Point
, about Britain’s most brilliant and furious young chef, I had to go out for a walk, just to cool down. I was seething with directionless rage, catching it off Ramsay, whose profanities tumble out of his gob in a hailstorm of abuse, firing off invective which seems to be both deeply personal and yet random, as if the whole world needs bollocking all the time,’ wrote Charles Jennings, television reviewer of the
Observer
.

And readers of the tabloids were getting pretty much the same message – though in shorter words they could tailor to their own purposes. Gordon says a group of brickies, scaffolders and other workmen taking their lunch breaks on London’s Tottenham Court Road took to shouting: ‘Table Nine, you fucking arsehole!’ whenever they saw him heading down the road to work, for example.

Long famous for his four-course meals, Gordon had a new trademark: his liberal use of four-letter words. He tried to laugh off the criticism, saying he was using the
language of the industry and had nothing to apologise for. But not everyone agreed.

Viewers had flooded the broadcasting watchdog the Independent Television Commission with complaints about both the language and the events in
Boiling Point
. Gordon’s ‘persistent use of the f-word’ triggered most of the complaints but, as the ITC explained, ‘Some viewers also felt that scenes in which he bullied his staff and indulged in unhygienic kitchen practices gave the impression that such behaviour was acceptable.’

The complaint about strong language was the first to be rejected, however. Attempts by Channel 4 to bleep out the worst of the language had not worked, the report said, because ‘Strong language was indivisible from Ramsay’s excitable and aggressive persona at work’. The ITV ruled that Channel 4’s strong warning about what was to come at the start of each show should have alerted any sensitive viewers. It also dismissed the broader complaints about what went on in Gordon’s kitchens because ‘No encouragement was given to regard Ramsay’s behaviour as normal or acceptable’.

While some may have seen a statement such as this as a pretty strong insult, Gordon said he was just pleased to be able to carry on as before. But, before he could do so, he had to face some fire from his peers. David Wood, chief executive of the Hotel and Cater ing International Management Association, said the ITC wasn’t the only organisation being inundated with complaints about Gordon’s onscreen antics. ‘I am getting phone calls from parents saying their children are no longer going to become chefs,’ he said. ‘There are so many positive portrayals of chefs but Ramsay pushes it all down the pan.
I wish he were still in football. Then we could send him off.’

Anne Walker, managing director of catering recruitment company Springboard UK, said, ‘At a college last week, students were saying that they were so horrified by what they had seen that they were no longer sure that this was the kind of industry they wanted to go into.’

After dealing with Gordon, some existing workers found they couldn’t get out of the industry fast enough. In fact, in the summer of 1999, Gordon was actually arrested for allegedly beating up one of his staff – 22-year-old pastry chef Nathan Thomas. The row, of all things, had begun over the shape of a banana parfait.

‘Ramsay kept going on about it not being ball-shaped enough,’ Nathan told the police. ‘He just went berserk. When I said I was quitting, he went mad, telling me I was ungrateful. He’s a bully. A genius, but a monster.’

Police confirmed the arrest and Ramsay was bailed to appear at Chelsea police station the following month. Fortunately, by then, all sides had accepted that it was a storm in a restaurant teacup and the case, with all charges, was dropped. Gordon’s tough-guy reputation, however, had moved up another gear.

One final person was ready to speak out against the way Gordon was acting and the language he was using in 1999: his mother Helen. ‘She rang me up and told me that my language is appalling. I said, “Mum, you should have been sat in the dressing room at Rangers when we were losing 2–0.” When I’m working I get upset and I tried to explain that to her. All I am using is the language you hear in every kitchen and she does seem to accept that. Everyone swears
in kitchens if they want to produce the best food. If a kitchen is silent and everyone says “please” and “thank you”, then you’d never hit the heights. I’m focused on producing the best and, if swearing makes that happen, then I’ll keep on doing it.’

The good news for Gordon was that his diners seemed to like the fact that their food was being prepared with passion. As its popularity grew, the restaurant became a fixture of the gossip columns and saw a near-endless stream of famous names pass through the doors, sometimes a little worse for wear from drink. And the rest of the world had also started to wake up to the Gordon Ramsay phenomenon – though the man himself continued to take it all in his stride.

‘There was one American critic who demanded a free meal for a review and said she could only come at 8.30pm that Friday night,’ he recalls. ‘The restaurant was fully booked and the critic refused to accept that paying punters who may have made their plans months ahead could not be excluded just to make room for her and her companion.’

In the end, Gordon said he could offer the critic the table she wanted at 8.30pm on the Saturday night instead. What he ‘forgot’ to tell her was that Gordon Ramsay didn’t open on Saturday nights. ‘It was wicked, I know,’ he says. ‘I wanted to drive round in a car with tinted windows to see what happened when she turned up.’

This fearless attitude to critics, opinion-formers, celebrities and all the other people that chefs normally suck up to was yet another way Gordon drew himself apart from his peers. It had always been part of his personality; now it had become part of his appeal. And it was on full display on the infamous night that Joan Collins came to dinner.

SIX

T
o this day, Gordon says he never intended to throw Joan Collins out of his restaurant before she had even tasted her starter. His problem, he says, was never with her. It was with the man sitting opposite her, the restaurant critic AA Gill.

Gill is easily one of the most acerbic and idiosyncratic restaurant reviewers in the business. His pieces are often hilarious – sometimes focusing almost entirely on himself, his companions and on his journeys to and from the restaurant in question, with just a brief mention of the food or the atmosphere tacked on to the end. Readers have always loved it – but restaurant owners and chefs are not always so keen.

One of Gordon's contentions was that Gill veered too far and too frequently from discussing the food or the
ambience of a restaurant and ended up commenting on the one set of people Gordon saw as above approach: the customers. For someone with an ever-growing reputation as an angry, aggressive and frequently unpleasant perfectionist, Gordon always felt genuine warmth towards the paying punter, and after all it was his wish to please the customer that made him so demanding of his staff.

‘One night a lady ordered the caramelised duck with a puree of dates,' he says, to illustrate his attitude towards diners. ‘She asked for the duck to be well done and Jean-Claude, my manager, asked me, “How do you feel about that?” I said, “Jean-Claude, she's paying, she can have it fucking raw if she wants. I'll serve the neck if she likes and she can have the feet to take home for a consomme.”'

Gordon didn't believe that AA Gill was always quite so respectful of the general public, however. ‘Bloated Godalming plutocrats and their popsies' was just one unpleasant image of Gordon's typical customers recently conjured up on Gill's keyboard. In a bid to stop things escalating and provoking more verbal attacks, Gordon went over to the critic one night when they were both eating at the Ivy, in London's theatreland. He told him that if Gill didn't stick to criticising the food and the service he would no longer be welcome at his restaurant.