Gordon Ramsay (3 page)

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 month 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.

On an unofficial level, Gordon faced an immediate backlash from residents of Silsden and other viewers after the first show was aired. ‘All Gordon Ramsay and the programme makers were after were ratings,’ said Chris Bone, one of Tim’s best mates, who had watched the Bonaparte’s programme with horror. Other locals said Gordon had deliberately patronised the town’s residents by suggesting they were too stupid to appreciate anything other than hotpot or fish and chips when they went out to dinner.

Some criticism was even more personal, however. ‘Ramsay is just another fat millionaire going on television to make more money, humiliate people less fortunate than himself and try and keep everyone else in their place,’ Terry Clarke from Ipswich wrote on the internet chatroom DigitalSpy. ‘Just like Simon Cowell he doesn’t care about anyone but himself, he doesn’t know the first thing about hard work and he wouldn’t last ten minutes in the real world.’

But Terry could hardly have been more wrong. Hard work had long since been imprinted in Gordon’s DNA. He knew, and none better, how tough it is to come from nowhere and climb to the top of a profession where you have no friends, no contacts and no connections to help you. The failed footballer from a broken home on one of Glasgow’s toughest estates had been fighting against the odds from the start. Whatever the critics might say, Gordon was the perfect person to show others how to overcome obstacles and turn their careers around. He had been doing that all his life.

When you take the time to find out where Gordon is from, what he has seen and how far he has travelled, it is little wonder that he’s so angry. Little wonder he has no time for failure, for underperformance or for fools. And little wonder that he says bad language is one of the world’s least important sins. As far as Gordon is concerned, ‘hell’s kitchen’ wasn’t just the title of some future television show. It was also the place that had first saved and then almost destroyed him. ‘My life has been an incredible roller-coaster ride,’ he said in 2005. That ride had taken in incredible highs and terrible lows. And it had begun almost 40 years earlier in a family that risked being torn apart by alcohol, violence, drugs and fear.

TWO

E
gg and chips. Ham, egg and chips when Mum was feeling flush. Steak and chips with a fried egg on top on special occasions when Dad took the family out for cheap Sunday lunches at a local hotel. They are not the sort of mealtime memories you might expect to hear from the man who would turn out to be the highest-profile and most imaginative chef of his generation. But that was pretty much all Gordon Ramsay ate as a child in one of the toughest parts of Glasgow. That and tripe.

‘We didn’t have a lot of money, so it was a very hard upbringing with very limited food on the table,’ he says. ‘We never sat down to a starter, main course and pudding and we had to eat everything we were given. There was no such thing as “don’t like” in our family. Tripe is the obvious example. It wasn’t exactly anyone’s favourite, but we had to
eat it when we were served it. Mealtimes weren’t exactly much fun back then.’