Gordon Ramsay (30 page)

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.

When it came, the news was terrible in itself. But it was even more shocking for the way it echoed the past. The call came through on Gordon’s mobile. His friend and
favourite maitre d’Jean-Philippe – JP who had filmed both the British and the American versions of
Hell’s Kitchen
with his boss – had fallen 50 feet from a ledge outside his flat in Stockwell on to the pavements below. The 30-year-old had been taken unconscious to Kings College Hospital in London with a suspected broken back and a long list of possible internal injuries. He was in a coma and no one knew if he would survive. Gordon sat with Tana in shocked silence as they digested the news. The similarities with David Dempsey’s death, who had also fallen from a window ledge on the front of an apartment block, were chilling and impossible to ignore. Was history repeating itself, Gordon asked himself, horrified, as he waited for more news from London. Could his great friend JP possibly have suffered a similar, possibly drug-induced, reaction to the one that had helped kill David?

Fortunately Gordon very quickly found out that there was nothing sinister about this awful accident. No drink or drugs had been involved at all when Jean-Philippe fell. It turned out that he had just been trying to break into his own flat late at night after leaving his keys at work. He regained consciousness after two long, terrifying days and Gordon rang him every 24 hours from his holiday to check on his progress before giving him a huge and tearful telling off back in London. Gordon had lost too many people he loved to risk losing another through something so stupid as a forgotten set of house keys.

With this tragedy averted, Gordon did have other problems to face in late 2005, however. Like every successful person in Britain, he has faced a near relentless series of criticisms from people who seem desperate to
question his motives or see him fail. What is often at issue is his genuine commitment to food – which cynics say does not ring true for someone who appears on so many television screens. The idea seems to be that in life you can be one thing or another: you are either a chef or a television star. The fact that you can be a television star because you are a good chef seems to pass people by. Yet asking Gordon just one question about food should prove his knowledge base, and his love of the subject, is far deeper than his critics allege. ‘Nothing is just skin deep when you speak to Gordon about food,’ said reporter Tamsin Richie, who spent an afternoon in his Claridge’s kitchens in 2005. ‘He has a genuine, overwhelming passion for finding the right ingredients and creating something extraordinary out of them. Details matter enormously to him and he can talk for so long about something as simple as a piece of raw salmon that your own eyes can glaze over while his are still burning. The science of cooking is as important as the flavour he creates. He wants to know why things happen as well as just making them happen. He will wrap you up in his enthusiasm and his new ideas and he simply fails to understand it if you don’t share his interest.’

Another writer, the
Observer’s
Nicci Gerrard, made the point even more starkly after she too spent time watching the chef at work. ‘Ramsay’s bashed-in face, especially when he gets angry, can screw into a grooved and winded exhaustion that looks close to despair. He cares too much about cooking. It’s not love so much as obsession.’

But had Gordon found a new love in television that would push his old passions to the sidelines? The £1.2 million Channel Four deal he had signed to make more
series of
Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares
included the option to make pretty much any other shows he chose – though everyone expected him to turn all the other proposals down so he could spend more time in his kitchens.