‘I’m a big guy. I know what to do’: the story of Gordon Ramsay
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Gordon Ramsay’s hands are looking for something to do. He taps and drums them on the tabletop. He puts them in his pockets. He sits on them a few times. Restless hands would seem an advantage for a chef. But Ramsay, who shot to fame 20 years ago as one of the best — and sweariest — young chefs in London, is rather more famous for cooking from the mouth.
Today, at 50, he has learnt to play a steady hand in all three of his incarnations: business brand, restaurateur and celebrity. His swearing is no longer limited to bad news: “Things can be f***ing brilliant. Things can be good, and f***ing well deserved. And f***ing congratulations.”
He celebrated his half-century last year on the night of the US presidential election, at a three-Michelin-starred restaurant in San Francisco where they serve chargrilled leek fondue with jars of caviar. The Trump result, he says, “completely f***ed my dinner. I’ve never seen a dining room f***ing curdle and go so silent in all my life. At the beginning of the dinner it was looking like Hillary, and by dessert they had a new president. It was a shell shock.”
Ramsay, who has four children, lives between work commitments in America and the UK, with houses in Los Angeles and London. The arrangement, though taxing, seems to suit him. “I got up this morning at about half past four,” he says, sitting in the private dining room of his central London restaurant, Heddon Street Kitchen. “Quick hour in the gym, then took the dogs for a walk, got back and woke them all [his family] up. And yeah, hit the ground running.”
Increasing the hours of the day by getting up in the middle of the night is not a surprising move from Ramsay, a rare example of a globally famous British chef, and one who has built an entire empire out of his commitment to hard work, not to mention his fearless, ‘F-word’-powered ability to get hard work out of others.
The daily hours in the gym (cycling, running and swimming) have formed him into a middle-aged matador shape, light on his feet as he bounds across the restaurant floor, his muscles neatly sprung under an expensive-looking grey T-shirt. The stressed-out Ramsay effing and blinding in his chef whites on the 1990s BBC documentary Boiling Point has undergone a noticeable Los Angelification but he is also, in a very unchangeably British way, polite, funny and a mite self-conscious.
“It sounds weird but the gym is a great way of relaxing — I think I felt, more so in the past five years since it got frantically busy, the fitter I am, the better I handle it.” He doesn’t like personal trainers. “I’m not very good at being babysat. I’m a big guy, I know what to do. And then they become your bloody mates and I don’t want that. That quality time is paramount.”
As a teenager, he had a “tiny” spell where he thought he might be a footballer, booting up briefly for the Rangers trial squad before injury took that possibility away. “You need to be f***ing stubborn to get to the top. I don’t give a shit who you are. It doesn’t just land in your lap. Footballing insecurity was no different to standing in the middle of Paris as a young chef at the age of 22 and thinking, ‘Shit, the talent around here is extraordinary, how am I ever going to match that?’ You just put your head down and become incredibly selfish.”
Having put his head down, he trained at the elbows of the Roux brothers, Guy Savoy and Marco Pierre White (“Crazy motherf***er”), then opened his own restaurant in 1998 and sweated it out for Michelin’s three-star accolade, gaining it in 2001 and retaining it to this day. Through television series such as Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, Hell’s Kitchen and The F Word, he also became a pre-eminent verbal pugilist, dressing down failing small-town restaurateurs for imprecise salads and revolting burgers, and spraying invective at would-be cooks for their momentary lapses in concentration.
Today, Heddon Street Kitchen is part of a portfolio that has carefully stepped back from putting the Gordon Ramsay name above the door, even if the association still helps to secure bookings. The group has interests in 14 London-based restaurants and 16 licence agreements for restaurants around the world. Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in Chelsea remains the flagship, with its three Michelin stars, but broadly speaking the group has fallen into sync with a more casual dining age. In general, Ramsay says, British restaurants are “way less pretentious than we were in the 90s”.
His celebrity travels well in America and in Asia, with brands such as Bread Street Kitchen licensed in Singapore and Hong Kong, and an opening for the group in Sanya, China, slated for later this year. It is also looking actively for new London sites. “Everyone’s having to look at their expansion and be very smart over the next two to two and a half years. Get Brexit over the line properly. This morning even before midday we heard of two groups going into liquidation and we were offered two sites. So it’s a vulnerable situation.” His Heathrow restaurant Plane Food relaunches this month after almost a decade of trade, spruced up in looks and menu, with more calorie-controlled options and tighter order-delivery times. He says proudly: “We’re the only restaurant that cooks fresh airside.” (As a career transatlantic flyer, he also calls Terminal 5 his “second home”.)
Business overall is good, even if he says he gets “a little bit upset when people want to scrutinise how much I’ve earned”. Kavalake Ltd, the holding company for Gordon Ramsay Group, turned over £51.9m in 2016, an increase of 3.2 per cent on the previous year. It generated an operating profit of £0.7m — just putting it back into the black following an operating loss of £1.3m in 2015.
The success of Ramsay’s American television persona adds to his earnings — not that he cares to boast. “Money has made life easier. But it doesn’t make me want to run out and buy something because I have that money. I’m very disciplined like that. I’m realistic, it’s tough out there.”
Ramsay appears to be enjoying the second act of his career, having put some colourful and costly drama behind him. In 2010, his father-in-law Chris Hutcheson was fired as head of the group’s business operations, an acrimonious split that found a resolution of sorts last month, when Hutcheson was sentenced to a six-month jail term for illegally accessing the company’s computer system. Hutcheson’s sons Adam and Chris were each given a four-month suspended sentence for conspiring with their father to hack into their former employer’s emails. Judge John Bevan QC called it an “unattractive” case of “dirty linen being washed in public”.
The episode is obviously a sensitive topic, and I ask Ramsay to confirm that he’d prefer not to talk about it, as had been heavily hinted by his team. He demurs quietly: “It is what it is.” He looks almost abashed at having uttered such a rote statement; after all, this is a man whose brand relies as much on a flair for language as it does on exactitude in the kitchen. But he goes on: “One lesson to any young chef out there: never mix family with business. It’s been said before me and it’ll be said long after me. Nothing but wish him [Hutcheson] well. It’s harder when it’s family, I think.” There’s a pause in the room, then Ramsay finds a joke: “If one of my daughters’ boyfriends asked me for a pint in a couple years’ time and said, ‘Hey Mr Ramsay, I’m thinking of setting up this burger chain. Would you be interested in investing?’ . . . You can f***, right, off. With a capital F! And two capital Fs at the end!”
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Born in Renfrewshire, Scotland, Ramsay grew up on a council estate in Stratford-upon-Avon. He left home at 16 to live in a flat in Banbury. When his eldest daughter Megan was going to open days for university, he drove her to see his childhood home. “I took her to Gifford Walk, to the old council house. She was like, ‘You did not live here.’ And I said, ‘Yes I did, that’s the bedroom where I grew up.’”
Ramsay’s mother Helen is a former nurse; his late father Gordon had various jobs, overshadowed by an addiction to alcohol. “My main ambition from that turbulent upbringing — amazing moments with mum, bad moments with dad — was to instil across all four children those values of working hard, being grateful and finding that one thing you’re passionate about.”
His family now feature in Matilda and the Ramsay Bunch, a CBBC cookery-docu-style glimpse of their LA summers, in which 15-year-old daughter Matilda demonstrates some recipe ideas of her own. There’s a lot of horsing around, with Ramsay being the “embarrassing dad”. “It’s important to show that level of family fun, because it’s real,” he says. “They’re good, grounded, hard-working teenagers. They’re pretty savvy.”
He keeps his head out of LA’s silliest sides, he says, and sticks to refreshing swims in Santa Monica and bike rides in the hills. “I love the climate in LA. It’s not quite the same at Weymouth and Chesil Beach . . . I love America because I don’t live there. I love Britain because it made me the person I am.”
Managing a long-distance career has removed Ramsay from day-to-day cooking. “Yesterday, the stewardess on the plane was taking her mum to The Narrow [his London gastropub] and she asked, ‘Are you cooking there?’ I said, ‘Are you f***ing mad?’ I don’t go and put Yorkshire puddings in the oven on Sunday lunch.” And, unlike the days when he obsessed over perfect pigs’ trotters and ballotines at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay on Royal Hospital Road, he now has more than one business to worry about.
In 1998, it was different — “an important time for me, a massive growing up”. Ramsay was a novice restaurateur, his “talent was on the plate; I depended heavily on the team around us.” He and his wife Tana were living in rented accommodation in London, their “beautiful” first property in Wandsworth sold to raise cash for a restaurant with Gordon’s own name above the door. “You can imagine Tana’s thoughts: ‘Well, how long are we going to rent for?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know.’ That added pressure that I liked, I think. I didn’t shy away from it, I needed that kind of drive, to make sure it had to work. It wasn’t maybe, or what if, or we’ll see what happens. No, this f***ing place is going to work and be one of the best restaurants in the country, I’m going to eat, drink, sleep it.”
His talent had shone at Harveys, Marco Pierre White’s restaurant, and subsequently as head chef at Aubergine. Each time he moved on, he says, he realised what he had learnt. “Marco pushed us. Oh my God, that guy was ruthless, but f***ing brilliantly ruthless, because he just wanted the best, and if you didn’t give him the best, he’d let you know. The pay-off for me was what I was learning; I could tolerate the shit. You were on a path of utter perfection.” On the question of swearing, he simply says it’s “an industry language. Chefs cook better when they swear.”
Not that it’s an essential skill in itself: “I can spot within the first 15 minutes of a young chef in the kitchen whether they’re passionate. Cooking with their eyes, their left- and right-hand side, their posture, holding the knife, excitement and developing the palate. That level of frustration is healthy. If you don’t give a f*** and you’re not cautious about what you’ve just delivered, that tells you a lot about where you’re going to go in this industry, big time.”
His relationship with White had bad patches. As with some other public Ramsay fallouts, such as with chef Jamie Oliver, it’s hard to make out from the documented record what the problem actually was. When discussing the relaxed template that Bread Street Kitchen in the City of London created for the group to roll out abroad, Ramsay says mischievously that “it was always my dream to open next to my mate”. Oliver’s Barbecoa is in the same development, next to St Paul’s Cathedral. When I ask if they are friends, Ramsay says: “Of course he’s a mate — mates fall out don’t they?”
Later, when politics comes up as something Ramsay was tapped on the shoulder for but rejected, he adds: “Let me just say, thank f*** I’m not in politics. Jamie can campaign for all he wants. Keep me out of the political world, I have no interest whatsoever. I remember that freaky moment standing in between Blair and Putin, having cooked lunch for them at Downing Street, and thinking, ‘F***ing hell, really? Do I really want to be involved in this?’ That was the scare then back in those days.”
Though he may have declined a shot at politics, Ramsay is one of the few chefs to have risen up in the Blair era who has increased his fame since. Marco Pierre White and others have retired. Whatever the history, Ramsay’s respect for White is clear: “You need to have that hunger, and he had it, he gave it to me . . . was Leicester City competing with Man United.”
From a starting point of 12 tables and 38 seats at Royal Hospital Road 20 years ago, Ramsay has learnt business acumen that can’t be taught at university, he says. “I was desperate to be fully booked, I was desperate to be a restaurant that was value for money. The selling point was that you could never get in — everyone thought it was a private club. We didn’t have quiet times or busy times — it was busy all the time.”
Not everything has gone smoothly, and Ramsay has in the past injected his own cash into the group to help it along. But he says: “My appetite has never been stronger. I’ve learnt massively from my mistakes.” When I ask what these mistakes have been, he says, half-playfully: “Employing my father-in-law, and kicking AA Gill out.” (The late Sunday Times restaurant critic was asked to leave one of Ramsay’s restaurants.) The “torment” of having a redoubtable critic sitting in the dining room isn’t quite as palpable in the food-blogger age. “I never thought I’d say it but I miss that fear. I don’t wake up with that worry any more.”
But Ramsay very much respects the institution that helped make his name, the Michelin Guide. “Michelin understand the pressure of business. I know that the Good Food Guide and the AA Guide are all out high-fiving one another and comping bills, you don’t do that with Michelin. They’re there for the public, they don’t give a damn about the name.”
He tells a story about the time he was at Aubergine, in the first six months. Jean-Claude Breton, the maître d’, “came down to me and his hand was shaking. He said, ‘This gentleman’s just given me his card.’ I said, ‘Jean-Claude, this is a f***ing Michelin inspector, why has he given me his card?’ He said, ‘I’ve just kicked him out. Well, he didn’t confirm his table, so I gave his table away.’ When they turned up, he sent them home. I laugh about it, the first time they came to taste my food, they got kicked out.”
So what would the alternative Gordon Ramsay story have been? He blanches at the unimaginable. “Failure. Knocking back the family. And losing every penny that I’d worked for and earned as that deposit.” He looks blank when I ask if he ever craves anonymity. But he does claim, convincingly, that he doesn’t splash out on himself. “I grew up dreaming of a Ferrari black horse, so now that I have a few, it’s exciting but I don’t want to push it in people’s faces. That’s the difference. I don’t like showing off.”
On this theme he rouses himself to retell a recent tabloid story in which “I got shit last month about not paying first-class tickets [for his children’s air fares]. That’s 15 f***ing grand a ticket, so let’s work this out for a minute. For four first-class tickets to LA, 60 f***ing grand. For Tana and I, 90 f***ing grand…F***ing right I won’t pay for them [the children]. What muppet is going to spend £90,000 flying from here to LA?”
Halfway to 100 and a millionaire, Ramsay isn’t going to waste anything. “I said to the kids, ‘Every single person you see on that plane, you’re going to see at the carousel. You’re not getting to LA any quicker. Do you have any idea what you can do with that money after you get off that plane?’”
Natalie Whittle is executive editor, FT Life & Arts
Photographs: Alastair Grant/AFP/Getty; Alamy
Portraits by Lola & Pani
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