Gordon Ramsay (16 page)

And still the random criticisms came. When Chelsea and England footballer Frank Lampard was photographed shirtless with his chest and armpits shaved, Gordon was
right in there with an opinion. ‘Lampard looked absolutely ridiculous. You could never have got anything like that when I was playing football. The England team should be thinking more about football and less about their appearance, considering how they did at Euro 2004. Footballers are turning into women.’

Ah, women. Over the years, Gordon Ramsay’s various musings on women have become legendary and it all began when he decided to speak out about women drivers. ‘They frustrate the hell out of me and there’s only one way to cut down on traffic congestion,’ he told Paul Merton on BBC TV’s
Room 101
. ‘Give women drivers alternate days on the road. Have you seen them trying to get into a small space? They’re stressed. They’re flustered. They’re on the mobile talking while taking seven or eight goes just to get into the space. Maybe if they could just drive on a Sunday and leave the roads to us from Monday to Saturday it would be a lot easier.’

Female workers were next in line for some shocks. If women work in a kitchen you can never get to use the toilet because they will always be in there crying, sorting out their make-up, gossiping with each other or resting from PMT, Gordon once said. Women at work also took time off because of ‘morning sickness and women’s troubles’ and ruined all the banter with male staff in the kitchen. ‘Men talk about totty all the time in my London restaurants but women don’t enjoy that kind of talk,’ he complained. Oh, and he said he could never have married a female chef because of her ‘stinking of food all the time in bed’ and claimed that the sight of women in the workplace might put him off sex. ‘Just the thought of women sticking their hands
up a pigeon’s arse – it’s not what would make your sex life fruitful,’ was his considered opinion.

Professional women, not surprisingly, were outraged by what they heard. ‘Ramsay is a brilliant chef but he makes me angry. It sounds like he is the one suffering from permanent pre-menstrual tension. A lot of women have been held back in the industry because of attitudes like Ramsay’s,’ said Lorraine Ferguson, one of the country’s few female success stories, who had worked at the top restaurant L’Escargot in London.

‘It sounds as though Ramsay is scared because there are wonderful women chefs and cooks around. To suggest that women are too emotional to work in his kitchen is pathetic,’ added Lady Claire Macdonald, a former judge on television’s
Masterchef
.

Finally, Sally Clarke, the legendary female chef whose Kensington restaurant Clarke’s has been a foodie favourite for more than two decades, had a subtle dig of her own to make against Gordon and the other male super-chefs. ‘Of course there are women in the industry. It is just that they are not clowning about as celebrity chefs on television or staring out of the pages of the colour supplements, so you are less aware of them,’ she said. The last point was particularly well aimed. Gordon hadn’t just been staring out of the pages of Sunday supplements in any old photographs recently. He had just been posing naked save for a well-placed conger eel in yet another bid to drum up publicity for his books and his businesses. (He joked with the paper’s reporter that only the conger eel had been big enough to preserve his modesty and he enjoyed hinting yet again about the real
reason why he had been nicknamed ‘the Horse’ by his Rangers teammates as a teenager.)

Joking aside, Gordon was actually more of a mischief-maker than a misogynist. Making outrageous statements to reporters made him laugh, kept the press happy and got him through the day. And back in the kitchen he was, in fact, very female-friendly. One of his longest-standing colleagues, Angela Hartnett, was being groomed for great things – soon to follow Gordon’s other proteges with a restaurant of her own. And Gordon said he was ‘over the moon’ when 20-year-old Gemma Blow – the only woman among the five finalists – was announced as the winner of the first Gordon Ramsay Scholarship in September 2001.

One subject Gordon was less able to joke about was the general standard of cooking in Britain. When it was done badly, or when the industry was brought into disrepute, he really could let rip. ‘I’ve just read about a hotel in Scotland that has gone public announcing the fact that they are doing a deep-fried sandwich full of Nutella,’ he told reporters, appalled. ‘I mean, Christ! Seventy-five per cent of my staff are French. They look at me like I’m some kind of twat because my Scottish brothers are launching two slices of bread with a fucking inch of Nutella between them, battered and deep-fat fried. Now what the fuck is this country coming to? What are we doing to ourselves? That has to be abolished. Here we are, progressing tenfold, buying the right bread, real croissants, we’re making fresh muesli and we understand what a great cup of coffee is. And then some idiot brings out a deep-fried chocolate sandwich.

‘I want to find the bastard that put that idea together. I’ve got the most amazing charcoal grill in my new kitchen. I’m going to sit his butt on it and criss-cross my name on his bloody arse cheeks to remind him. Is he fucking stupid? When these things hit France, the French just have a field day laughing at us. So I’m looking for that scumbag. I’m going to brand him with a hot iron like a little calf or a lamb. I’m going to put “Ramsayfield” on his butt so every time he wakes up in the morning he thinks, Fuck, I shouldn’t have done that. That man is my new target and I’ll find him.’

ELEVEN

‘O
n a warm summer evening in a restaurant kitchen in Chelsea, London, there is something resembling a ballet going on. A strange surreal ballet of 15 blokes in striped aprons, chopping, stirring, arranging with meticulous care, moving with such precision, such orchestrated timing, that they are almost as one as they count down the crucial timing on a dish of lobster tail ravioli. Out in the front of house, where immaculate staff are discreetly attentive and the decor is muted, there is an air of anticipation among those who seek the ultimate dining experience; an uneasy sense that at any moment something dangerous and exciting could happen. For this is Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant and the artiste is not a predictable man.’

Reporter Susan Chenery of
The Times
perfectly summed up the tensions that lay beneath every meal at one of
Gordon’s restaurants. ‘With every perfect, pricey plate comes a tale of human suffering,’ she wrote. ‘There is a frisson of fear in the foie gras and a sous-chef clamped in a half nelson etched into the passion fruit cornetto.’

By the spring of 2002, Gordon Ramsay was already as famous for his anger and his volatility as he was for the quality of his food. So, while his latest restaurant was an obvious choice when Cherie Blair was planning a party for her husband’s 49th birthday, it was still making the Prime Minister’s protection team a little nervous. One wrong word from someone at the table could start the insults or the food flying, they feared. And, to make matters worse, the table Cherie had chosen wasn’t exactly a standard one. She had booked ‘the chef’s table’ – set directly in the kitchen and only yards from where Gordon himself would be screaming out his orders, wielding the knives and directing the entire lunch service.

The idea behind a chef’s table is to give diners a dramatic and totally unique dining experience and it had been a huge hit with customers since Gordon had introduced it at Claridge’s the previous year. By the time the Blairs made their booking, it had already been used by Andrew Lloyd Webber, chat-show hosts Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan, Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood and models Jade Jagger and Kate Moss. Everyone had also paid heavily for their experiences: accounts showed that this one table alone generated around £1.2 million a year for Gordon’s company coffers.

To reach the table, customers have to walk through the hotel’s main art deco restaurant and follow the staff through the swing doors into the kitchen. There, backed
on three sides by frosted-glass walls, is the slightly raised table surrounded by rich leather banquettes. As ringside seats go, you can’t get any closer to the heat or the action and, while a dressed-down Tony Blair didn’t take advantage of the opportunity, you can also have a full tour of the kitchens during your meal. No less than you might expect when your table’s bill for lunch comes in at an average of £480 before drinks.

‘Mr Blair stood up from time to time to get a better view of what was going on. He was particularly interested when a little fracas broke out between a couple of the sous-chefs,’ one onlooker told the papers afterwards.

The Prime Minister also had a different shock a little later. Cherie had spotted Cilla Black in the main dining room and had asked her to burst through the kitchen doors to shout: ‘Surprise, surprise!’ halfway through the lunch. Ever the self-publicist, Gordon was happy to provide the Prime Minister’s verdict on the experience when the four-hour celebration was over. ‘He absolutely loved it. He was very relaxed and ate all the food we offered him. He was very interested in the way the food had been cooked and he seemed to enjoy watching all the chefs at work.’ Even the Blairs’ vegetarian security guard, it seemed, had been happy with the meat-free tray he had been presented with as he sat guarding the doors.

Back at home, the Ramsay family was still growing – not bad for a man who had said at the start of his marriage that he had a low sperm count because of spending so much time in front of hot ovens. At first, Gordon had an unorthodox name in mind for his third daughter. ‘It sounds daft, but she looks like a Coriander. That’s the name that
came into my head as soon as I saw her.’ But in the end he agreed with Tana that the name Matilda might raise fewer eyebrows in later life.

But what was both raising eyebrows and making headlines in the meantime was that once more Gordon had failed to be at his daughter’s birth. Missing Megan’s birth in 1998 could be put down to an oversight, the newspaper columnists and commentators seemed to feel. Missing Jack and Holly’s birth on New Year’s Eve 1999 could be seen as an accident. But missing Matilda’s as well looked like a little more than just carelessness.

And, upfront as ever, Gordon was happy to confirm to everyone that a deliberate pattern had in fact emerged. He hadn’t been at the latest birth because neither he nor Tana had wanted him there. And neither of them saw any reason to apologise for their decision.

‘We have a very active sex life and we both contemplated over a bottle of wine that it wasn’t good for our sexual relationship for me to be at the childbirth. I told her that I would feel squeamish seeing that level of mess. It’s like sending 25 vegans into a kitchen with meat in the blender. So I was very relieved when Tana said, “I don’t want you there. I won’t feel attractive.” I said, “Thank God for that.” If Tana had turned around and said, “I want you there, it is an awful position and I need someone I deeply love by my side,” then of course I would have been there. But that wasn’t the case. She didn’t want me to witness her distress. The truth is that I am a control freak. And in the delivery suite I wouldn’t be in control, would I? I’d be standing there, useless, amid all the blood and the pushing and the sweating, like a useless prick.’

For her part, Tana says she knew her husband too well to expect him to cope properly with the reality of childbirth. ‘I just wanted to get on with it and have Gordon there afterwards,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to have the babies clean and wrapped in a blanket and then be able to present them to him. He’s squeamish enough when he cuts his finger after all.’

For all this, the couple continued to be roundly criticised for their unconventionality – and for their honesty. Gordon in particular came in for a lot of flak after going public about his views and his perceived chauvinism. But he remained defiant – even to his friends. ‘There are dads I know who say, “I can’t believe you missed the most momentous time of your marital life.” I’m like: “Has your missus told you to say that? Is she wearing the trousers in your relationship?” Let me decide what I want to do at childbirth. The children’s birthdays are phenomenal. The first time I took Jack fishing was phenomenal. But childbirth? It’s like being stuck in a room with a thousand skinned rabbits.’

Or worse – because, when it came to labour, Gordon’s imagination had clearly gone wild and he was prepared to come right out and say what most of his friends were too afraid to admit to thinking. ‘I had images like something out of a sci-fi movie whenever I thought about childbirth – skinned rabbits and conger eels coming at me from everywhere. I didn’t want that to be in my memory. Seeing a woman in distress, screaming at the top of her voice, pushing, pushing, pushing and sweat, sweat, sweat? I’d rather be stark bollock naked in a steam room with 50 vegans,’ he said – his worst nightmares coming back around to food, as they always did.

With four children and a growing fortune, the Ramsays had long since moved out of their top-floor converted flat in grimy Stockwell. They now lived slightly further west, in a massive 11-bedroom home in the altogether leafier borough of Wandsworth. The new home had cost an impressive £3.5 million and the couple had spent an estimated £1 million refurbishing it and fitting it out before moving in. The biggest job was converting the building’s four flats with an external staircase back into the glorious single-family home it would have been in Victorian times. And, when that was done, one of the Ramsays’ first tasks had been to sort out the one design feature that would set them apart from almost every other house in Britain. For, while an increasing number of well-off couples now boast ‘his and hers’ bathrooms, the Ramsays can point to separate kitchens as well. Tana’s was on the lower ground floor – Gordon described it as ‘an MFI job’ from where she could cook family meals and run the house. It was also where she frequently stocked up the family fridge with Jamie Oliver’s ready meals from Sainsbury’s – just to wind up her husband.

Gordon’s kitchen was different. Nearly £500,000 different. His state-of-the-art room included a £67,000 main oven which was the size of a car and had to be lifted over the whole house and into the new kitchen by crane. Around it are cupboard-door handles based on Ferrari gear-sticks and costing £350 a piece, double dishwashers and a £480 silent extractor fan that Gordon said ‘makes Megan’s hair stand on end when we put her underneath it’. Then there is nearly £110,000 of limestone flooring, a sound system loaded with 2,000 hours of music, the best
black Zimbabwean granite worktops money could buy – the list could go on and on.