Gordon Ramsay (26 page)

Over the years, his views had mellowed enormously, however, and he had introduced vegetarian menus into all his restaurants, and says he loves coming up with new ideas for them. And, while analysts and anoraks totted up that Gordon still swore roughly once every 40 seconds in this second series of
Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares
, he did seem to be making more friends than enemies. The biggest, brightest and most memorable of them turned out to be Charita Jones, the owner of Momma Cherri’s Soul Food Shack, buried deep in the winding Lanes of Brighton.

‘Y’all gotta come to me. Ain’t no one like me in the country. You gotta come see me,’ she had begged the show’s producers when they were looking for restaurants in need of the Ramsay touch. But, when they agreed, she laid down her ground rules from the start. ‘When Gordon came round, I told him, “Listen, I am a churchgoing woman. You’d better mind your language.”’

Unfortunately, this wasn’t going to be an easy request for Gordon to stick to. Because he soon found a lot to swear about.

For once, though, the problem wasn’t with the food. Gordon sat down, read the menu, looked at the food, tasted it and loved it. ‘He didn’t look that impressed when he walked in the restaurant but I fixed him catfish goujons with pineapple salsa and a cornbread with vegetable I call
hush puppies. Then he had meat jambalaya, baby back ribs with barbecue sauce, a sweetcorn and broad beans dish called succotash plus coleslaw and salad. His plate was just piled up. And when he handed me back his plate it had just four bones on it. I grabbed my camera and took a picture. I said, “Whether y’all do this film or not, Gordon Ramsay cleaned his plate in my restaurant!” He said, “I feel like I’ve been to my mother’s,” and I took that as a big compliment. Even if I had to close tomorrow, that did it for me.’

But Gordon did want to do the film with Charita. And he could tell she needed help if she wanted to stay open. She might well be serving the best soul food in Britain but her restaurant hadn’t made a penny in profit in four years and, with her debts topping £65,000, the banks were closing in.

The key reason, Gordon said, was that she was too nice to her staff, paying most of them more than she paid herself and putting up with any number of unexplained absences and sudden departures. Too many of them, he said, were part-timers who showed part-time commitment. And none seemed to really know what they ought to be doing. ‘I hate to ruin a good party but, if you want to run a good business, then the terms “laid-back” and “professional” don’t mix,’ said Gordon, foreshadowing Sir Alan Sugar in
The Apprentice
. ‘The food is not the problem here. It’s the way you are running everything. You are too much of a mother. You baby all your staff. You let them get away with murder.’

In one bit of classic television, he found out that Charita’s chef was at home with childcare problems, leaving her to do all his work that day. Stopping Charita in
her tracks as she tried to make excuses for her chef, Gordon and the film crew headed out to the chef’s home with all the ingredients he should have been preparing. Off camera, they continued to talk through his problems, tried to find solutions – and got him to work on the food at the same time to take the pressure off his boss.

What Gordon also did was to persuade Charita to play to her own formidable strengths. He told her to leave the kitchen to the others and get out into the dining room and into the streets of Brighton to drum up business. An entire new menu was also created. It was simpler, cheaper and, with the new name ‘Soul in a bowl’, it was a whole lot easier to promote.

So, six weeks later, had it all worked? In the second half of a feel-good episode that matched Gordon’s
Faking It
show with Ed Devlin of nearly four years earlier, it turned out that it had. Charita had managed to stick to most, if not all, of Gordon’s instructions. And, while her debts would take years to clear, more customers were at last coming through her doors. On one memorable night, all 40 seats in the restaurant were full and people were being turned away – something that had never happened before.

‘I was like a sponge, taking in what Gordon said and giving everything a try. He had my chefs sweating but it was just the push they needed. I thought all I had to do was cook food and put it on plates. Gordon taught me how to kick ass. He taught me I don’t have to be so nice,’ said Charita. And he was certainly the right man to teach that particular lesson.

The episode also served to silence the critics who said Gordon was playing to the cameras and only interested in
humiliating and embarrassing the chefs and restaurant owners featured in it. Instead, he proved that he really could help turn ailing businesses around – with some brilliant entertainment thrown in. So, at the end of this episode, Charita and Gordon were incredibly close, with the ever-sassy Charita just about holding on to the upper hand.

‘Will you adopt me?’ Gordon asked the woman who over the years had fostered more than 30 kids and raised two of her own.

‘Yes, I will,’ she replied. ‘But you’ve got to wash your mouth out first.’

Unfortunately, not everyone Gordon had met while filming
Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares
over the years would stay in such good spirits. The bosses of D-Place in Chelmsford could be forgiven for a sense-of-humour failure: their ‘global cuisine’ restaurant had shut its doors even before Gordon returned to check on progress six weeks after giving them his survival strategy.

But one other restaurant had closed in even more acrimonious fashion. In Silsden, West Yorkshire, a ‘For Sale’ sign was hanging outside the premises of Bonaparte’s – the first restaurant that Gordon had tackled in the previous series of the show a year earlier, where the world had been introduced to 21-year-old trainee chef Tim Gray. During and immediately after filming, the owner, Sue Ray, said she was pleasantly surprised by Gordon’s manner. ‘He is really a sheep in wolf’s clothing. He does not pull any punches, but he’s really charming and good fun, quite the opposite of how he normally appears on television. We had a bit of a laugh with him and he’s actually a very pleasant guy.’

One year on, she had changed her mind completely and
said dicing with the kitchen devil had been a disaster from start to finish. ‘They said they were here to help. They said the show would make the restaurant profitable but in the programme they just focused on the negative and made a laughing stock out of me. They certainly didn’t say there were going to call the show
Kitchen Nightmares
, make a fool out of me and destroy my business. It was very cruel,’ she said of Ramsay, the producers and the edited version of the show that had been broadcast about her.

Tim was equally unhappy. ‘I think I came out of it worse than anyone and it wasn’t all down to me. A friend called me afterwards and asked me how it felt to be the biggest twat in Britain?’

Unable to make the restaurant pay despite trying to introduce the changes Gordon had suggested, Sue had shut it down and was now struggling just to run a bar in the same building. When the second series of the show was about to be broadcast, she warned anyone else against taking part, telling the
Daily Mail
that the experience had ruined her life, left her with £500,000 of debts, the prospect of bankruptcy, deep depression and a desire only to move to live in a camper van in Spain. ‘Gordon Ramsay was extremely negative and destructive with me. The programme crippled me and I am just waiting for the axe to fall from the bank. I have been on tablets for depression, we were getting hate mail, the programme had terrible repercussions. I currently have a flat above Bonaparte’s but when the building is sold I am out of house and home. The bank will repossess it if it is not sold and even if it is I won’t see a penny of the money because I owe so much. Ramsay has taken everything from me. I am thinking of going
down to London and sleeping outside Claridge’s to embarrass him.’

The producers advised her not to and the show’s publicist, Julie Pickford, rejected Sue’s claims that she had been stitched up. ‘We invited people to apply to the show if they felt they could benefit from the wisdom Gordon could offer. There were big issues at Bonaparte’s restaurant and they were discussed at the beginning of the programme when Sue told Gordon the reasons for inviting him in. She had full opportunity to have her say. Gordon’s reputation precedes him. It’s not as if people didn’t know what to expect with him.’

Once bitten, twice shy, Sue was outraged when Gordon subsequently turned up to try to film a follow-up programme. ‘How dare you? I thought. You cheeky bastard. You’ve done enough damage.’ Gordon, however, remained convinced that, despite all the drawbacks, Bonaparte’s could be turned into a success. ‘I still believe Sue could make it work but she has to learn that to run a restaurant she first has to run a clean kitchen,’ he said.

He believed she should also take on board that nowadays all publicity really can be good publicity. Charita Jones believed it, and so too did Neil Farrell, who had nearly come to blows with Gordon when the Glass House was featured a week after Bonaparte’s in that first series. ‘Halfway through the actual programme, we had 10,000 hits on our website and within a week of it ending we had 183,000 hits,’ he said. ‘That’s when I thought, This isn’t so bad. It’s easy to swallow your pride when you see a positive effect on your business.’

While he had laid into Gordon’s professionalism in the
first few days after his episode had been broadcast, Neil ultimately softened his views. In the end, he even had the story of the show written up on the back of the restaurant’s menus to drum up even more publicity and interest. ‘Overall we have gained more than we have lost and that is down to Ramsay giving me a kick up the butt,’ he said. Neil was also ready with some secret advice for anyone following in his footsteps by taking part in the show. ‘Out of the blue one night, I got a call from the owner of one of the restaurants being featured in the new series,’ he says, though he won’t reveal who it was. ‘He was in floods of tears and Gordon had only been there for one day. He was crying, “How can I get rid of this terrible man?” All I could say was: “Don’t let the bastard see you cry.”’ Neil also tried to persuade his caller that it was worth staying the course and listening to what Gordon had to say, however painful that might be.

The experts agreed that there were long-term advantages to getting Gordon’s advice, and that there was more to the show than just good television. ‘Gordon creates drama to identify with,’ said Professor Kim James of the Cranfield School of Management. ‘But the ultimate test of a leader is their legacy and Ramsay’s greatest gift to the restaurants he turns around will be to leave them capable of good theatre when he is no longer the star.’

Gordon was also hoping that customers would do some of his work for him in other underperforming restaurants, though he despairs of the fact that British diners are strangely incapable of fighting for their rights. ‘I don’t think customers are tough enough. Food, on the whole, is getting miles better in this country. Shops and
supermarkets have improved, we’re moving forward as a nation. But we lack the confidence to question the standards in a restaurant. You’re paying for it, though, so it’s your right. If you go and buy a car, you make sure you get value for money, a three-year warranty, a service history, and you look at securing part-exchange three years down the line. You scrutinise everything. But going out to dinner, we just sit there like lambs to the slaughter and just accept what’s given.’

Or do we? Some experts had credited Gordon with changing that as well, identifying a ‘Ramsay effect’ that was making us a more demanding nation. Advertising firm Publicis said we had seen how Gordon and the likes of Sharon Osbourne got results by being direct, and were following suit. ‘We are following their examples, rejecting the stiff upper lip and becoming more volatile and more verbally and emotionally demonstrative,’ said Paul Edwards. ‘We’re no longer so ashamed of making our views clear and we’re getting angry in public more often.’

What Gordon was also doing, when the cameras had stopped rolling, was to try to change the lives of some of the talented and hopeful chefs that he met while filming his various programmes. Relatively experienced workers such as Spencer Ralph at the Walnut Tree and Andy Trowell at Moore Place in Esher, Surrey, were given some behind-the-scenes encouragement to help them develop their careers, while those at the very bottom of the catering pile were also offered a lift. Claire Porter, the 24-year-old part-time chef at the Glass House in Ambleside, was a prime example of the latter. Claire had never been to catering college, was running a bookshop as her day job
and only ended up in the Glass House’s kitchen after trying to earn some extra money by working evening shifts in the front of house. Gordon, however, said he knew she had potential from the start, and that she reminded him of Angela Hartnett, one of his most successful proteges, who was now heading up his restaurant at London’s luxury Connaught Hotel. After long, private pep talks with Claire, Gordon persuaded her to consider catering as a full-time career. She left Cumbria for London, where he helped her get an interview and then a job on the Connaught’s garnish section alongside Angela herself.

Another potential rising star had also been spotted at the Glass House: new recruit Ian Waddell. ‘I can’t believe you’ve only been cooking for three months. You’re a fucking natural,’ Gordon said after seeing the youngster at work. Equally inspired by Gordon’s behind-the-scenes encouragement, Ian followed Claire down to London and was offered a job as demi chef de partie at Gordon’s flagship restaurant at Claridge’s – one of the most prestigious dining rooms in the capital. Unfortunately, Ian didn’t last long in Gordon’s long-hours culture. ‘Ian had a natural gift and was definitely a great chef in the making and I am gutted he didn’t last the course,’ his former boss, Neil, said when he heard that the lad had left the Ramsay empire and gone off to work for an outside catering company in London’s Canary Wharf instead. ‘He came from a kitchen where things were a bit of a laugh,’ Neil said, and 19-hour-days just repeating the same task in London turned out to be anything but.