Gordon Ramsay (29 page)

Gordon was also estimated to sell up to £4 million a year of his own-label chocolates, even though these had been launched pretty much on a whim and never given any proper publicity or marketing. A signature line of fine bone china was being planned and a new range of ready meals for supermarkets was being considered.

A subtle change of direction had also given Gordon’s publishing income a boost. His early cookbooks –
A Passion for Flavour, A Passion for Seafood, A Chef for All Seasons
and
Just Desserts
– had come in for some widespread criticism for demanding too much of their readers. The public perception was that the books sometimes read like instructional manuals and didn’t make cooking seem much fun because when you tried to follow the recipes you spent too much time worrying you might be getting things wrong. And Gordon’s schoolmasterly attitude seemed out of step in an era when the likes of Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson were hamming it up, showing that exact measurements didn’t always matter and that almost anyone could make good food. Conspiracy theorists said that Gordon deliberately made his early books overly complicated so that readers would make mistakes at home and end up spending big money in his restaurants to see how things should really be done.

Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Heaven
was Gordon’s first attempt to boost book sales and redress the balance. First published in 2004, it was unashamedly linked to the
Kitchen Nightmares
show and included a brief mention of many of the good and bad things he had seen while
filming. It included more than a hundred new recipes but, despite Gordon’s attempts at a lighter touch, some buyers continued to be turned off by the overall tone.

‘It is an interesting if a bit light on content cookbook,’ wrote one London-based reviewer on Amazon. ‘A short word of warning though to less-than-confident cooks. Many of the recipes assume a reasonable level of culinary skill which may have some starters a bit lost. Delia Smith it ain’t.’

Another reviewer agreed that Gordon’s book came off worse than Delia’s in the value-for-money stakes when the number of recipes in each was added up. Others repeated the old claims that the recipes were made unnecessarily hard just to try to make the chef who created them look good.

Having taken comments such as these on board, Gordon finally came up with a very lucrative back-to-basics response:
Gordon Ramsay Makes It Easy
. The idea was to write a book that would ‘do what it says on the tin’ and bring a whole new generation of nervous cooks into his fold. In a bid to create the practical, real-world edge that people said had been missing from his early books, Gordon and his team researched and wrote the new book in his family kitchen. It was a bit of an eye-opener for a man who had got used to the most lavish restaurant kitchens money can buy. ‘It’s hard, cooking at home,’ he admitted when he talked about these latest recipes. ‘You’ve got no brigade. You have to prep, cook and wash up and the space is limited. You have to be more clever in buying the ingredients because you’ve got less refrigerator space. Recipes have to reflect all this.’

And it turned out that the new, simpler ideas did just that. The book hit the hardback top ten within weeks of its publication in 2005 and became his best selling book to date. And this wasn’t the only money Gordon was making from publishing his recipes. He had signed what was thought to be the best-paid newspaper deal in Fleet Street when he agreed to produce an average of three colour pages of recipes and comment for
The Times
’s Saturday magazine each week. No one has said publicly how much his contract was worth. But industry experts put it at around £2,500 a week – or £500 per well-photographed recipe.

With so much going on, it was little wonder that Gordon increasingly started to rely on others to run huge parts of his life. ‘Chefs are the worst businessmen in the world,’ he said once. ‘I have never made the mistake of believing that I am a chef and a businessman at the same time. That way trouble lies – the two just don’t mix.’ Trusting his entire financial affairs to his father-in-law, Chris, left Gordon free to focus on his new set of career mountains in America and beyond. It was a policy that had paid huge dividends in recent years. But as 2005 got under way, both Gordon and Chris faced a series of warnings that the gravy train might not run for ever.

The first came when a newspaper used the new Freedom of Information Act to obtain documents proving that the ill-fated Amaryllis in Glasgow had failed basic hygiene and cleaning tests before being closed down. Meanwhile, critics were circling over several of Gordon’s more successful London restaurants with claims that they were starting to lose their spark. But the most worrying
rumours of all suggested that at least some of Gordon’s hard-won Michelin stars could be at risk if he carried on playing for the cameras around the world and left his kitchens to fend for themselves.

It was serious stuff and Gordon and Chris knew they had to tackle it straight away. Television and America would have to go on hold for a while, Gordon decided. For the next few months, he had work to do in London.

EIGHTEEN

‘S
tay close to the kitchen.’ That had been the simple, five word piece of advice Gordon had been given as a fiercely ambitious twenty-something trainee chef in Paris. Back in London in the early summer of 2005 he knew he had to start living up to it again. Over the past few months, a series of unflattering reviews of his flagship restaurants had been published and posted on internet websites. It looked as if his prolonged absences from the restaurants that bore his name were starting to cause problems and everyone feared that the consequences could be far more serious than they looked.

With massively high fixed costs, Gordon was acutely aware that once restaurants hit the skids they could fail faster than almost any other business. And he knew that once customers lost faith in a restaurant they hardly ever came back.

‘To me, Gordon was my God until I ate here,’ a Moya King wrote on one website about his eponymous Chelsea restaurant. ‘Food was lacking any of the passion I expected, celeriac soup was a creamy glue, two courses back to back contained peas and broad beans, desserts were not pleasant, panna cotta was tasteless and chocolate tarte so bitter I couldn’t eat it, and service was lacking any kind of warmth and leadership. After hearing all he preaches on television Gordon would not have been happy dining with me that evening. Save your money,’ she advised other diners.

But a worrying number of other people already seemed to share Moya’s opinions. ‘Not the best place we have been to. I was expecting 100 per cent for the price we were paying but service wasn’t up to standard, the food was just OK and the desserts were naff. Won’t be going there again, sorry Gordon,’ came from Anna O’Neill towards the end of June 2005. ‘I had the set lunch and as a former restaurant reviewer I have to say that this is not extraordinary cooking,’ wrote another diner, while phrases such as: ‘Too expensive and too pretentious’, ‘No atmosphere and the food was average’, ‘Not worth the money you are spending’ and ‘This proves that hype can override quality,’ littered a host of other customer comments that summer.

Over the years Gordon had been criticised by everyone from broadcasting standards officers to cookery school teachers. None of it had bothered him. ‘I will only start worrying if my customers start complaining,’ he said in the late 1990s. Nearly a decade later, having read some of the comments while surfing the web in the offices deep within Claridge’s Hotel, Gordon wondered if that time had finally come. He walked down to the staff toilets at Claridge’s and
passed the Bafta award he had won the previous April for his performance in
Kitchen Nightmares
. Collecting it had been a fantastic honour. But no amount of entertainment gongs would dull the pain if he lost some of his even more valuable Michelin stars.

‘Don’t judge me, judge my food,’ he had once said in defiance of a critic who said his x-rated diatribes on television were dragging the industry down. But could he in all honesty say he was as involved in that food in 2005 as he had been five or ten years earlier?

Fortunately two recent incidents had reminded Gordon that his love of kitchen life was as strong as ever. The first had become apparent in America during the filming of
Hell’s Kitchen
– the very thing that was being blamed for letting his mind wander. ‘I was doing the nightly service at
Hell’s Kitchen
. It was torture, but it was self-inflicted torture. I realised that the last time it had felt like that to me had been in the early days of Aubergine when it was chaotic. I like that roughness. I need to feel that stuff. It’s back to school, the challenge is there, there’s the struggle to get it right which I hadn’t felt for two or three years. It was all the old questions of what everyone on the team was thinking, how they are feeling, who is going to ****up, who is going to perform. I realised I missed the adrenaline, I missed that kind of buzz,’ he said immediately afterwards.

The second reminder came when he came back from a brief ‘boyfriend and girlfriend’ holiday with Tana. ‘When we landed I thought: “It will be so nice to see the kids, I can’t wait.” But I just saw them for 15 minutes and then I went back to work. It was only after I had been back in the
kitchen at Claridge’s for 20 minutes that I started to mellow out and feel I was coming back to life again.’

Desperate to keep these feelings alive and to kick-start his restaurants, Gordon went on a whistle-stop mid-summer tour of his kitchens and dining rooms across the capital. And he immediately realised that he had to regain control over the way his restaurants felt, as well as over what they served. One of the reasons he said Amaryllis in Glasgow had lost money and been forced to close was because Gordon felt the head chef there had got too carried away with making fancy, self-indulgent food that confused and intimidated potential customers. If there was any danger of this trend being repeated in London he realised he would have to act fast to nip it in the bud.

As a man born and brought up on a council estate Gordon had always been determined to make sure that people from a similar background could feel comfortable in every one of his restaurants. ‘I have always hated all that pompous, farty intimidation stuff that you used to get in every hotel restaurant in the world. I had to change all that in mine,’ he says. And he thinks fair and impeccable service is the best way to make sure these changes stick. In a Ramsay restaurant he says everyone has to be treated the same and everyone has to be treated well – and after a few weeks back in the London hot seats he was certain he was fulfilling the promise. ‘This month I have served Kylie Minogue, George Clooney and my little sister. They all got the same treatment as every other customer. The other day a couple from Yorkshire also came all the way down to London to eat lunch at one of my London restaurants for £70, accompanied by a carafe of tap water. They were
treated no differently from any so-called VIP client or the businessmen who once spent £44,000 on dinner at Petrus.’

That said, a few favoured customers did qualify for a little extra attention. When
Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares
’ Charita Jones and her family came to his flagship restaurant in Claridge’s to celebrate her foster daughter’s 21st birthday she enjoyed a special welcome. ‘Gordon sent bottles of champagne to us and treated us like royalty,’ says Charita, whose Brighton restaurant was still thriving more than a year after Gordon had arrived to troubleshoot it.

Sitting alone at Claridge’s after another late night service had ended Gordon took stock of the state of play in his own business. There had, perhaps, been shortcomings in some of the attitudes and standards he had seen over the past few weeks. But he was convinced he had managed to nip the worst of them in the bud and re-inspire his staff about what they could and should be achieving. He was confident that his teams were back at the top of their games. And that was important because the Ramsay empire was in for yet another massive period of expansion. It would be some time before he could spend so much time in his kitchens again.

On 25 May 2005, when the first episode of the second series of
Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares
had been broadcast on Channel Four, for example, Gordon hadn’t actually had time to watch. Instead he had been hoping to see the Beckhams and a host of other celebrity invitees at the launch of Maze, his 8th London restaurant. Billed as a New York style diner, Maze is squeezed into the Marriott Hotel in Grosvenor Square, just around the corner from the heavily fortified American Embassy. The idea behind the
restaurant was a real departure from the relatively formal dining structures at Gordon’s other hotel restaurants. Instead of choosing a standard starter, main course and desert, diners at Maze pick any number of small ‘tapas style’ dishes at around £11 a time. Gordon said he was fusing French and Asian cuisine on the menu, which included the likes of foie gras and apricot pizza, lamb with cinnamon roasted sweetbreads and bayleaf and Alsace chard. And if you fancy an unusual pudding then his sea salt and almond ice-cream is pretty hard to beat.

Gordon says that these off-the-wall menu ideas – half of them created in the kitchen in Gordon and Tana’s home, half created at Claridge’s – are what keeps him enthusiastic about food and what drives him to keep opening new restaurants. A dish of scallops with a spiced raisin puree and cauliflower might not work at Gordon Ramsay back in Chelsea, for example. But by opening Maze, Gordon reckoned he and his head chef Jason Atherton had found somewhere suitable to serve it.

Gordon has always been a voracious consumer of information about what other chefs were doing – at home he has stacks of boxes where he files his 3,500 strong (and growing) collection of menus from around the world. ‘Whenever I hear from a guest in one of my restaurants that they are going somewhere new I ask if they might get me a menu,’ he says. ‘One of my favourites is from the three Michelin star Louis XV in Monaco.’ He will also spend big money checking out the competition. ‘Any time a good new restaurant opens up, anywhere in the world, we check it out,’ he told a London management conference which had asked him to share his business
secrets. ‘Five years ago we could afford to do this just in Britain. But now, to stay in front we have to respond to the amazing changes happening in, say, Asia and Australia. I send teams of 4-6 people to these places, not just chefs, but waiters too, and they check out everything, even delicatessens and cooking stores. Then we start incorporating the best ideas into what we do.’