Gordon Ramsay (6 page)

Before heading out into the world of full-time work, Gordon made one final bid to make peace with his father. Looking back, he says he knows it was crazy to keep on trying – and that he should have guessed that once more he would have the door shut in his face. ‘As ever, it all meant nothing to my father,’ he said after graduating from college, for which he had hoped for some paternal praise. ‘He still could not understand for a moment how any real man could be interested in food. I felt sad that, yet again, he had failed to support me. For, in spite of everything he had said or done to hurt me and his family, my father still remained the bedrock of my world and his approval still mattered to me.’

Or at least it did until the phone rang late one night. ‘Ronnie called to say that Mum had been hospitalised for two days as a result of another attack by my father. I remember calling Dad then and there and telling him that he was no longer my father. At that point, I honestly never wanted to see him again and we were all relieved when we found out he had run away to Spain with another woman.’

Meanwhile, Ronnie was starting to have problems of his own. At 16, before working as a mechanic and briefly being in the Army, he had started smoking marijuana. Nobody really gave it a second thought at the time. Nobody realised that for Ronnie this first soft drug really would lead to other, far more serious addictions. As for Gordon, the summer of 1986 was to prove another major turning point in his life. He had read voraciously of some of the great chefs working in London, Paris, New York and
other capitals around the world. For all the amazing work they did, many of them were known only to their peers in the restaurant business and to real restaurant fans. Some had been on television, become famous and made a nice amount of money. But, as far as Gordon could tell, there was no real Premier League of chefs to generate a proper sense of competition in the industry. From his bedroom in Banbury, the former footballer decided to create one.

THREE

W
hen you are brought up on a council estate and learn your trade out in the sticks, you tend to have high expectations of what you will find if you ever make it to the bright lights of the capital. So the teenage Gordon Ramsay was hoping to see great things when he got his first job in a London kitchen. Instead, he got a very nasty shock.

In the mid-1980s, good British restaurants remained few and far between. Cooking, Gordon discovered, still pretty much meant pouring sauces on to reheated legs of lamb or pieces of beef that had been roasted and sliced the previous day. Vegetables might be overcooked, but by the time they got to a diner’s plate they were lukewarm. Decent presentation was ignored, service was appalling and nobody seemed to think anything was wrong.

For several months, Gordon wondered if he had made a
huge mistake by picking this as his new career. Had he been imagining things when he had seen all that excitement in the kitchens of his childhood? Did no one in London share his passion for food and for how it could be created, presented and enjoyed? As Gordon would ultimately find out, a small number of top chefs did. But they too say they had to fight against the grim, traditional attitudes and practices that were already giving Gordon sleepless nights.

‘All the top London hotels served the same food when I first came to London,’ says Anton Mosimann, one of the early super-chefs credited with transforming the capital’s moribund restaurant scene. ‘The Savoy, the Ritz, Claridge’s – there was no difference. The chefs had all worked there for many years and their attitude was: this is the system, why change it?

‘I found that the lamb, for instance – and it was always a saddle of lamb – was cooked each morning at 5am, taken out of the oven at 7am, carved, covered in foil, kept warm and then served at 8pm. Very unhappy-looking meat. And that was it. The rice was also cooked a day in advance. There was no fresh food cooked to order. When diners asked what vegetables were being served, the waiters would reply, “Today we have peas, carrots, peas, beans, peas.” They were determined to serve peas. And the peas were frozen.’

Anton fought against the prevailing wisdom by tearing up the rulebook and forcing through his vision of lower-fat, freshly cooked food. And Gordon was determined to follow in the older man’s footsteps. Having been turned down by the Royal Navy two years earlier, he organised
the next steps of his career with the precision of a military campaign.

While working at the Intercontinental Hotel and in his other job at Maxim’s de Paris in London, Gordon spent hours working out which were the capital’s best and most innovative restaurants. He already knew what he would need to learn if he were ever to run one of them. And he wanted to make sure he knew exactly whom he could learn it from. ‘I believe that, if you want to be the best, then you have to work for the best. If you do, there’s no automatic assumption that you will make it. But that’s where you have to start.’

At the top of Gordon’s list as a possible mentor was Leeds-born Marco Pierre White, the man who had made headlines and won awards with the launch of Harvey’s in south London’s then unfashionable Wandsworth. At 25, Marco was only five years older than Gordon, but he was already seen as one of the country’s new generation of super-chefs. And, as soon as Gordon clapped eyes on him, he knew he had found a soul mate. A hero had been born.

‘Marco had long hair. He looked like he’d done ten rounds with Mike Tyson. I thought, Christ, I want to work for that guy.’ Cooking, for a man like that, really could be rock and roll, Gordon decided. It would be worlds away from the pre-heated meats and overcooked sauces that were already starting to drive him mad. But how could he make the move?

In the end, Gordon just rang the normal booking number for Harvey’s, demanded to speak to Marco, spun some lies about his experience and qualifications and was given a few trial shifts where he could try to prove his
worth. Looking back, he says he knew he was in the right place from the very first morning in south London – not least because the atmosphere in the kitchen was as tense and exciting as he had hoped for. He says everyone there seemed to have a temper, everyone swore constantly, everyone shouted and screamed at one another. And, while Gordon was at the bottom of the pile and the focus of much of the aggression, he knew immediately that he would thrive on it.

‘The most important thing for a chef is that you’ve got to be able to take a bollocking. The trick is to remember that none of the insults is meant to be personal. Bollocking worked with me. I’ve been slapped and kicked and punched. And when the chef shouted at me, I listened, took it in and said, “Oui, chef.” When I was training, a bollocking made me try harder. At Harvey’s, I took the flak till the cows came home. Marco pushed me as far as possible; it was a test of strength and yes we went to the limit and yes I know it was worth it.’

Gordon stayed at Harvey’s for nearly two long years, working 17-hour days, learning his craft, storing up information and experiences and helping make some of the capital’s freshest, most exciting meals. It was tough, exhausting and the money was lousy. But Gordon loved every minute. ‘For the first time in years I felt secure,’ he said. ‘Good at what I was doing and happy in myself.’ But he still kept his private life and his professional life separate. The kitchen gang used to get together for football games in the afternoons and at weekends – but Gordon was determined to make sure his boss never found out about his past at Rangers. ‘I was terrified that one day Marco
might turn around and say, “You were a failed footballer, and now you are a failed chef”, so I kept that part of my life secret.’

Working for a man like Marco Pierre White was never going to be enough for Gordon, though. He wanted to
be
a man like Marco Pierre White. So both of them knew that after a couple of years he would have to move on. To his credit, Marco had seen the potential in his younger apprentice. He saw how hard the man was prepared to work and how much abuse he was prepared to accept to produce the best possible food. So he decided to help him. As a first step, he put him in touch with the even more legendary Roux brothers.

The Frenchmen, Michel and Albert, had reportedly said that in moving to Britain their life’s mission had been to convert ‘a nation of culinary barbarians into one of gourmets’. By the time Gordon met them they were well on their way. Le Gavroche, their flagship restaurant in Mayfair, had won almost every award going and the brothers were famous for encouraging younger chefs to fulfil their potential through their Continental-style apprenticeship schemes.

‘There was no better or more exciting place in the business to be,’ Gordon said of his nearly 18 months at Le Gavroche. But both he and the Roux brothers knew he had far more still to learn. Michel and Albert were well known for having an amazing eye for spotting talent – and for working out how their proteges could smooth out any rough edges and fulfil their potential. They said Gordon needed to spread his wings and gain international experience among some other grand masters. They said he
should head to Paris. Armed with some letters of recommendation, Gordon did just that. At that point, Paris was still the world’s most renowned culinary capital. It was where the giants of the art worked. And it was going to change Gordon’s life.

His first job was at the world-famous Guy Savoy restaurant. But before it began Gordon had time for his first-ever working holiday. He headed south to the ski resort of Isola 2000 in Provence, where he was to live and work at the Hotel Diva. ‘I was at work at 7.30 in the morning to set up service. Then I’d ski from midday till 4pm, then be back in the kitchen from 5.30pm until midnight.’ Little did he know back then that these would be the shortest working hours he would experience for some time.

Back in Paris, Gordon started to learn more about cooking, as well as more about himself. ‘You can never be bored in Paris. It’s a boisterous place and a rude city and the Parisians are incredibly arrogant. I think it is a place that helped to form my character. I found out a lot about myself in Paris and I think I found my soul there.’ He also found a French girlfriend, a tall, dark-haired Parisian who was a waitress at the prestigious George V Hotel. And he found professional inspiration in the elegant and intimate surroundings of the Guy Savoy.

‘One of the many things Guy taught me is that flavour is the most important aspect of a dish,’ Gordon says. ‘I trained my palate in Paris and learned that taste is what should be held in the memory, not what the dish looks like on the plate for the first 30 seconds. People pay big money for food which tastes phenomenal, not just for something
which looks pretty when it gets to your table. There has to be much, much more to a top chef than style. The content has to be spot on as well.’

Behind the scenes, things were as manic and angry as they had been in London, though for Gordon there was one key difference. ‘I couldn’t speak a word of French when I arrived there. But it meant, thankfully, that I couldn’t understand a word when I was being yelled at, which was nice.’ As well as learning French – which Gordon lapses into all the time when shouting at his restaurant staff to this day – he also learned a little more about the work ethic required to become a top chef. It is a story he would ultimately tell in his cookbook
Kitchen Heaven
.

‘When I was training with Guy Savoy I arrived one Friday morning feeling exhausted at the end of a busy week. I made the mistake of telling him so. “What do you mean, tired?” he said. “How many hours did you sleep?” I told him just six. “Six? That’s far too many. By the time you get to 60 you’ll have slept for 15 years. Does that scare you?”

‘“Yes,” I replied.

‘“Well, then, shut the fuck up, sleep for four hours and by the time you reach 60 you’ll only have slept for ten.”’

As a still sleepy commis chef, the first rung of the career ladder for newly trained workers, Gordon was paid one of the lowest wages allowed by the French government – even though he was working in arguably the greatest French restaurant in the world. Like Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman’s characters in the film
Moulin Rouge
, Gordon and his girlfriend lived in a bedsit on the top floor of a classic tenement block near the Paris Opera.
‘Romantic and, better still, cheap’ was how he described it at the time.

On his one weekly day off Gordon got a second job in the neighbourhood. He served coffee and emptied ashtrays at La Bastille, the grand old cafe opposite the Opera. But, while the tips could sometimes be generous, survival was still pretty hard. Every now and then, Gordon recalls, he would empty his pockets and wonder about what might have been. He reckons he was making a maximum of around £100 a week when some of his former teammates at Rangers were not only collecting £5,000 but also enjoying the adulation of thousands of fans. ‘It was hard and it hurt to think of it,’ he says. ‘But I became even more determined not to fail again.’

His determination to learn and to carry on paying his dues was also as strong as ever. So he left Guy Savoy to work for another celebrated Frenchman: the Michelin star-holding Joel Robuchon, who had recently been named ‘Chef of the Century’ in Paris. And Gordon admits he had a very bad start. On his first day in Robuchon’s kitchen, the chef threw a plate of langoustine ravioli at Gordon’s head – because his foie gras sauce had spilled and the presentation was not up to scratch. ‘I was 24 then – what could I do?’ Gordon later said of the incident. ‘Should I have thought that I was too good to take that? I wanted to learn from this guy, he was the best chef in the world and that was the price you pay. My ears got burned by the cabbage and I had all the stuff in my hair but I just said, “I’ll make you another one right away, chef.” I certainly didn’t start crying on the phone to my mum. I just got on with it.’

Back in Britain, the powers that be had started to notice Gordon – and they approved of his desire to learn from the masters in France. He won a minor award as a top young apprentice and headed back to London to collect the prize and, more importantly, the prize money. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to supplement his subsistence wages in France and it allowed him to stay there for another year. It was, he says, time well spent. ‘The two and half years I had in France were the most important cooking years of my life,’ he said later. ‘The French have cooking at the forefront of their psyche and I was encouraged to feel the same. I built some fantastic foundations for my future in those years.’