Gordon Ramsay (7 page)

And still the learning went on. Desperate for money rather than big kitchen experience, Gordon took Marco Pierre White’s advice again and agreed to a well-paid private commission. He headed out to live on a yacht as personal chef to Reg Grundy, the Australian television magnate famous for giving the world
Neighbours
and Kylie Minogue. They sailed around the Mediterranean from the chic ports of Sardinia and Sicily to Corsica and Cannes and even crossed the Atlantic to the glorious British Virgin Islands and Antigua. As a crewmember, you can be fantastically busy when the boss, his family, friends or colleagues are on board. But at other times you can live like a king, get a great tan and experience the good life.

The job gave Gordon the diving bug, a sport he still loves today. It also helped him repay some of his debts, showed him how the other half lived and made him even more determined to become his own boss and make his own money. As soon as possible.

What he knew he wanted more than anything at this point was a restaurant of his own. A place in London where he could take on the masters and prove he had learned all their lessons. A place where he could make a real name for himself.

But, when you are a boy from a council estate in Glasgow who has had to wait at table just to afford your rent, it is hard to see how this kind of dream can become a reality. Setting up a London restaurant could cost hundreds of thousands of pounds even then. Gordon knew he had to try to call in some favours. He would beg and borrow the money. If it came to it, maybe he would even steal.

Interestingly, bearing in mind how volatile their relationship was to become in the years ahead, it was Marco Pierre White who came up trumps and helped Gordon into his first restaurant. A site had become available at 11 Park Walk, in Fulham. It was set on a side street off the noisy, traffic-filled Fulham Road. And it had bad vibes and a tricky history. Many a restaurant had opened there and soon closed after failing to attract enough paying customers. Big hopes in that corner of west London had often led to big losses – which is one reason why the plot was vacant yet again back in early 1993.

Everyone in the industry knew it would take something special to go against the trend and defy history. Could 26-year-old Gordon provide the X factor? Marco had lined up some other financial backers to help raise the funds for the venture, and Gordon himself borrowed as heavily as the banks would allow him. Everything he had, and a lot that he didn’t, would be going on the line over the next 12 months.

Picking a name for a new restaurant is never easy. But Gordon and the team got that job done quickly. They wanted a single word that suggested health, freshness and something very slightly different. They reckoned they had it when someone suggested the name of a vegetable that was also a colour. Gordon’s favourite colour, as it turned out – Aubergine.

Even Gordon himself says now that he’s not sure exactly what it was that made the place such a big hit. In fitting out the room, he and his partners had tried to make it as airy as possible and give it a Mediterranean feel. When it came to the food Gordon’s keyword was simplicity – and, years ahead of the rest of the world, his twin aims were to use as little fat in the dishes as possible and to keep the flavours as light and natural as he could. ‘People come here for a three-course meal but I don’t want them to feel heavy or overly full at the end,’ he said. What he did want, though, was to come up with a personal signature. ‘Over the years I have begged for as many menus from other places as possible to try and work out what they were all about. Now I want my cooking to be able to say: “That’s me on the plate.”’

One way he set himself apart was by taking simple, surprisingly cheap ingredients and somehow turning them into something special. ‘How many London restaurants have mackerel on the menu?’ he asked once when trying to make the point. His choices – of eight dishes for the main course, five of them fish – changed every three months, though what had turned into his signature dish, ‘roast seabass with braised salsify and jus vanilla’, tended to keep its place, as loyal customers asked for it even when it wasn’t available.

The one thing that was always there was Gordon himself. ‘People spend big money for a meal for two to know that I’m cooking the food,’ he said. ‘My chefs don’t want to see me upstairs drinking Champagne. People don’t wait for two months to eat cock-up food that hasn’t been checked by me personally. It has to be perfect.’

To make sure it was, he tended to arrive at the restaurant at 8.30 in the morning to look at the day’s menus, check the fresh food that was coming in, go over the books and the paperwork from the night before and deal with any management issues that needed tackling. Then came the food itself, as he got going on the lunch and then the dinner service. Most nights he would still be at 11 Park Walk nearly 18 hours after he had first arrived – and less than seven before he would be back in the kitchen to do it all again. It was relentless, exhausting, but exhilarating. At just 26, Gordon was head chef in his own London restaurant. He was living his dream. And the world was starting to notice both what he cooked and what he looked like.

Earning recognition for his food was the most important thing for him. And Fay Maschler, the celebrated restaurant critic of the
Evening Standard
, was one of the first to give him the seal of approval – something she might have regretted years later when Gordon turned on her in one of his periodic attacks on the critics. ‘Certain dishes are straight copies of the masters but come excitingly reasonably priced. It’s couture cooking at off-the-peg prices,’ she wrote back in 1994 in a long, positive review. Perhaps equally important to Gordon’s vanity was the sudden interest in his appearance. And he decided he
might as well milk it as much as possible to get extra publicity for his restaurant.

‘Gordon Ramsay is 6ft 2in, beefy, with natural fair hair and electric blue eyes. He talks about deep-sea diving, squash and working out. He doesn’t smoke nor, interestingly, does he drink. Unless you have seen him in his chef’s apron you would never guess that he cooks, or that he is about to become London’s most chic chef,’ wrote Pauline Peters, also in the
Evening Standard
. ‘He is about as opposite to his mentor, the pallid and volatile Marco Pierre White, as it is possible to be.’

Meanwhile, the
Daily Telegraph
said Gordon looked more like ‘a sportsman in fancy dress’ with ‘muscles straining against his chef’s whites’, rather than the traditional image of a well-fed restaurateur.

It hardly matters now whether it was Fay Maschler’s review of his food or Pauline Peters’s description of his looks that did the trick. The phones at Aubergine had started to ring – and for a long time they hardly stopped. After his six-year apprenticeship, Gordon had become an over night sensation and his momentum seemed unstoppable. For ten straight months, he says, there was hardly ever an empty table at dinner – and one night he had 75 people on his waiting list for a restaurant that had already filled every one of its 45 seats. Long before eBay had been invented, some clever people were trying to cash in on Aubergine’s sudden success by making Saturday-night bookings and placing adverts in London papers saying the reservations were now on sale to the highest bidders. Even his mother, who wanted to turn up and surprise him on his birthday during one of her rare
forays into London, had to hang on the phone and wait for a cancellation.

Throughout all this, Gordon was thriving. But he admits his personal life was suffering. He split up with his latest girlfriend within six months of the restaurant opening when she refused to put up with his long hours. ‘It was tough but it was inevitable,’ he explains. ‘In this job you have to be a little selfish. I can’t take three nights off a week to sit with her or take her out to dinner. I can’t be anywhere else but in my restaurant.’

Even on the very rare nights when he was elsewhere, he was worried sick. One of his business partners wanted to take him on a trip to America for the Italy versus Brazil World Cup Final in 1994, but Gordon only agreed to go if he could fly to LA and back in a day. ‘It was great but I couldn’t really settle,’ he says. ‘The whole time I was nervous about what was happening back in London.’

And, by the end of that year, Gordon had a lot more than just Aubergine to worry about. Always a man in a hurry, he was ready to sign a host of other deals to make his name, build his empire and earn some cash. One restaurant had never seemed enough for his heroes like Marco Pierre White, the Roux brothers, Raymond Blanc, Jean-Christophe Novelli and Nico Ladenis. So it wouldn’t be enough for him either.

Over the next few years, Gordon entered a series of deals with other restaurants and restaurant groups. He agreed to rewrite the menus for Michael Caine’s restaurant, the Canteen. The company which had helped put up the money for Aubergine was also expanding and wanted his input into its other projects. One of them was the reopening
of the old Overton’s restaurant in St James’s Street as L’Oranger. Gordon took on a management role there as executive chef while asking his old Le Gavroche colleague Marcus Wareing to come back from Paris to be head chef.

Finally, as Britain’s newfound love affair with celebrities gathered pace, Gordon joined forces with another ex-footballer, former Leeds United star Lee Chapman. Lee and his actress wife, Leslie Ash, were moving into the restaurant business and planned to set up a celebrity-friendly restaurant and club called Teatro in the heart of Soho. They wanted Gordon, as executive head chef, to help draw up the menus and set the standards that the kitchen team should follow.

Once more, Gordon got on the phone to try to arrange things. He asked Stuart Gillies, another of his former colleagues and proteges, to take charge of the brand-new £130,000 kitchen being built in an old office block behind the Palace Theatre. In total, 16 kitchen staff were recruited for Teatro – all of whom had been tested out at one of Gordon’s other restaurants over the past few months.

At first, all went well at the new venture. An unlikely list of guests ranging from Geri Halliwell and Robbie Williams to Chancellor Gordon Brown came to eat and be seen at the club. But, behind the scenes, storms were brewing. Reports of Lee’s lifestyle and the relationship with his wife were regularly featured in the media and Gordon was not impressed. He decided that whatever the financial cost he had to cut all ties with both Lee and Teatro.

When reporters asked him about the split, he told the
Daily Mirror
. ‘There were all sorts of things happening late at night which were just beyond belief. I’ve witnessed all
the screaming and shouting. I saw some pretty horrific things I don’t wish to go into because it’s not pleasant for anyone, but it’s pretty low. The embarrassing nights were when Leslie was at home with the children and on the phone looking for Lee, and Lee was asking myself and head chef Stuart to lie for him and say that he’s not there. But he was upstairs trying to chat up some bird. Leslie’s the most endearing woman and so down-to-earth. She deserves a knighthood to put up with that kind of crap from him.

‘At Teatro, I always hung around out of respect for Leslie because he’s a big guy. I remember seeing him at four in the morning, abusing the staff. He pushes the self-destruct button because of his ego.’While accepting that it’s okay to have a drink in the kitchen, Gordon pointed out that their need to draw a line if you want to run things smoothly.

Moving on from Teatro wasn’t as easy as Gordon had hoped, however, and immediately after he dissolved the business partnership he bumped into Lee in the street – literally. ‘One night, on my way from Oxford Circus I went on to Old Compton Street and bang – there he was. Lee kept blocking my path. Eventually, I had to stop a police car and ask them to intervene so that I could get on to my next appointment.’ Over the next few years Chapman’s mood did not change. In 1997, he was charged with common assault after a row that left Leslie with a black eye and facial bruising. She took out a restraining order against him after he followed her to the home of fellow actress Caroline Quentin. Then, in 2004, Leslie ended up in hospital after suffering injuries that both sides said had been sustained during a bout of ‘rough sex’.

Back at Aubergine, the news was much, much better.
Within 12 months of opening, the restaurant wasn’t just making money – it was winning awards. First came the news that Gordon was being named ‘Newcomer of the Year’ by
Caterer and Hotelkeeper
magazine – which is a lot more important than it sounds. Winning a ‘Catey’ is seen as the restaurant business equivalent of getting an Oscar. And in a year with tough competition Gordon had apparently won his by a mile. ‘His was simply the most stunning meal I have had in the past 12 months,’ said judge David Young, an area manager for AA Hotel Division who practically ate out for a living.

Aubergine itself got some great press at the same time. ‘Unlike some new ventures which peak early and then fail to get any better, the judges felt that Ramsay was still improving. He is not someone who is just sitting tight and marking time,’ said fellow ‘Cateys’ judge Michael Raffael. And there was even better news to come. Gordon had always said that, if he couldn’t get an FA Cup Winners’ medal from football, he wanted to collect some Michelin stars for his cooking. With Aubergine he got one. Then another.

Michelin stars continue to be the gold standard for chefs and they are the holy grail for newcomers like Gordon wanting to make their names. Printed in secrecy each December and released every January, Michelin’s restaurant guide has been going for 105 years – and has been entirely independent and unbiased for each of them. Restaurants are visited by totally anonymous inspectors who turn up or book tables like any other customer and pay their bills in full without saying who they are. There are no favours, no freebies and no clues about who is doing the judging or when a restaurant is being scrutinised. What inspectors
do offer is experience. They each visit an average of 240 restaurants a year (and sleep in around 130 hotels) and any restaurant can receive up to 12 random checks in any given year before it is rated.