Humble Pie (3 page)

We arranged that I would meet him at
Harvey’s
at midnight.

I walked into the restaurant. It was pitch black. When I switched on the lights, there he was, sitting in a corner of the room with a bottle of mineral water.

I started work again the next day.

How did he persuade me?

‘Why are you throwing all this away?’ he said. ‘If you don’t walk back into that kitchen tomorrow morning, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. I’ll tell everyone that you ONCE worked here.’

Essentially, though, the climate of fear went on. He could be totally mad, but it was only when I worked in other seriously good kitchens
that I realised that, despite his creative genius, Marco was unnaturally erratic.

Breaks were out of the question, mostly. The only way you could get one was to take your shallots and peel them while you were sitting out on the common. Woe betide you if he looked out and saw you kicking a ball around.

One day, he was going out for lunch with the chef and restaurant owner Albert Roux. That meant we had to do lunch on our own, something that really excited me. However, he said that he was going to make the sauces for that evening’s dinner when he came back from lunch. I thought to myself: oh fuck, that means he’s going to do the sauces just as we’re going to slip out of the door for fifteen minutes. So I decided to do the sauces myself. I was so proud of them. About five minutes past twelve, he came to say goodbye. That’s when he saw the sauces.

‘What the fuck is going on here?’ he said. ‘Who finished those sauces?’

I put my hand up.

‘Marco, it was me. I’m just about to bring them to the boil and cook them out for twenty minutes.’

Next thing you knew, pans were raining down on us. He went mad. I mean, fucking mad.
Finally, he threw the sauces themselves at us. That fucked up our fifteen-minute break, and it put us in the shit for sauces that night. I was gutted. There was nothing bloody wrong with those sauces. He didn’t even taste them.

I stayed at
Harvey’s
for two years and ten months. It was a massive learning curve for me, and it completely changed the way that I cooked. The trouble was that Marco made you feel as though there was nothing outside of
Harvey’s
– that nowhere else mattered. That was just not true. Even if I hadn’t been sick of the rages and the bullying, I needed to spread my wings if I was going to become the kind of cook I now so badly wanted to be. And that is exactly what I did next.

I landed a job with a top chef in Paris, but Marco wasn’t having any of it.

‘You’re fucking stupid,’ he said. ‘Get yourself into a French kitchen in THIS country before you go off to France. I’ll get you into
Le Gavroche
.’

Le Gavroche
is a famous French restaurant in London. The man in the kitchen was Albert Roux. I didn’t really want to work for Albert. Marco had worked for every top classical chef in the country including Albert, and now he could cook just as well as them. In turn, I’d taken everything I possibly could from him, so what would be the point of me going back to his teacher? On the other hand, it was exactly the kind of place I wanted to work in. And it was only open Monday to Friday. For the first time in my life, I’d be able to enjoy a proper weekend. Well, that was the theory.

I was in the shit, financially. When I got to Albert’s restaurant, I said, ‘I’m really pleased to be here. Thank you so much for allowing me to come here. Yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, sir.’

Then I went straight back to being a commis chef. In other words, I was on less money and more in the shit than ever. So on Saturday nights, I would go back to
Harvey’s
and work there so that Marco could take the night off.

It was very tough indeed. At Albert’s restaurant, you had to be there at 6.30 a.m. You needed every bit of energy, and if you lagged behind, you were out on your ear. Michel, Albert’s son, had worked out that I was working at
Harvey’s
, too. He went mad, but he’s an amazing guy. He lent me some money so that I didn’t have to go to
Harvey’s
any more.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘Just pay me back later.’

At last, I could concentrate again.

Albert asked me if I would go and work with him at a place called Hotel Diva, a ski resort in the French Alps, in a place called Isola. I went for one season and it was amazing, a kind of working holiday. It was somewhere to start learning French, and to start understanding France. I was only twenty-three, and it seemed like a miracle. At Stratford High, lots of the kids would
go off on skiing trips – but never us, because we couldn’t afford it. Finally, I was skiing!

The kitchen was a challenge, as my French was so poor – I couldn’t tell anyone what to do. Jean-Claude, who’s now my head waiter at my restaurant
Royal Hospital Road,
worked at
Le Gavroche
. He came out to Diva with us, and he’d have to translate what customers said. But it was a great experience. There was a cookery school there as well, and people would ski during the day, take cookery lessons at night, and then enjoy a gourmet dinner.

One night, we had to put on an eight-course tasting menu for a massive group of
Mail on Sunday
readers. I was running the fish and the meat, and my head chef, Alan, was running the starter. It was a French fish stew. He’d made it that morning, but instead of putting it in the fridge to cool, he put it in these stainless steel buckets outside in the snow. The stuff was freezing over on the surface, while beneath, it was still warm. This made it fester.

Champagne and canapés were served, and everyone sat down for dinner.

‘Fucking hell,’ Alan said. ‘Get me the starter, Ramsay.’

That was when he remembered that it was still outside. I scraped the ice off, pushed my fingers
into a bucket, and it was horrible, like hot cheese. I came running in with the buckets.

‘You’d better take a look,’ I said.

Then in walks Albert, screaming that he wants to taste a cup of the stew.

Then, rather than admit his mistake, Alan brought it to the boil, skimmed off the froth and the natural yeast, and tipped in a bit of brandy. Then he gave it to Albert. Well, fuck me. He went ballistic. He got hold of the bucket and he just threw it. He was aiming for Alan, but it was the kitchen porter who took most of it. There was saffron and tomatoes bubbling across every wall.

What happened next? Albert went out and made a speech. And while he made that speech, we made fish stew from scratch. I spread it between six pans, and there were fourteen of us dashing between them, crushing it, blitzing it and skimming it – eighty portions in all. What a nightmare!

From the ski slopes, I made my way – at last – to Paris. There, I went down to an even lower salary, but believe me, as a Brit in a French kitchen, they weren’t going to pay me proper money. It worked out at about £480 a month.

My first job was at the
Guy Savoy
restaurant, which had two Michelin stars. There, I learned total respect for food, and how you can make something out of nothing. Take a leek. At
Harvey’s
, we would take a fourteen-inch leek and use half an inch of white stuff to finish a soup. The rest of it would be binned. In France, you’d use the best white bit for the soup, but then you’d use the rest for a sauce, and the very top in a staff meal. Nothing went in the bin. It was all about precision and freshness. My eyes were opened by the way that they roasted the most amazing capons and guinea fowl, and by the way the chef would order in such small quantities: sixteen tomatoes, or a dozen shallots, or just two sea bass.

It took me three months to get upstairs. They put me on fish, one of the most difficult stations of all. It was a baptism of fire. Fish demands precision. Thirty seconds’ too much cooking can mean that bass is dry, ruined. But the minute I was there, I was away, there was no stopping me. I swear that I had the biggest penis in all of France!

Guy, the boss, took a shine to me. I was first in and last out, and I used to beg him to let me
make the staff dinner. I wouldn’t take my half-day off during the week. I would come in and work for nothing.

English customers would come, and Guy would say that they must be taken into the kitchen to meet me, his little British chef, because he knew how homesick, how isolated I was. He saw through my arrogance, my pushiness. I was like an orphan there, and he stepped in as a father-figure. People sometimes point out how, in shows like
Kitchen Nightmares,
I’ll always encourage the youngest chap in the kitchen. If you want to know why – Paris is why. I know how it feels to be in a corner, unnoticed and unloved.

After I’d been in Guy’s kitchen for a year, I told him I wanted to move on. That was when he offered me a job as his Number Two. I was thrilled, but, as a Number Two, I would have to show other people what to do, and I wasn’t ready to finish my training so soon. So I went to the great Joël Robuchon, where – guess what? – I went straight back to being a humble commis.

Joël’s restaurant,
Robuchon
, was the most famous restaurant in the world at the time. The kitchen was in a kind of corridor, and once you were installed there, you simply didn’t move for the next five hours. Joël made Marco look like a
pussycat. One evening, we had eight Japanese investors in: two wanted duck, two a meat course, and four fish. I’ll never forget it. The duck was cooked wrapped in pastry. So that would come out of the oven, and then you had two minutes before the other main courses all had to be ready. Timing was crucial.

One of the fish I had to cook was hake. I had to wait until all the breadcrumbs were the same colour. Then I had to take it out and pipe on this butter. I was also doing John Dory and sea bass, all in two minutes, timing myself by a clock on the hearth.

All of a sudden, Bernard, one of the French chefs, had fucked up. There was a problem with the pastry, and he was in such a rage that he slammed the oven door and the glass broke. A minute later, I saw this huge copper pan coming at us, the pan that the duck was supposed to be in. It turned out that the meat section had panicked and forgotten to put the duck in it. Someone had lifted the lid up and discovered this, and, well, I’ve never heard a scream like it. The guy had to start again from scratch. It was horrific, and if there had been a back door, I think we all would have bolted.

Joël was such an unpleasant person to work for. On my last week, the fucker even put me on
bin duty. You literally had to climb inside the bins on a Saturday morning and hose them down for about three hours. It was a terrible job.

‘But it’s my last day tomorrow,’ I said to Chef.

‘Look, you’ll be here tomorrow morning, cleaning those bins out, or you’ll never work in a Michelin-star restaurant again. I’ll ring every chef in France and make sure that you’re banned.’

That night, I knew I wouldn’t get my money. I had worked the last month for nothing.

After my stint at
Robuchon
, I knew I was good for nothing. Not for a while, anyway, because, physically, I was broken, but I couldn’t afford not to work. What I needed was a lucky break, a way of earning some cash and recharging my energy at the same time. That break came to me just in the nick of time. And this time, believe it or not, the money was good and the hours were human.

A guy came into the restaurant who had an agency near Nice that employed chefs to work on board the yachts of millionaires. A few days later, I sent them my CV. Within twenty-four hours, they contacted me and told me that they had a job for me on board a charter. The idea of what amounted to a working holiday sounded like just what the doctor ordered. So I headed down to the Med. My boat was captained by an absolute knob, but berthed next to it was another boat,
Idlewood.
One night, I got talking to one of its deckhands, and he let me know that they were looking for a chef, too.

‘Our captain’s called Ginger Steve,’ he said.

I met up with Ginger Steve two days later, and he told me that he worked for a high-profile couple, but that he couldn’t tell me who they were, which meant that the owners had to be
seriously rich. So, forty hours later, I’m sailing off into the sunset on this beautiful mega-yacht.

It was amazing. The kitchen was massive for a boat. There were twenty-two crew members, and I was earning about $4,000 per month, which is a fortune. And bear in mind that I was spending no money. I didn’t even have to cook for the crew. My assistant did that.

It turned out that the boat was owned by Reg Grundy and his wife, Joy Chambers. Reg is one of Australia’s most famous media bosses. He founded the Grundy Organisation, which makes television shows like
Young Doctors
and, most famously of all,
Neighbours.
Joy is a novelist and an actress. They were charming, the perfect employers, and I loved them to bits. I’m still in touch with them. They came to my restaurant
Aubergine
when it opened. They came to my wedding and they send my children presents.

After the summer season, I’d saved about £15,000, which seemed like a fortune, and I felt fantastic. But I was dying to get back to London and use everything I had learned to open my own restaurant. Then I was asked if I would travel with the boat across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Then the Grundys would pay for me to fly back to Europe. When would I get the chance to do something like that ever again? I
was torn between wanting to pursue my dream back in London or have one last adventure – so I agreed.

Cooking for the Grundys helped me to develop my style even further, strange as that may sound. They adored fine dining, but they were also health-conscious. So breakfast was stewed fruit, and dinner was light – no cream, no butter, even if there were important guests around the table. For me, it was great. I was being paid very well indeed to evolve my own culinary style. You can see traces of my time on the
Idlewood
in the way I cook now.

I had so much respect for Reg. We got on like a house on fire. He was so loyal to his staff, some of whom had worked for him for thirty-five years. He taught me the importance of looking after people long before I opened the doors of my own restaurant.

But I never let myself forget that this, for me, was just another leg in my journey. And I could feel myself getting closer to achieving my goal every day. I could almost SMELL that restaurant of mine. It was in my sights. I just had to reach out and grab it with both hands.