In the first of a new series of seminal interviews with chefs, our writer spends a day in New York with the famously foul-mouthed former footballer. Despite the pressures of overseeing his ever-expanding empire, Ramsay still has time for some true confessions.
Photographs by Jenny Zarins
There are two facts you need to know before beginning to get to grips with Gordon Ramsay. First, in person he swears more than he does on TV. The chef doesn't 'pepper' his speech with foul language: it's actually the other way round. Minus the effing, he'd be mute. "I don't mean to swear," he says. "It just comes out." To convey what he says without causing offence, I have replaced Ramsay's favourite f-word, for the duration of this article, with the word 'flip'.
Secondly, it transpires that, before we met, Ramsay made a pledge not to mention his former mentor, Marco Pierre White. They fell out at the turn
of the century because: either (as White maintains) White wanted to improve his life by removing Ramsay from it; or (as Ramsay maintains) White
attempted to muscle in on Ramsay's deal with Claridge's.
So the f-word was OK, but the M-word was as off-limits as a Dairylea Dunker on the menu of a Michelin-starred restaurant. Ramsay's publicists may have urged him to chat about his two new pubs in London, which are opening this spring, and not talk about the great White-Ramsay ding dong, but this would prove a cruel challenge for Ramsay. At his hundredth mention of MPW, Ramsay would explain to me, "Flipping Marco's in my blood. How can I just stop talking about him?" Their relationship began in the late 1980s, when White gave Ramsay a job in the notoriously tough kitchen at Harveys, in Wandsworth, southwest London; Ramsay would go on to work for Albert Roux, Guy Savoy and Joël Robuchon, before opening his own, much-acclaimed restaurant, Aubergine.
We meet in New York, where Ramsay is overseeing Gordon Ramsay at The London, a restaurant that sits within The London NYC hotel and which may, he hopes, be awarded a Michelin star or three come November. I arrive at Soho House at breakfast time and Ramsay bounds in, an aspirant Popeye with muscles bulging out of a blue T-shirt. He was named as television's scariest personality in a recent Radio Times poll because of his talent for turning big men into trembling cry babies on Hell's Kitchen and Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. Yet the 40-year-old is starting this particular day in a positively charming mood, politely offering me tea and keen to know whether the Virgin flight from London was OK.
He talks about New York, says he loves the place and has been house-hunting with his wife Tana and the couple's four children (Megan, eight; the seven-year-old twins, Holly and Jack; and Matilda, five). Then he lists irritations. For instance, he was annoyed at Thanksgiving, because customers at his new restaurant kept asking for turkey: "I didn't come to New York to do flipping turkey." At Christmas, well-wishers irritated him by saying, 'Happy Holidays': "I was thinking: no, it's not flipping Happy Holidays. I'm over here to work my flipping a**e off."
Meanwhile, residents of a building near The London NYC have complained about the smells pumped out by the kitchen's extractor fans. "I said to the head of the residents' association, 'Flip me, the smells coming out of this kitchen are extraordinary. Shouldn't you be happy? Flipping slow-braising pork smells flipping amazing.' He just stomped off…"
For breakfast at Soho House, Ramsay has salt (on a bed of poached egg, grilled tomatoes and brown toast). I'm keen to hear about his new UK pubs, but conversation turns to his 'eating disorder', which he's sure he has conquered. For years, he "overindulged" in food during periods of unhappiness. These lows included his relationship with his late father, Gordon Senior, an abusive, heavy-drinking womaniser who eventually walked out on the family. "I thought, weirdly, that eating was a way of feeling sorry for myself," says Ramsay. "It was stupid. And when you've got so much crap piled on your shoulders behind the scenes and you're depressed – actually not depressed, I've never been depressed in my life, but still – it seems as if you can make yourself feel better by eating more, for some bizarre reason.
"I struggled to stay under 15 stone. If I ate lunch and dinner four times a week, I'd put on a stone in weight, easy. I knew full well that I didn't have to finish what was on the plate, but still I would need to finish everything on the plate." Now he insists, "I'll never be that size again." We glance at his plate: whatever crumbs of toasted brown bread are left on the dish are now covered by a folded white linen napkin placed neatly on top.
In Ramsay's autobiography, Humble Pie, which recounts an impressive gastronomic story (he now has nine London restaurants including Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, Pétrus and Maze), he declares that he despises fat chefs. So does he sack members of the brigade if they turn porky?
"No, no, no. I help them all. I want all of my chefs here to do the New York marathon. I think I just meant I despised myself, really. It's so hard for a chef not to eat because you pick all day long. Flipping candy floss, flipping butternut squash, flipping risotto, flipping lobster ravioli. Pick, pick, pick."
These recollections of overeating lead him back to Marco Pierre White because, says Ramsay, he found himself fighting the same inner turmoil when their friendship came to an end. Ramsay begins a ten-minute monologue on White, during which there are signs that he might want to end the feud – for example, he praises his former mentor: "Marco is the man who opened the door, gave chefs a profile, in terms of shining the spotlight on the flipping s****y, horrible hours, sweaty, confined conditions at the coalface…"
He concludes, somewhat poignantly, "I just want him to be the Marco that he was when I met him – when I was 19 and he was 25, and I got my flipping a**e kicked and I got the s**t beaten out of me but I loved every minute of it."
With a picture in my mind of Ramsay being pummelled in the kitchen at Harveys, he invites me to yellow-cab it uptown to West 54th Street, where he is due to oversee lunch service. "Wait until you see Gregory, the waiter," he says. "He's lost so much weight in the past month, he doesn't need a bra any more."
The explosion occurs at precisely 2.02pm. Until this moment, the kitchen has been running smoothly. Ramsay has spent most of the time with one hand holding a phone to his ear, the other hand tweaking ingredients as dishes of pan-fried trout fillet and ballottine of smoked ham hock are put on the counter, ready to be swept up and out by the waiters.
Into the clitter-clatter of the kitchen step two middle-aged, over-perfumed lunching ladies. They survey the place and coo, "Jeez, this is sooo big…" Which is just the moment Ramsay picks to explode, in true Ramsay style. Someone somewhere is doing something wrong and it has infuriated him. He fires
a volley of f-words at the underlings and then – more ferocious now – launches a barrage of obscenities. He lines up six chefs, as if they are facing his one-man firing squad. At one of the chefs he screams, "Will you get your flipping head out of your a**e?!"
Minion: "Yes, chef."
Another chef in the line-up is blasted for being "flipping mediocre". Another is told – horror of horrors – that he'll be
"a flipping salad chef for the next two years". "All of you have got to show some b*ll*cks," he thunders. A waiter swiftly ushers the pair of lunching ladies out of the kitchen and back to the polite chit-chat of the dining room, to dishes of navarin of Colorado lamb with buttered vegetables, pan-fried fillet of daurade with eggplant parmigiana, or perhaps the blackberry and mascarpone parfait with honeycomb and pine-nut praline. Perfume floats in the air as Ramsay shouts at his lads, "You've got to use your eyes." In case they don't know what eyes look like, he puts his fingers on his eyelids and pulls on them sideways. "These are your flipping eyes. Use them!"
Chorus: "Yes, chef."
Ramsay shouts at a waiter: "Speed up! It wouldn't be so bad if you were in a beauty pageant." The waiter sprints off.
An hour later, I am in the bar when Ramsay appears from the kitchen, stops in the middle of the room and belts out nine f-words in as many seconds. He is swearing at no one and nothing. I ask him later if he could describe himself as sane and he replies, in all seriousness, "Of course I couldn't."
Ramsay is scrolling through text messages on his mobile phone, searching for a message that he has received from his brother, Ronnie, who is living in Indonesia. Ronnie, 38, has fought a long battle against heroin addiction. As Ramsay searches, he says he's had two low points in his life. The first was his father's death, which was just before Ramsay would have had the chance to cook haute cuisine for him. "It wasn't that I wanted to show off," he explains. "I wanted him to understand the journey." The other low point, he says, was Ronnie's relapse. (At the time of this interview, Ronnie has been clean for nearly 30 days.) "It's hard dealing with Ronnie. A major responsibility. It's like having an 18-year-old child to look after."
He is very protective of his mother, Helen. "I'm not saying you can buy your way out of s**t, but it does makes life a little less stressful. So if there's a situation with Ronnie where he needs money, I do it because it doesn't get onto her doorstep. I don't think that Mum, at 60, should still be putting up with it." He pauses. Ramsay says his philosophy is to "move on. Don't look back". Retrospection may be out, but he allows himself a rare moment of introspection. "I feel her pain. I feel it big time," he says. "Ronnie should be halfway there in life but he has nothing."
If Ramsay finds his brother so difficult to deal with, surely he could stop talking to him and leave him to his own devices. He doesn't like this suggestion. "Ronnie's like a wisdom tooth you can never take out," he says. "You've got to live with it, and take two or three Nurofen each day to numb the pain." Clearly, while discipline and perfection are necessities for Ramsay, his brother is a constant reminder that not everything in the chef's life is disciplined. Ronnie is the one thing that Ramsay cannot manage.
A waiter brings a latte. Ramsay sips and then winces, as if dog dirt has just been waved under his nose. "This coffee is cold," he tells the waiter. "Thankfully, it's me and not a flipping customer." The bar manager is told to turn up the flipping lights because "it's like a brothel in here". When the lights go up, the bar manager is told to turn them down because "it's like being sat in the middle of Blackpool flipping illuminations".
Ramsay stands up to scurry back to the kitchen, where he is to be photographed for an article in an American magazine. I say that a lot of people would be appalled to have witnessed the monstering he gave his chefs at lunchtime. "Mmm," he says. "There's no other way, unfortunately."
Until a couple of years ago, Ramsay was virtually teetotal but tonight, having finished evening service, he is enjoying a glass or two of white burgundy, while he reflects on "Don Marco". (When asked if he is obsessed with White, he replies, "Well, I don't wake up in the morning thinking about him, but…" and then he disappears into deep thought.) Like White, Ramsay describes himself as an adrenaline junkie, which means he feels the need to add another business to his empire of restaurants. "I am scared," he says. "Scared of failing. And I crave jeopardy."
Doesn't all this work make him a selfish man? "Like many chefs, I'm selfish on the personal front, yes. But on Saturdays and Sundays I'm devoted to the family. If I miss football on a Saturday morning, Jack charges me a fiver. I've missed it four times."
As a child Ramsay may have wanted recognition from his father, but today he craves acknowledgment from his son. He tells me, "Every day, I ask Jack, 'Who's your best friend?' And Jack says, 'It's you, Dad.' And I'll ask again, 'Come on, who's really your best friend?' And he says, 'It's you…' "
It's nearly midnight and we say goodbye. "Christ," says Ramsay. "We didn't get to talk about the flipping pubs, did we?"
- Gordon Ramsay's new pubs are The Narrow, 44 Narrow Street, London E14 (0871 075 2332), opening this month, and
The Warrington, 93 Warrington Crescent, London W9 (020 7286 2929), due to open in April.
- WFI stayed in New York at The London NYC (00 1 866 690 2029; thelondonnyc.com). Doubles start at the special introductory rate of $399 (£205) per night.
- Virgin Atlantic (0870 574 7747; virginatlantic.com) flies six times daily from London to New York, from £405.20 return, including tax.
Prices correct at time of publication.