Don't mess with the Michelin Man

10 April 2012

Flicking through the myriad newspaper cuttings about Gordon Ramsay, one can't help thinking of that scene from Apocalypse Now, the one where Martin Sheen is doing his research into Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz. If you didn't know him you'd say that he's had a more than a fair shot at being a culinary Kurtz. He has that same mixture of off-the-register talent and hair-trigger temper.

Ramsay is the original Angry Young Cook. Whereas Marco Pierre White likes to role play - sometimes the Jagger of the Aga, sometimes decadent ladies' man or tweedy shooting gent - Ramsay just gets angry. Really, really angry. And there are few aspects of contemporary restaurant culture that do not manage to whip Ramsay up into a towering millefeuille of rage.

'Someone wrote me a letter after seeing me get upset on TV with a member of the public,' he smiles. 'It was a nice polite letter from Harley Street, from people who come to eat here regularly, suggesting that we might like to exchange professional services.' Ramsay's correspondent was a psychiatrist who suggested that the volatile chef might benefit from a couple of hours of anger-management counselling each week, in return for which he would eat for free. 'F*** that,' says Ramsay, 'I put that to the torch.'

At the moment, Gordon Ramsay is the only chef in London to hold three Michelin stars and his eponymous Chelsea restaurant is the hottest ticket in town. He is the backer of the Michelin-starred P?trus, the super-swanky St James's Street dining room run by his prot?g? Marcus Wareing, where some Barclays employees recently blew forty grand plus on a claret-sodden lunch.

Then there is a restaurant in Scotland, Amaryllis, in Ramsay's birthplace of Glasgow, which also has a Michelin star. The afternoon of the day we meet he is flying out to Dubai to check how things are going at Verre, a restaurant he is opening at the Emirate's new Hilton. And then, later next month, the curtain rises on his most ambitious venture to date, and the most talked about gastronomic project in London so far this century: the restaurant at Claridge's.

And yet in spite of, or perhaps because of, his success, he is almost better known for his public outbursts. His feuds with other chefs can be pointlessly cruel. For instance, he once described Antony Worrall Thompson as a 'squashed Bee Gee', and branded Thompson and his Food and Drink partner Brian Turner 'the Teletubbies'.

Then there is his peculiar on-off relationship with his erstwhile mentor and employer, Marco Pierre White. At the moment it's going through an 'off' phase. 'I haven't spoken to Marco for about six months. I was over in Carmel doing a food and wine festival when I was told by Claridge's that he was in there trying to take the deal.'

But his feuds with restaurant writers are even more high-profile than his spats with his peers. He famously ejected AA Gill from his restaurant (but there again Gill did turn up with Joan Collins) and fell out with the Evening Standard's Fay Maschler after some decidedly salty remarks she made about a cappuccino of haricots.

Amateur shrinks might ascribe his temper and inhuman will to succeed to certain personal events: his failure as a football player for Glasgow Rangers; his difficult relationship with his hard-drinking father, who poignantly died before the two men could make amends; or maybe his equally tortured time with his heroin-addict brother.

Not that Ramsay pays much attention to such analysis. He's too busy being a man's man. He doesn't just run marathons for fun - he runs double marathons. And when he is not cooking, running or fighting he could give Top Gear's Jason Barlow a few hints on high-speed motoring. He used to take his Honda Fireblade up to 170 mph, but since becoming a husband and a father of three, he has switched responsibly from two wheels to four. He's about to test a new Aston Martin and the only thing worrying him is that his 'sausage-like fingers' will have difficulty mastering the F1-style paddle controls.

Those chipolata-like digits are attached to a pair of gnarled and scarred hands that would not disgrace a 19th-century navvy, which in turn complement perfectly a craggy face and compact, powerful body. There is such a sense of barely suppressed energy about Ramsay that even when he is being solicitous, there is the lurking concern that he might just sock you one by accident.

He certainly pulls no punches when it comes to women, and his views can be predictably traditional. 'A girl who works in my kitchen can have a row with her boyfriend on Saturday and come in on a Monday in a daze,' he explains. 'A guy breaks up with his wife on Saturday, goes out and gets drunk all Sunday and is back in the kitchen at 1,000 mph on Monday.'

He talks of his career in terms that Hemingway or, for that matter, Andy McNab would find appealing. 'It has been a scrap. It has been a shit-fight. I have had to fight for everything. No one gave it to me. That is why I have been obnoxious, to tell the truth. I was f***ing bad and I was scared of failing and I am still scared of failing. But one day you wake up and realise that the only person you are fighting is yourself.'

Did I really hear correctly? Were my ears deceiving me or did that almost sound like an apology? Could it be that one sunny September morning Gordon Ramsay admitted that his behaviour has not been totally impeccable and that he might be his own worst enemy?

In fact, all sorts of revelations tumble out of Ramsay's usually foul mouth. He says, for instance, that he saw Fay Maschler in a restaurant and instead of storming out or subjecting her to a torrent of abuse, he actually walked over and was civil to the grande dame of restaurant writing. 'She wrote me a charming letter wishing me well at Claridge's.' He has also been charmed by the 3am Girls, the infamous trio of gossip columnists from the Mirror, even naming a pudding in their honour.

Perhaps it's an age thing. He is now 34 and in serious danger of becoming something of a gentleman. He cites his marriage as a major factor in this shift in personality. His wife Tana, 26, is expecting their fourth child. 'I still have a mad crush on her,' he said recently, 'even when she's six months' pregnant and looks like a duck sideways.' They already have three children, four-year-old Megan and two-year-old twins Jack and Holly.

'Tana,' he says, 'has helped calm me down, and my father-in-law is running the business behind the scenes.' What? Ramsay the notorious control freak not doing it all?

'I made a major f***-up a year ago,' he admits with remarkable candour. 'Laurent, who was head waiter at the time, had forgotten to hand the kitchen a ticket for a pudding order and they had to wait 45 minutes. I was so pissed off. I couldn't believe that someone would take an order and stick it in their top pocket. I mean, people wait a month to come and eat here.' Ramsay reacted as only he knew how and made the waiter pay the table's bill - mercifully the diners were not a bunch of Barclays employees, so the bill was a more manageable £700, although Ramsay ground a little sea salt in the wound by adding a 15 per cent service charge. So far, so Ramsay.

'The following day my father-in-law said: "You can't treat staff that way", and made me pay him back every penny.' Laurent is now working for Alain Ducasse, the six-starred French maestro, where, I imagine, he is unlikely to forget another pudding order.

The problem for Ramsay is that he expects everyone to care just as much as he does - 'You don't get results unless you are firm and assertive' - and his 'firm and assertive' is another man's cruel and vicious. But then you don't hang on to three Michelin stars if you come across as a Sabatier-wielding savage with Tourette's syndrome. 'I am not saying that my third star has calmed me down,' says Ramsay defensively, 'but the Michelin people don't want to see this nutcase covered in lambs' brains.'

What they can see, instead, is a gleaming new kitchen refurbished at a cost of three-quarters-of-a-million pounds. It's even equipped with CCTV cameras which monitor the tables. 'It means we can see the last mouthful being eaten and that will speed up service. They don't want to go on holiday between courses,' he says. Clearly that late pudding order still bothers him.

However, spending £750,000 on the kitchen is small change compared to the £2.5 million makeover taking place in the dining room. Throughout our chat, Ramsay has been doodling on some draft menus, drawing something that looks like a cross between a ziggurat and an inverted wedding cake. This is his sketch of what the lights dangling from the ceiling of the Claridge's restaurant will look like. 'I have just approved these chandeliers,' he says, with proprietorial pride. 'They cost £25,000 each and there will be 30 of them, each two metres tall. The effect will be to lower the whole ceiling making it one of the most intimate rooms in Central London.'

The d?cor may be expensive but, surprisingly, the food sounds reasonably priced: £21 for a three-course lunch. The Michelin judge should have every reason to be looking forward to eating at Gordon Ramsay's new restaurant - even if it might be a bit beneath Barclays employees. All that remains to be seen is if Ramsay can stop himself turning from mild-mannered Dr Jekyll into the lamb's-brain-spattered Mr Hyde.

'I have got to come across as professional,' he says, almost as much for his own benefit as for mine, 'but I still get upset. I suppose I will have to go down to the wine cellar, lock the door and scream.'

Claridge's restaurant opens on 22 October.

Stir gently, then bring to the boil...by Charlotte Williamson

There are hot-headed chefs and then there's Gordon Ramsay. He may run award-winning restaurants and have several Michelin stars, but his infamy derives from something else: his temper.

Most famously, he ejected restaurant critic AA Gill and dinner date Joan Collins from his restaurant. 'I've no interest in cooking for him ever,' fumed Gordon. 'I don't have to take his personal attacks any more.' Gill, it seems, had called him a failed footballer. He had also written that his cooking was rather good.

Next up was Boiling Point, a television documentary that portrayed the Scot as the boss from hell who regularly reduces his sous-chefs to tears. 'The programme was total crap,' barked Ramsay. 'They condensed five days of footage into six minutes of constant swearing. I'm not some f*****g maniac.'

The same programme caused yet more trouble. Ramsay, who had been paid to promote Bramley apples, referred to the campaign director as a 'plonker' before using Granny Smiths in a recipe. Not only did he have to return his fee, he also suffered the wrath of picketing farmers outside his Chelsea restaurant shouting 'Ramsay out, Bramleys in!'

Women are another bugbear. Gordon believes they shouldn't be allowed to work in professional kitchens as they take time off for 'morning sickness' and 'women's troubles'.

But his latest target is cheeky chappy Ainsley Harriot. 'He's not a chef, he's a f*****g comedian,' spits Gordon. Hmmm. Actually, he's got a point.

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