It's time to go f*@!ing global

How did Gordon grow so big? By learning from the mistakes of others. During the 1990s restaurant boom, he landed his first jobs in Michelin-starred outfits in London and watched his mentors, Marco Pierre White, Nico Ladenis and Jean-Christophe Novelli, open dozens of restaurants across the capital - only to close them again when the market went as flat as a glass of day-old Perrier.

"I wanted to learn from their mistakes," he says. "I realised that they had all gone into competition against each other. They opened very similar restaurants, all bearing their name, all serving similar food, with no infrastructure to back them up."

Ramsay took a different tack. He decided to work with the competition, not against it. He persuaded banks and other backers to lend him the money to set up Gordon Ramsay Holdings in the late 1990s. He ran just two eponymous restaurants - in Chelsea and, from 2001, Claridges - but set up eight run by talented chefs he had worked with on the way up.

"I'd met all these great young chefs. I wasn't going to be so stupid as to let them go and set up in competition with me as my predecessors had done, so I made them partners." He persuaded Marcus Wareing to take charge at the Savoy Grill, Angela Hartnett to run the Connaught and Stuart Gillies to operate Boxwood Café. Jason Atherton set up Verre in the Hilton Hotel on Dubai Creek, before returning to London to open Maze.

GRH backs all its restaurants with its own cash, from £1 million in the case of Maze to £3 million in New York. Its London-based staff of 60 handles bookings and logistics but each head chef chooses the menus. "That way all the food is distinctive and we all support each other." Except for Tokyo and Dubai, where Ramsay acts as a consultant and appoints key staff, GRH rents the space, deals with the costs and takes home the revenues.

It's high risk, high return, and not every venture works out. Pengelley's restaurant collapsed spectacularly last year after only seven months with losses of £850,000. "When things are not working, we get out fast," says Ramsay. Explaining the closure, he says Pengelley "was the first chef not to come through our ranks and therefore was not up to speed with our disciplines and systems".

GRH is also locked in a dispute with Alistair Paton, who used to run the super-exclusive private members' club M1NT, in a building in Knightsbridge that GRH controls. GRH closed the doors on the club and changed the locks two weeks ago.

Paton claims Ramsay used bullyboy tactics - including physical threats and commercial sabotage, notably switching off the electricity and water in the club - to force him out. He is suing for damages and loss of trade valued at £ 500,000. Paton says: "It was a disgusting way to behave. The public face and practices of GRH and the harsh behind-the-scenes commercial reality could not be more distorted."

Ramsay says M1NT was closed because of rent arrears totalling £100,000.

In spite of these high-profile set-backs, Ramsay's diversification strategy seems to be working. Business at the Savoy Grill alone is up threefold on last year, and Maze's Atherton has just won a Michelin star, taking the group's tally to eight.

It's heady stuff - and it might never have happened if Ramsay hadn't fallen for his mate's girlfriend 10 years ago. When he was working in London in the early 1990s, a friend was dating Tana Hutcheson, a Montessori teacher and former manager of Terence Conran's Pont de la Tour restaurant. Ramsay wooed her, the couple married, and had four children.

It was Tana's father, Chris, a self-made businessman who ran a successful printing firm in south London, who backed Ramsay's early investments with £500,000. Today, Hutcheson is the business power behind the Ramsay empire.

After Ramsay finishes cooking in Claridges or Gordon Ramsay at 2am each morning, Hutcheson arrives at the firm's offices in Victoria by 6am - GRH is effectively a 24-hour operation. He is on the board of the company with Ramsay and the pair talk dozens of times a day. Ramsay is quick to acknowledge Hutcheson's importance. "He has taught me business. He has shown me more in the past five years than my real father did in 30 years."

Lately, Ramsay's 24/7 schedule and raft of new openings have sparked criticism that he has "spread himself too thin". Mention this and Ramsay's smile disappears and his pudgy, lined face screws up into a snarl. "Don't be a twat. I haven't stopped cooking. Sure, I spend some time in the office but I haven't forgotten how I got the Michelin stars that got me here."

But can Ramsay really provide exactly the same experience across the globe in London, New York, Tokyo, Los Angeles and Florida? "If you buy an Armani suit in Tokyo, instead of London, you don't ask the assistant if Giorgio stitched it himself. What you are paying for is the level of perfection, the level of quality. That's what I guarantee."

The Armani of food? It has a certain ring to it - one that appeals to City investors. Recent reports have suggested that Ramsay is planning to cash in and sell out to one of the City's burgeoning private-equity firms. His response is another verbal hotplate.

"F****** bollocks. This business is what I do. It's my passion. Every day that I go into the kitchen I want to elbow the cook out of the way. I've got the hunger and the fear.

"I've only just got to the summit and I intend staying here longer than many chefs in this country think is possible. We're opening at the new Heathrow Terminal Five. We're looking at Amsterdam and Prague. There's no limit."