It hasn't been a great start to the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness for Britain's top chef-entrepreneur. A string of setbacks has led to whispers that Gordon Ramsay's "unbeatable formula" may be curdling, says The Guardian. After taking "a kicking" in both the Zagat and Harden's restaurant guides, he has lost his concession at The Connaught, while revelations that he hadn't actually caught the sea bass he was shown manfully spearing on his Channel 4 show The F-Word, made Ramsay the Action Man look like a plonker. Worst of all, perhaps, his renegade brother, Ronnie, has just been jailed in Indonesia for heroin possession.
"To use Ramsay's parlance, he's just had a nasty knee in the bollocks," says his publicist. Some cannot conceal their delight. Andrew Gilligan in the Evening Standard was "glad, glad, glad that the world seems to be ganging up on Gordon Ramsay". He "always thought it absurd" that "this foul-mouthed individual" was seen as a role model. But given how far Ramsay has travelled, you might argue there are worse. Ramsay, described by critic AA Gill as a "wonderful chef, just a really second-rate human being", has become an unlikely British institution, says The Sunday Telegraph. On top of his string of Michelin-starred restaurants, he has a lucrative line in consultancy and several cook-books under his belt, and the compulsory range of celebrity-chef china. If Ramsay pulls off his ambitious plan to conquer America, this £67m "mini-empire" will become huge. Yet rapid expansion lies at the heart of his troubles. "No one doubts Ramsay's talent. But the growing impression is that the maestro is spreading himself thinner than a white truffle shaving."
Ramsay only became a chef because his career as Glasgow Rangers' reserve goalkeeper was scuppered by injury when he was 19. Even so, his experience at Ibrox under manager Jock Wallace, "who made Ramsay's tirades look like limp lettuce", was formative, says The Times. Ramsay acknowledges "I would not have got where I am as a chef if he hadn't been so ruthless". He was born in Scotland and grew up in a council-owned "concrete bunker" in Stratford-upon-Avon. Life for Gordon and his siblings was tough, largely because of their ne'er-do-well father "a boozing, philandering pub-band musician", says The New Yorker. Food mattered not as a culture, but as a necessity. "I did not pod beans at my grandmother's knee, gather forest mushrooms, or chase the farmyard hens," said Ramsay in Humble Pie, his autobiography. "If Dad had done a runner [there was] no food at all." Ten years after Gordon Sr's death, Ramsay still gets letters from his creditors.
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After leaving Rangers, Ramsay took an HND in hotel management, which led to a series of kitchen jobs. The turning point came in 1988 when he found a magazine article about Marco Pierre White, the Michelin-starred enfant terrible of the London restaurant scene, and thought: "There's Jesus." He and White would later fall out spectacularly (the feud continues). But, despite the stormy apprenticeship at Harvey's and Aubergine, he credits White with "everything". In 1998, he opened the eponymous Gordon Ramsay, and never looked back. But the ultimate call facing Ramsay is drawing closer by the day: chef, or businessman? It will be interesting to see which way he goes.
His move to America has the Rottweiler been tamed?
Anyone doubting Gordon Ramsay's celebrity status across the pond should consider two recent propositions. First, a Hollywood offer to make a "Billy Elliott-style" movie on his rise to stardom. Second, his forthcoming appearance on The Simpsons; the highest of all celebrity accolades ("I hope they keep the swearing in," he says). Meanwhile, his show Hell's Kitchen which follows the British formula of showering hopeless restaurateurs with a mixture of expletives, practical advice and flashes of tenderness is a mega-hit, rated by Daily Variety as "the most compelling show of the new season".
"I do television, so I can do New York," Ramsay told The New Yorker. "Basically, I'm a prostitute. I prostitute myself so I can have a restaurant here." Yet his New York restaurant, while hardly a failure, has not had the storming debut hoped for. It opened last November "with more a whimper than a bang", observes The Sunday Telegraph: critics expecting "a Rottweiler" complained they'd been served a "golden retriever". Ramsay soon found he couldn't compete in the hot-venue stakes with Vanity Fair supremo Graydon Carter's Waverly Inn hardly a promising prelude to his forthcoming launch in LA. With restaurants in Tokyo and Dubai, and one in Paris in the pipeline, Ramsay already spends more time in his jet than in the kitchen. Yet there's no let up in his commercial drive. Gordon Ramsay Holdings plans to grow its turnover to £100m by 2008, and the family coffers are being swelled by his wife Tana's burgeoning TV cookery career. The danger is that the Ramsay name becomes "so ubiquitous it loses its classy connotations".
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