It’s not only rivals who feel the wrath of Gordon Ramsay. He is happy to give his children a kick up the backside, too.
Mr Pot meet Mr Kettle. Gordon Ramsay is asking – and not entirely flippantly – if Jamie Oliver really needs to swear so much. ‘You have to ask if there’s a reason to swear,’ he says, in a timely, if surreal, contribution to the broadcasting standards debate.
‘Maybe if you are delivering babies and it’s going t**s up and the umbilical cord is wrapped around their ankle, of course you might need to swear. But not teaching someone to make a f****** Cornish pasty, no.’
Er, Gordon… ‘Yes, I know, I know, I know. Who am I to say that? I’m the last person to tell him that. But Jamie really should know better, because he is the domestic darling of the blue rinse brigade. He is the nation’s treasure.’
Gordon, 42, who always likes to think he invented the F word, bless him, suggests he has been sprinkling the expletives with a little less gusto recently. Not that any of us would have noticed. ‘I try not to swear in front of the kids. It’s wrong. I tell them it’s wrong, even though part of me thinks, ‘They are going to hear it anyway, why not from us?’
‘I was out watching my son, Jack, play football the other day, and he missed the f****** goal. Tried some fancy footwork and missed. I was going nuts. I shouted at him, “Should’ve gone to Specsavers Jack.” The other dads were going, “Ooh, nasty.” But you have to teach kids to be hungry to win. The point is, I didn’t say, “Should’ve gone to f****** Specsavers”, did I? And I still got my point across. He went back on that pitch – and we won 3-2!’
Crikey. Competitive dad, or what. Jack is only eight. Does Gordon ever feel he is being too hard on Jack? He softens, but just a little. ‘Well, I did apologise for the Specsavers thing afterwards, because we won. It’s hard, though, getting the balance between encouraging and supporting them, and giving them that hunger.’
I ask if he wants his son to be anything like him, and he thinks for rather longer than you’d expect from a man who supposedly has an ego the size of Vesuvius.
‘I want my son to be competitive and hungry, but, more importantly, to do what he wants to do but to be the best at it. I say to him, “If you are going to be a librarian in Wandsworth, be the best and the funniest.” Mind you, you never know with kids. My seven-year-old daughter, Tilly, told my wife, Tana, the other day that she wants to be a lesbian when she grows up!’
Gordon reveals that he wants his children to be hungry. He wants them to experience something of the real world
It can’t be easy having Gordon Ramsay as a dad. He may be the most famous – and reportedly richest – chef in the world, personally insured for £25 million, but he is also a man driven by demons, and one who is determined that his kids should grow up experiencing something of the real world. That’s a difficult combination.
He nods. ‘Jack got punched on the school bus recently – not for being ugly or spotty, but for being my son. Imagine how that feels.’
How did Gordon handle that one? ‘I made him get back on the bus. It’s the only way. Do I want to wrap them up in cotton wool and get them a chauffeur-driven car to take them to school? No I don’t.’
It’s the same with his children’s diets: no mollycoddling here either. He gleefully recounts the tale of one of his daughters taking a piece of sheep skull into school for a ‘show and tell’ session. ‘The teacher came out with some comment about Hannibal Lecter.
Hilarious.’ Seriously, though, where did he learn to be a good dad – if his father was as bad as he says – and what will he tell his own children (he also has Jack’s twin, Holly, and Megan, ten) about his own troubled childhood? Gordon senior was a violent bully with a drink problem, who never showed his son any encouragement or pushed him to achieve anything.
‘I have a simple strategy. I do the exact opposite of what my dad did, so Jack and I are best mates. He said to me last night, ‘Do we have to stop being best mates when I fall in love?’ I said, ‘No, we will be best mates for the rest of our lives.’ I don’t know what I will tell them about my dad. I have only got another two or three years before I have to tell him the truth.’
Gordon Ramsay with wife Tana, and children Jack, Tilly, Holly and Megan
The most incredible thing about Gordon’s story is how he channelled the disappointment of a failed footballing career (he was signed to Glasgow Rangers, but a knee injury put an end to his hopes) into a new life as a chef.
He says he enrolled on a hotel management course at the age of 19 because he didn’t have enough O-levels to join either the Navy or the police, but could he have found himself in a kitchen precisely because his father thought it was ‘a place for poofs’?
There was certainly no hint of fine dining in his background. ‘The nearest we got was a Berni Inn. Even now, my mum doesn’t like to eat in my restaurants. She would much rather be at home having tea with the kids.’
I ask how long it took him to get football out of his system. He doesn’t know if he has, yet.
‘Even after the bitterness – no, I was never bitter, more hurt – was gone, there was this ache on a Saturday afternoon, about the time I’d be walking out of that changing room onto the pitch.’
His disjointed childhood – he describes it as ‘hopelessly itinerant’ – meant moving from one council estate to the next, as his father worked as a swimming pool manager, welder, shopkeeper, and aspiring country and western singer.
The young Gordon attended some 20 schools in his time, and recalls each one bitterly. It’s why he won’t consider relocating to the US or Dubai for good – both moves have been reported – because he wants his children to have a proper base. ‘I don’t want my children to ever have to be the new kid. It was horrible for me.’
How did he survive? ‘I asked what the football team was like and could I play?’
Later, we talk drugs. His brother is an addict and has served time for possession. Gordon says he has never as much as tried a drug. Why? ‘I know it would have been the beginning of the end. What saved me was the sport ethic. Sport was so, so, clean, and so far removed from the bun-fight at home.
‘I came from a broken home and sport was where everything was amazingly exciting, but comfortable.
I fell in love with it, and it gave me everything I ever wanted in terms of team spirit and support. Everything really.’ And when it was taken from him, he found that support in another macho arena: the kitchen.
His explanation of what happened may be linguistically clumsy, but it isn’t short on passion. ‘That’s what cooking does, doesn’t it? It instils this level of confidence that you are… maybe not untouchable… but somewhere near it. It’s a pretty tough world to survive in. It gives you this inner feeling of solidarity that no one is ever going to break through, and getting inside me is like getting inside Fort Knox.’
Gordon with Edwina Currie on his hit TV show, Hell’s Kitchen
Of course, it has always been in Gordon’s interest to talk about his troubled, even tortured, past. It gives him a depth that his TV rival – the lovely Jamie – lacks. He jokes about how they arrived on our screens at pretty much the same time.
‘Don’t get me wrong, I think Jamie’s great. But there he was – the Naked Chef, wholesome, all that rubbish – and there was me, this eight-headed monster. I still haven’t been able to watch Ramsay’s Boiling Point to this day.’
Boiling Point, the 1998 fly-on-the-wall documentary, was where Gordon’s TV career began. It was shocking stuff – the swearing, the kitchen chaos, the pure rage pouring from him. It seems it even shocked Gordon himself. ‘It wasn’t designed to be that, Christ, no. Everything was going on in my life then – my father had just died, I was trying to set up a restaurant on my own and was being sued by the previous people I’d worked for. It was carnage.
‘My father-in-law, who I’d borrowed half a million from, and who’d agreed to act as guarantor for the bank for another half a million, was beside himself. He had the bank on the phone saying, “Oh my God, we just lent this guy half a million quid, and you signed the indemnity. Is there any chance you could control him a little bit?”‘
The relationship between him and Tana’s father, Chris Hutcheson, is a fascinating one. I ask about their first meeting and he roars with laughter. ‘He hated me. Tana was going out with my friend, Tim, at the time and she and her dad came to eat in Aubergine, my first restaurant. I was lording it up a bit, you know. I said to Tim, “Look, I am a 25 per cent shareholder. I’ve arrived, mate.” All that stuff. I remember Chris turning to Tim on the way out and saying, ‘Who was that arrogant, jumped-up a***?’ It’s still hard to believe that Chris is now my CEO.’
Gordon and Tana at Claridges
Indeed, it was Chris who, last month, announced that his son-in-law is the highest earning chef in the world, and claimed that revenue from his restaurants, TV shows and merchandising deals is expected to hit £100 million by 2010. Gordon’s latest project, Taste of Christmas, is about as ambitious as they come.
Taking place over four days, it is a festive roadshow with extra baubles on. Twenty-five thousand people are expected to visit the show at Excel in London, and dozens of top restaurants – including most of his – will be represented.
The fairy on the tree, so to speak, will be Gordon himself – cooking, cajoling, creating. Oh and, he reminds me, getting his hands dirty. ‘I still pluck my own f****** turkeys’, is how he puts it, lest there be any doubt.
None of it would have been possible without Chris. Of course, Gordon has always sought out mentors. His great culinary influence was his old boss Marco Pierre White.
They fell out amid lawyers and recriminations, and what looks, from a distance, like some serious macho posturing. There have been other, headline-grabbing spats, like the one with his former protege Marcus Wareing. Chris’s influence, however, is something else entirely, a bona fide father figure. ‘You might think it’s too late to get a true father figure in your life. But it’s never too late.’
A humble Gordon Ramsay. How odd. Odder still is his assertion that ‘chefs are bad at running businesses. No disrespect to Marco, or Jean Christophe Novelli or Raymond Blanc. These guys were phenomenal successes ten years ago. But then they tried to get that level of creativity in a boardroom with a group of investors – and it’s not the same.’
Spend an hour in Gordon’s company and you can see exactly why Tana, 34, was enthralled by him. Less obvious is how she has managed to live with him for 15 years without attacking him with his beloved meat cleaver.
Halfway through the interview he tells me, apropos of nothing, that he recently told her she needed Botox. They’d been chatting to the actress Amanda Holden after Cookalong [his live TV show] and she asked if Tana had ever had Botox. ‘Tana said, ‘No, do you think I need it?’ and Amanda said, ‘Yes, if you are going to have it, have it around your eyes.’ I said she should, too, just to wind her up. So, all weekend, Tana has been saying, ‘Oh, my God, do my eyes look that wrinkly?” He laughs like a drain.
Of course, he’d be horrified if Tana actually was the sort of woman who trots along to the cosmetic surgeon every few months. ‘No! It would be like going to bed with a box of gelatine. I want a proper woman. I want to know that, when things get hot and steamy, she isn’t going to melt all over the bed.’ It seems the great Gordon Ramsay isn’t nearly as alpha male as he would have you believe after all.
