Gordon Ramsay by Neil Simpson Read Free Book Online Page B

‘They paid for the wholething and if it hadn’t been for them I wouldn’t be where I am today.’
    Before heading out into the world of full-time work, Gordon made one final bid to make peace with his father. Looking back, he says he knows it was crazy to keep on trying – and that he should have guessed that once more he would have the door shut in his face. ‘As ever, it all meant nothing to my father,’ he said after graduating from college, for which he had hoped for some paternal praise. ‘He still could not understand for a moment how any real man could be interested in food. I felt sad that, yet again, he had failed to support me. For, in spite of everything he had said or done to hurt me and his family, my father still remained the bedrock of my world and his approval still mattered to me.’
    Or at least it did until the phone rang late one night. ‘Ronnie called to say that Mum had been hospitalised for two days as a result of another attack by my father. I remember calling Dad then and there and telling him that he was no longer my father. At that point, I honestly never wanted to see him again and we were all relieved when we found out he had run away to Spain with another woman.’
    Meanwhile, Ronnie was starting to have problems of his own. At 16, before working as a mechanic and briefly being in the Army, he had started smoking marijuana. Nobody really gave it a second thought at the time. Nobody realised that for Ronnie this first soft drug really would lead to other, far more serious addictions. As for Gordon, the summer of 1986 was to prove another major turning point in his life. He had read voraciously of some of the great chefs working in London, Paris, New York andother capitals around the world. For all the amazing work they did, many of them were known only to their peers in the restaurant business and to real restaurant fans. Some had been on television, become famous and made a nice amount of money. But, as far as Gordon could tell, there was no real Premier League of chefs to generate a proper sense of competition in the industry. From his bedroom in Banbury, the former footballer decided to create one.

THREE
HARD SLOG AND BAD LANGUAGE
    W hen you are brought up on a council estate and learn your trade out in the sticks, you tend to have high expectations of what you will find if you ever make it to the bright lights of the capital. So the teenage Gordon Ramsay was hoping to see great things when he got his first job in a London kitchen. Instead, he got a very nasty shock.
    In the mid-1980s, good British restaurants remained few and far between. Cooking, Gordon discovered, still pretty much meant pouring sauces on to reheated legs of lamb or pieces of beef that had been roasted and sliced the previous day. Vegetables might be overcooked, but by the time they got to a diner’s plate they were lukewarm. Decent presentation was ignored, service was appalling and nobody seemed to think anything was wrong.
    For several months, Gordon wondered if he had made ahuge mistake by picking this as his new career. Had he been imagining things when he had seen all that excitement in the kitchens of his childhood? Did no one in London share his passion for food and for how it could be created, presented and enjoyed? As Gordon would ultimately find out, a small number of top chefs did. But they too say they had to fight against the grim, traditional attitudes and practices that were already giving Gordon sleepless nights.
    ‘All the top London hotels served the same food when I first came to London,’ says Anton Mosimann, one of the early super-chefs credited with transforming the capital’s moribund restaurant scene. ‘The Savoy, the Ritz, Claridge’s – there was no difference. The chefs had all worked there for many years and their attitude was: this is the system, why change it?
    ‘I found that the lamb, for instance – and it was always a saddle of lamb – was cooked each morning at 5am, taken