Cover story
Gordon Ramsay
analysed that. I think it’s brutal honesty, really. Sometimes in our ever-evolving world, we get a little bit too PC. In kitchens, you’ve got to get honest quickly because there are so many things going on. So, part upbringing I think, Mum and
Dad. A bit of Scottish roots in me. Also, I think pressure’s healthy. Pressure’s very healthy. It just becomes stressful when you can’t handle that pressure.
How do you balance your workload?
GR: How do I balance? I take the whole of August off, that’s my holiday. It’s so much easier now, to be honest, because I really focus on what I want to do, and who I want to do it with. And with the success behind me, it’s not because I can pick and choose in
chance to open a business. At 26, it happened early for me. I’d just come back from Paris with all this knowledge, got introduced to some guys who had an Italian restaurant sort of in the ass end of Chelsea, and it was a little place called Eleven Park Walk. I looked at it, they offered me 25 percent
of it, I didn’t know what I was getting 25 percent of. It turned out to be 25 percent of debt. But what do you know at 26? I put my head down, wiped my ass off and I go after it. I really worked hard. We went from a little neighbourhood bistro to this sort of mega two-Michelin star establishment in three years, which was an amazing journey. And, I was just bubbling. Then I couldn’t
quite understand why the bills weren’t being paid, and all these cash fl ow issues were happening and we were fully booked for 6, 7 months in advance. So, you need to go through that process of learning. And I’d much rather have experienced that
than go to Harvard for a business degree in how to run a business, because I was dropped in it and I understood. My man management skills were dreadful
and I couldn’t talk to anyone, and I had all this knowledge. I realised at an early age that in order to become really good, you have to offl oad and teach and that’s, how I understood to remove the insecurities. Because I found all this knowledge, I
wanted to keep hold of it and not show anyone it, I wanted to shine, but then I wanted to become one of the best chefs ever. So you’ve got to teach, and you got to teach properly. I understood that one quite early.
How did you develop your candid and frank nature when dealing with chefs? Is it something that developed over the years? Did you have this personality as a child? GR: I’ve never actually sat down and
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an arrogant form, but I’m just very sort of conscious of time and I manage my life far better than I ever was doing 8, 9 years ago.
You see lots of chefs and they are rotund, to be kind, but not you. Is it an exercise regime, or you just don’t sample the wares?
GR: Oh no, I eat. Trust me, I eat like a horse. But I was a fat chef once, and I knew that it wasn’t a good advert for my restaurants, to come out sweating, looking ridiculous and barely could tie up my apron strings, drooling over a customer who was trying to force the pudding down. The role of a chef today is far more prolifi c
than it ever was 20 years ago and it’s a young man and young girl’s game today, so there has to be a certain image in terms of an appetizing image. I think that we are now sort of under the
scrutiny more than ever before so you can indulge, you can eat out and you can have the most amazing time with food, but it has to be done in a balance, and every restaurant has to perform along those lines. So, having been a fat chef once, I don’t want to go back there, I suppose. When you just want a snack, what is your
go-to food? I love burgers. I’m allowed one a week, but it’s nice when you’ve got an assistant because you send him in for one and you eat his.
What about your kids’ diets?
GR: I’ve got four children of my own, three girls and a boy. I got to keep it real with the kids or I’m in danger of spoiling them. We don’t do that. They keep a very level-headed, disciplined lifestyle. They eat well, they keep fi t, they do their homework and they know that school is
absolutely critical. They’re not food snobs, they don’t go out and eat appetizers and entrees at Nobu. They get taken to “A” restaurants for a treat.
How much do you take the obesity epidemic into what you do?
GR: It’s a very good question. I get very uncomfortable when the focus is on the children that are overweight because the problem is the parents. You look at the strict guidelines in terms of what we have to go through to run a business, to pay our taxes. It should be the same with the understanding of how we cannot allow our children to become overweight. That’s our responsibility. We need to scrutinize the beginning. We
have a fun element in our house where the kids weigh themselves every week – every Sunday, religiously, they weigh themselves. They write it down, they have little
competitions, and I don’t want them to get a conscious thinking that they’re overweight at 14 or 15, so they know why they weigh themselves, and they see Mum and Dad weigh themselves, and then they see that when we’re having dinner, dessert’s a treat and fruit is imperative. So it’s the parents. That’s the sort of
passport that’s missing, the strict guidelines where you will be held responsible if a four-year-old is over the standard weight in conjunction with their height. It’s not about them screaming and not tolerating you, it’s about your level of discipline. That’s where the help’s needed, I think.
It seems these types of shows have become more popular, and we seem to just be getting fatter and fatter with garbage food. How do you reconcile that?
GR: Whether it’s garbage food in central Europe, UK – outside America, the fastest development of McDonalds now is taking place in France. Now, what’s all that about? So it doesn’t really stack up. Even if you never wanted to make this as a career point of view, to become a professional chef, teacher, whatever, learning how to cook for yourself on a natural front is paramount. We don’t have enough schools, and I think
if there’s more of an educational part of a MasterChef scope inside a curriculum, inside a school, campus, academy, I think you’d see less obesity across the country. Because learning to cook for yourself is so
important, just like it is reading and writing, just like it is speaking a second language and learning that kind of confi dence. Cooking something simple, making a great
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