He is the star of three television series and runs 19 high-end restaurants that together have earned 12 Michelin stars, but it took a trip to Burlington, Ont., this week for Gordon Ramsay to fully appreciate the extent of his cult fame.
A young woman at a book signing, part of a throng of more than 500 who had lined up starting the day before, had come with an unconventional request. Would he autograph her forearm so she could use it as a stencil for a tattoo?
"I said, 'Sweetie, don't do that, because when you meet your boyfriend, the love of your life, you'll want it removed,' " he recalled. " 'Trust me, please don't get ink on your skin.' "
Undeterred, the woman assured him it was too late for that kind of warning. "She turned around and lifted up her back," Mr. Ramsay said, raising the tail of his sports jacket for illustration. "There's a big 'HK' above her ass. That freaked me out."
"HK" would be Hell's Kitchen, the Fox reality-TV series about aspiring chefs that catapulted the infamous British potty mouth to stardom in North America in 2005.
In southern Ontario to promote his latest cookbook, Gordon Ramsay's Fast Food, as well as the debut season of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares (U.S.A.), now airing on Food Network Canada, the chef admitted to being a bit weirded out by the bookstore reception.
"Sleeping out, camping out, with all the police and the tents, I thought, 'My God,' " he said over an early evening espresso at an outdoor cafe on Yorkville Avenue. "One lady drove from Montreal, but she missed the cut-off line, so she was fuming. Then there was a fight, which was just weird."
The better-heeled among those fans will be happy to hear, however, that Mr. Ramsay is in talks to open his first Canadian restaurant, likely to be a tapas-style casual fine-dining concept, at the corner of Yonge and Bloor streets. "We had an amazing offer before Christmas for a new build," he said, adding he has until July to make a decision on the venture, which would open in the fall of 2009. "I would seriously consider it. But I'm doing one project at a time." (He is also considering an undisclosed site in Vancouver.
If chefs are the new rock stars, Mr. Ramsay is the total package: a sort of cross between bad-boy virtuoso Keith Richards and charismatic charmer Mick Jagger - only much taller (he's 6 foot 2).
Even at 41, he manages to carry off a blond mop of trendy bed-head hair, which sits atop a trim, marathoner's frame that on this day is dressed in a blue sports jacket, jeans and running shoes.
Then there's his most famous rock-world analogue, the Ozzy Osbourne mouth. "Sod the critics. I'm fed up. I hate being judged by individuals who know less about food than I do," he said on being asked about his cooking being dismissed as "unimaginative and bland" by a columnist in Le Figaro of France, where Mr. Ramsay just opened a restaurant.
"We kissed their asses and embraced the French in Britain 35 or 40 years ago when they came over with their cuisine français."
The tirade is classic Ramsay, the antipathy and vitriol cranked to 11 for the benefit - one can't help but suspect - of a reporter.
It's that hair-trigger temper and instinct for sensationalism that helped catapult Mr. Ramsay to the stratosphere of haute cuisine in the late 1990s.
Born in Scotland and raised in government-subsidized housing outside London, he signed with the Glasgow Rangers soccer team at 16 before an injury forced him into the world of pub and hotel kitchens. Eventually seeking out and apprenticing under famed London chef Marco Pierre White, Mr. Ramsay found financial backers through Mr. White, in 1993, for his first restaurant, Aubergine.
Five years later, he opened what is now his flagship eponymous restaurant in Chelsea, on Royal Hospital Road. That address, and Mr. Ramsay's bad-boy persona, would be flashed across Britain thanks to a four-part documentary titled Ramsay's Boiling Point, about the restaurant's quest to earn three Michelin stars, which is the Paris-based food guide's top ranking. Scandal-hungry Britons eagerly tuned in to watch the chef fire waiters on the spot, hurl food-bearing plates and, in one case, bash a person's head.
It's that same, uncensored Ramsay that Canadians can see on Ramsay's K itchen Nightmares (U.S.A.), a restaurant makeover show with the chef playing food führer. He also stars in The F Word, a series already airing in England, which will make its debut here on the Food Network in the fall.
"That's not hammed up or bigged up because some producer wants me to do it," Mr. Ramsay insisted, saying the screaming is necessary to motivate the participants to turn their restaurant around in the allotted time. "That's what I got done at 25. My chefs pushed me to the limit and then dropped me in the shit, sink or swim, and I swam."
Though Mr. Ramsay is considered the outlaw of the British culinary invasion that includes cuddly Jamie Oliver and sultry Nigella Lawson, he shares much more in common professionally with French-trained virtuosos such as American Thomas Keller and the only two men with more Michelin stars to their names, Joël Robuchon (17 stars) and Alain Ducasse (15).
Gordon Ramsay Holdings, which employs 1,500 people, now spans 11 restaurants in London and eight in such cities as Tokyo, Dubai and Prague. But Mr. Ramsay's latest gambles, his first restaurant in France, which overlooks the Versailles gardens outside Paris, and one in New York, which opened in late 2006, appear to mark a turning point for the man who would be the world's most successful high-end chef.
Several prominent critics have been unkind, notably the New York Times' Frank Bruni, who awarded the ambitious Manhattan location a devastating two out of four stars. Fay Maschler, the influential critic of London's Evening Standard, was similarly unimpressed with the Versailles restaurant, bestowing just three out of five stars in a column under the headline "Gordon's French Frolics."
Mr. Ramsay, in return, has decided to use his Ramsaymania soapbox to expose what he sees as these critics' bias against his personality, no doubt becoming a source of catharsis for restaurateurs everywhere who have been similarly panned.
"The problem was, I didn't go in there [New York] pull my pants down and ask them to take me from behind. But tell you what, I'll bet you a hundred bucks today that we'll go to three [Michelin]stars in November on that one. Fuck the Times."
Most stinging of all was the Evening Standard review last Wednesday. In what he calls a "sad week," he had just learned that the four-year-old son of lifelong friends had succumbed to cancer. The "kick in the balls," he said, was Ms. Maschler's choice of metaphor to describe a starter course.
"Pressed Vendée chicken sandwiching a layer of foie gras," she wrote, "is a faintly pink, gleaming boneless slab that resembles, well, it resembles a tumour."
"I've had enough now," Mr. Ramsay said. "...Honestly? Truth? Between you and me, I've stopped reading it now."
But that won't help with complaints from customers, whom Mr. Ramsay himself has set up to expect nothing short of perfection. One common criticism? If he's not in the kitchen, who's cooking the food? To which Mr. Ramsay likes to respond by drawing an analogy with the fashion world. "A lady in Japan, she was busting my ass in terms of 'You're such a hands-on chef and a control freak, so who does the food when you're not there?' I said, 'You have an amazing suit.' She said, 'It's Armani, a thousand dollars.' I said, 'So when you bought it, did you ask if Giorgio stitched it?' "
Besides, he said, he has systems in place that do a better job than newspaper critics of ensuring quality. He employs more than 200 "mystery shoppers" who dine clandestinely at his restaurants. "There's not a chef anywhere in the world that spends what we spend, on average half a million pounds a year, with a company that's turning 74 million pounds a year," he said. "You've got no idea - toilet, bathroom, telephone manners, knocking over glasses of wine, asking for vegetarian, vegan - daily, on this little baby here," he added, waving his BlackBerry.
His next location, an "absolutely beautiful" space in West Hollywood, is slated to open in mid-June.
"I'll tell you what. I can guarantee, within 18 months I'll be giving Robuchon a fright. And if he's on 18 Michelin stars, we'll be on 20. Trust me. I will be top."
Gordon Ramsay's Fast Food is published in Canada by Key Porter. Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares (U.S.A.) airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. (ET) on Food Network.
*****
ON RESTAURANT CRITICS
It's all bullshit. My customers are my biggest critics. On top of them there's one bigger critic and that's me.
ON DINNER INVITES
They don't ask, no longer. Great news. Trust me. That's a happy problem. I'm not very good at dinner parties. I am the world's worst guest. I have to sit there and be so diplomatic at how bad their food is. I just sit there and nod like a dog.
ON HOME COOKS
They try too hard. The better the ingredient, the less it needs done to it.
ON FERRAN ADRIA
He does it brilliantly. Not my bag. The downside is the Muppets that work for him for insignificant periods that try to replicate something he's been training to do for the last 20 years. I had a situation back in January where I had a tartare of venison and a tartare of hand-dived scallops served with capers, lemon, ketchup and grated white chocolate.
ON SENDING FOOD BACK IN RESTAURANTS
Never. Bad manners. Sounds light, doesn't it, coming from me? But just leaving it is a big enough kick in the bollocks for any chef.