Gordon's global empire: the cook who ate the world

Tonight, Gordon Ramsay will welcome journalists to his latest venture in Versailles. He's already been pilloried by Paris's leading food critic – so is France set to become the new F-word in the superstar chef's colourful lexicon? Martin Hickman reports

(RICK NEDERSTIGT/AFP/Getty Images)

You could be forgiven for thinking that Gordon Ramsay is everywhere: on television, castigating chefs in Kitchen Nightmares, on the front cover of recipe books, staring out from adverts for BT, and Threshers, and Gordon's Gin. But he is actually in France at the moment.

French journalists are visiting his new restaurant and brasserie at the Trianon Palace Hotel in Versailles tonight, and Ramsay will be there to greet them in person. Over the next few days, Britain's cockiest chef will monster the kitchen ahead of the public opening next week.

He won't hang around, though. In 2008, Ramsay is not just the footballer-turned-chef whose TV appearances are riddled with expletives. He is a modern culinary and media phenomenon. A one-man, foul-mouthed whirligig with annual sales of tens of millions and an ambition of creating a global culinary empire: Attila the Restaurateur.

Paris – the fulfilment of a long-held and deeply personal ambition –is merely another box ticked towards his overarching international goals. He is probably half of the way there.

In less than 10 years, the catering college trainee with an itinerant father has powered his way from a single restaurant to a multimillion-pound business spanning three continents.

He is the owner of 10 Michelin stars, making him one of a handful of truly famous international chefs.

In London, his empire spans five fine-dining restaurants, including the capital's only one with three Michelin stars (Restaurant Gordon Ramsay at Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea), three gastro-pubs and a brasserie.

Worldwide, he has restaurants in Dublin, Prague, Tokyo, New York and Florida. Paris (Versailles), Amsterdam, and Los Angeles arrive this year. Further corners of the globe are being scouted and there are hopes for Melbourne.

Then there is Gordon the food presenter, one of the most bankable stars on TV with £8m contracts with Channel 4 and Fox in the US. He has four ongoing shows – two in the US (Hell's Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares) and two in the UK (Kitchen Nightmares and The F Word).

He is a prolific author of cookbooks that fly into the best-selling charts like a well-aimed knife, and he has a range of Royal Doulton pans, crockery and glasses.

How did Ramsay become so successful? And can he make a go of Paris, in what must be the most demanding restaurant scene in the world? One wouldn't want to bet against him. He has made his fortune on a road paved as much with broken glass as with gold. He did not have the most auspicious start in life. His father was a womanising, alcoholic swimming pool manager who regularly uprooted the family whenever he switched jobs. ("He was competitive... and gobby, very gobby," Ramsay says in his autobiography).

Ramsay junior could have been a professional footballer but a knee injury devastated his career at Glasgow Rangers aged 16. It could have crushed him, but he fell back on his second love, cooking, and did an HND course in hotel management.

In the late 1980s, he ventured as a fresh-faced commis into the kitchens of Harveys, the restaurant in Wandsworth that made Marco Pierre White's reputation. Then, MPW ran the gastronomic equivalent of the SAS, once reducing Ramsay, who went on to become his lieutenant, to a quivering wreck.

After another bruising apprenticeship, at Albert Roux's Le Gavroche in Mayfair, Ramsay went to France for yet more punishment in the kitchens of Guy Savoy and Joel Rubuchon. His French co-workers, he said later, would deliberately talk fast so that he could not understand and engage in petty acts of unkindness, such as stealing his socks.

After a recuperative stint onboard the yacht of the Australian TV mogul Reg Grundy, Ramsay returned to London with the dream of opening his own restaurant and he became head chef at Aubergine. Business boomed, but Ramsay was not making the money; he only had 10 per cent.

So one day he walked out. His entire team followed him – to Restaurant Gordon Ramsay.

His staff, among them Angela Hartnett and Marcus Wareing, have followed him pretty much ever since during his takeover of the kitchens of London hotels.

First came Petrus at the Savoy in 1999 (run by Wareing), then Gordon Ramsay At Claridge's, then the Connaught (Hartnett), then The Savoy Grill (Ramsay and Wareing) and plenty since.

Observers say that Ramsay has been able to expand so rapidly because he has kept this coterie of innovative, industrious chefs. They are given a financial stake in the restaurants they run.

Another key link has been the Blackstone Group, the US financiers who installed Ramsay as the restaurateur at each big new hotel they revamp, such as The London in New York and the Pullitzer in Amsterdam.

Arguably most important to Ramsay's success, though, has been his father-in-law, Chris Hutcheson. Hutcheson is the financial brains, with a 29 per cent stake in the business. He does the numbers while Ramsay does the food.

They talk 15 times a day, often on the "Gordon Hotline", an old-fashioned cream phone at their headquarters in Victoria.

All the reservations, accounts, human resources, training, planning and meetings are done at the office of Gordon Ramsay Holdings.

Mr Hutcheson scouts potential restaurant locations across the world, meeting property-owning suitors. He wants to expand the pubs side of the business and start a £30-a-head casual dining chain called Foxtrot Oscar, named after the newly-opened Chelsea brasserie.

The next to open in London, though, will be Murano and the York & Albany Hotel, overseen by Hartnett, who recently left the Connaught. "She epitomises the role we are trying to establish for chefs who have proven themselves to us," explains Mr Hutcheson.

"What we do is that we basically say: 'Give us your career and we will make sure you get a percentage of everything you do'. We give equity to our chefs once they have proven themselves.

"So Angela went out to Dubai to open our restaurant there and spent two years doing that and she came back here and was given the Connaught. She was replaced by Jason Atherton, who went out there for two years. So that is our business plan: everything we do starts with the chef."

Ramsay's ambition is to have restaurants with three Michelin stars in London, Paris and New York. The Versailles restaurant is part of that – but also personal. He told Caterer and Hotelkeeper magazine that, with his Versailles restaurant, he wanted to wreck France's 32-hour week and make the French staff do the preparation for the cooking by the English – the opposite of the pecking order he experienced in Paris. "So I'll turn the clock back 20 years," he vowed.

But the reception from the French may not be any warmer this time. In Le Figaro, the critic Francois Simon questioned why Parisians would eat Ramsay's "uncomplicated" meals, rather than visit a good French restaurant closer to the city.

Under the heading "Why has he come to Paris?", M. Simon answered: "Money."

"Like his [celebrity chef] confreres, he is regularly approached by companies who set up ventures in lucrative places and want a quick return on investments."

Diners would be entering "Gordon Ramsayland," M. Simon protested. "If Gordon comes to Paris, it's precisely to see what us 'fucking Frenchies' make of his 'fucking cuisine'."

Frank Bruni, the New York Times critic, disparaged Ramsay's opening in a similar fashion last year. He complained: "Most ingredients are predictable, most flavours polite, most effects muted." The Michelin guide awarded the restaurant two stars. Bookings soared.