Not Famous, Just Busy

GORDON Ramsay wants to tell us something. "I am not sexist,'' he says. OK. That's good. That's a start. We're listening. Earlier this week he was in the headlines for stating that modern women can't cook to save their lives, but be fair - he has got a new television show to promote. Anyway, he's also got a point.

In this country, there is an ongoing decline in the preparation of meals cooked from scratch at home, with less than eight per cent of them prepared in the traditional way. Meanwhile, more than one billion ready-cooked meals are sold every year, which seems to suggest that most men can't cook, won't cook either. The thing is, when they do go into the kitchen, they make such a fuss about it that you can't help but notice. Get the camera, I'm basting a chicken. Look everybody, toast avec beurre. And so on.

Today, at home, Ramsay ate a banana and strawberry smoothie for breakfast - a bowl of it, not a glass, for he eats "like a horse''. Now, his lunchtime Welsh rarebit lies on a plate, next to the £ 67,000 Rorgue cooker in the middle of his south London kitchen. The hotplate alone is about the size of a lorry. Apparently, it makes great grilled cheese and is good for testing recipes, for Ramsay never, ever has dinner parties at home - "Are you f****** kidding?'' - and most of the cooking here is done by his wife, Tana. So at least she's doing her bit for the sisterhood.

"She is evolving,'' is how her husband puts it, as if lovely Tana had just crawled out of the primordial soup with an egg whisk in her hand. When Ramsay came home late and famished the other night, he dined on family leftovers, as he so often does. This time, it was a bowl of her chorizo, cabbage, flageolet bean and potato stew.

"A really nice autumnal stew,'' he says. "I had to correct the seasoning, of course, but it was delicious. It f****** shocked me.''

He tries not to mind that Tana prefers Delia Smith's cookery books to his own, and even made an effort to tempt her with a Gordon Ramsay DVD. "All she has to do is press play and the rest is done for her, but she still won't use it. She has never cooked from my books, I don't know why. It is a bit of a worry.''

According to the statistics, no one else is either, so why worry? Anyway, when the last of their four small children starts school this year, Montessori-trained Tana wants to have a career of her own again, and he's all for it. Something big involving children and school meals evidently, so it sounds like she's going to be famous too.

"Not famous. We don't like that word around here. We prefer busy,'' he says, correcting my own seasoning. "Anyway, Tana doesn't want to be one of those lazy yummy mummies who sit around on the lounge floor all day with that fanny-stretching Pilates video. She wants to get up in the morning and go to work.''

God, he's not sexist at all, is he? "No,'' he agrees. "And as you know, I do have a campaign to get women back into the kitchen.'' But Gordon, that is sexist in itself, doubly so...

"It is and it isn't. Some women say we've all got careers now and we're not going back to cook your f****** tea. But I'm not trying to return to what my mum experienced. Nothing of it. There's a certain amount of machismo with cooking, and I don't understand why women don't see it as glamorous as men do; to go into the kitchen and have a good service, a good old ding-dong.''

A Big Man, With A Groin Strain

This bollock-swinging machismo has been the taproot of Ramsay's career, powering him through kitchens both here and in France during his training. In Ramsay's kitchens, no one ever stands in the corner quietly mincing garlic or stirring soup while listening to The Archers.

Instead, talking about cojones and swearing is the order of the day, although there is definitely a certain poetry in the way Gordon Ramsay swears and in person - if not in print - his cursing is oddly inoffensive and often very funny. The genital obsession, however, remains unfathomable.

"You've got to have bollocks,'' he will scream at some pimply youth trying to run a burger bar in his Kitchen Nightmares show. And in the promotional literature issued by Channel 4 for Ramsay's brand-new television series, The F Word, we are promised that Ramsay and the new crew will have "balls as big as profiteroles''. Which is weird, because profiteroles are not actually very big at all.

"God, no. A profiterole wouldn't really be any bigger than an inch,'' muses Ramsay. Draw one for me, I say, and he obediently draws a teeny little pathetic circle.

"What?'' he shouts, when I tell him about the document. "Listen. I can confirm my bollocks are bigger than that. I'm not going to show you, but they are definitely bigger than that. What an extraordinary press release. Someone's going to get it f****** later! Of course my balls are bigger than profiteroles! I've got balls of steel.'' Then he adds, in a rather sophisticated manner: "I've got balls as big as pétanque.'' At least that's what I think he says. With Ramsay you can never be entirely sure.

We talk in the glass-roofed kitchen of his home, where Ramsay almost glows under the bright autumn sunshine. Today he's a big man with a groin strain - "I thought it was a hernia'' - but he still moves quickly and with astonishing grace on his size 14 trainers. His craggy face looks as if it has been fashioned from pale, Scottish dough, then baked hard and long in a hot oven, while a kind of restless energy comes off him in waves; he is never calm.

"I'm not going to bullshit you and say I go on the rowing machine, or I go for a drive with my wife. F****** crap. I don't relax. I find it hard to relax,'' he says, and one can see that. Sometimes it's like talking to a giant, clenched fist, although not one without a sense of humour.

His reputation as the hotplate hard man is now embedded in the national consciousness and of course it has been good for business, but most of his chefs and brigades have worked with him for years and despite the occasional explosion, are all obviously devoted to him.

"It's not rocket science,'' he says, "but I don't want to turn into a f****** boring philosopher like Raymond Blanc. I was listening to him on the radio last week. And he was saying 'Ooh, I never talk to my staff the way that Ramsay does; when I am upset with my cooks I sit them down and we have a glass of Laurent Perrier champagne together'. The f****** two-faced French t***. What a pile of s***.''

Other bêtes noires include his old colleague Marco Pierre White and restaurant critics in particular, of which I am one. Ramsay dishes it out, with sauce on the top, but is notoriously thin-skinned when the traffic is coming the other way.

"You know what, I have to take it. I have to sit there and take it like a f****** man,'' he says, and laughs. "How do you think I feel when you get to the f****** stage where you work your bollocks off on a new restaurant and a critic comes in to review it and got so drunk, as pissed as a fart, that he has to telephone the next day to find out what he had to eat. F****** hell.''

Who was that, I ask, and he gives me the name of The Times's current restaurant critic, the very same one who will be working with him on The F-Word.

"It's not like we're best mates or anything. We don't go out to dinner together. Anyway, it's only week one. I could always kick him out. I could always say, 'Look, your balls are f****** way smaller than profiteroles. You've got balls like marbles. Now f*** off.' ''

Ramsay is closely associated with The Times. He writes a recipe column for it - ignored by his wife, obviously - and has just signed a contract to advertise the newspaper on television for another year. Not that he seems particularly familiar with it. "I just wanted to sit opposite Jodie Kidd,'' he shrugs. He reckons that the last Times leader he read was "something by Jeremy Clarkson about no-shows'' and when asked to name the editor he says, "F***, you've got me there.''

Elsewhere, his restaurant empire - the business side is run by his father-in-law, Chris Hutchinson - stretches around the world, with a clutch of top London restaurants, plus outlets in Dubai and Tokyo, with new ones opening in Los Angeles and New York next year. The last one is the most important, for if Ramsay can make it there, he can make it anywhere.

"I'm already s****** myself,'' he admits in his inimitably frank way, adding that the food there is going to be light, modern, European seasonal, which is basically what is served in most of his restaurants.

What with his various commitments, what everyone wants to know is how he can carry on running his business at such a high-revving level. Perhaps the first chink in the armour happened this month, when the Good Food Guide published its annual report, demoting his flagship Royal Hospital Road restaurant - the only one in London with three Michelin stars - to nine points instead of a perfect 10 for the first time.

Lunching there last week, I thought it a fair assessment. The glossy staff were still groomed and impeccable, the turbot with citrus butter sauce was superb - one of the best things I've had to eat this year - but a starter of discs of lobster and chicken was slightly lame, there were two empty tables and in general the gilt seems to be off the gingerbread in some impenetrable way. Deep down, I suspect that this is something Ramsay himself knows, for the restaurant will close in January for expansion and refurbishment.

Meanwhile, he remains bullish. "Am I taking it seriously? Am I going to go upstairs and f****** do what that French chef did, and put a gun to my head because I got marked down? Am I f***. The first thing I said to the staff was, 'Change nothing. Congratulations, because we got nine out of 10, an excellent score. Do not lose sleep over it because I am definitely f****** not.' ''

The thing is, I bet he does. If not over that, then something else. "I never know where the next attack is coming from. I walk around with my eyes wide open all the time. I sleep with one eye open,'' he says, and admits that he drives himself on so hard because he knows that it could "all end tomorrow''.

In the meantime, he remains an exceptional, brilliant man, one who has added much to the gaiety of the nation by his food, but also by just being himself. Think ofhim, sitting alone late at night in his silent kitchen, scoffing up the leftover stew but racked by a different kind of hunger. One that never, ever abates.

© jan moir 2007

• This interview was first published in October 2005 © jan moir are you ready to order