Gordon Ramsay - Gordon Ramsay’s Playing with Fire

There are only forty-five seats at Royal Hospital Road , which makes things easier. When the bookings for a day are complete, that’s it. If the Queen called after that and asked for a table for two that evening for herself and Philip, you’d have to offer up your apologies. There is no room to manoeuvre, short of calling a guest and cancelling their booking, and that, believe me, is never going to happen. In a bigger restaurant like Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s , it is easier to rearrange the bookings, and there, to be honest, we always have a table up our sleeve.

But when you’re planning reservations, you have to time them. Imagine two fully booked restaurants, one where everybody turns up at the same time, and the other, where all tables arrive at fifteen-minute intervals. Which restaurant is going to perform better? You have to give the kitchen a chance, and our guests have learned to appreciate this. Not only are they happy to book for 8.15 p.m., rather than eight o’clock, but they actually turn up on time.

When I think back to the early days at The Connaught , the procession of the old school diners into the restaurant at eight o’clock was a living nightmare for Angela Hartnett, the head chef. Then there’s the appearance of London’s power brokers for lunch at The Savoy Grill , all on the dot of one o’clock. Of course, it’s difficult for the kitchen to handle. Actually, it’s a fucking nightmare.

People say that restaurants where you have to book can never attract people who are just passing by. It’s nonsense. My favourite scenario is when a party of six or eight knocks on the door at Royal Hospital Road late on a Friday night and asks if there is a chance of a table. Too bloody right there is. You wheel them in and come to an understanding that they are more than welcome, provided we can serve them with whatever we have left. It means that we can empty the fridges for the weekend and have a large bill to round off the evening. And we make the guests happy, too.

That combination of good planning and passionate staff is exactly what you need to make a restaurant successful. It’s all part of the mix that makes a brilliant restaurant stand out from an ordinary one. That was what we had set out to achieve, and it soon became clear that we were getting there. And, suddenly, there was the chance of doing it twice.

It was in this same period that we were offered a second restaurant right in the middle of St James’s. Someone had thought they would run a restaurant for fun, bring their mates, and wondered why it had all gone pear-shaped. I had a look at it, with its trolley of sweating cheeses, white- painted piano and filthy kitchen. The menu was a disgrace, and the owner was flat broke.

Before the ink was dry on a hastily cobbled contract, the bailiffs moved in. But they were just a day too late. The builders were stripping the last remains of 33 St James’s and we had secured our second premises. The name was to become Pétrus , and the chef I brought in was Marcus Wareing. He was the first person to experience the elevation from chef to a shareholding chef patron.

This was where the stable of chefs-in-waiting that I built up at Aubergine became a reality. We have been able to expand because we have brilliant chefs, and giving them a share in the ownership of new restaurants was to become the way forward for us. I knew that the chef would always be the most important player, and it became a rule that we never planned a restaurant without the chef. The location, the design and the front-of-house staff were all important, but first we had to work out who would be in charge of the kitchen.

Pétrus was not an easy site. The kitchen was below the dining room, and everything had to be carried upstairs. It was a long room without a central arrangement for guests, so familiar at Royal Hospital Road , and without the easy, comfortable ambience. But all of this was more than balanced because we had a passion and energy to get this restaurant up and running profitably, which is exactly what we did.

The next job was to find a name. The name Pétrus represented the very finest claret. I wrote to the owners, asking if I could use the name, and they agreed. It meant a considerable investment in the cellar: as well as all the usual bins, we decided we needed to carry one of the finest collections of this Bordeaux wine, all the way back to 1945. It made me think that what we were becoming was a purveyor of wine, rather than food. After all, you can’t charge any more than £ 100 per head for the menu, but there is little or no limit on what people can spend on wine.

This is a kind of kick in the bollocks for someone like me, for whom the cuisine is all important. But the business reality – whether I liked it or not – is that wine provides us with the profit we need to keep going. And I was determined to keep going. It was less than one year since I had opened Royal Hospital Road , and already I had the beginnings of a stable of restaurants, and I simply had to make them both successful.

And, on occasion, I could live with wine taking priority over the menu. One night while I was in the kitchen at Royal Hospital Road and Chris was in the office in Fulham Road, we got a call from Marcus to say that a table of six bankers had ordered £ 13,000 from the wine list. The feeling was electric, and the voltage increased in line with the spend. When the bill increased to £ 27,000, Chris started to make old man noises about credit card clearance. By the time it had reached £ 44,000, we made the decision to remove all food charges from the bill. After all, what was £ 600 in the face of this extraordinary wine spend? By noon on the following day, the news had somehow leaked, with front-page coverage in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Straits Times . It was one of the few occasions when Pétrus was on everyone’s lips.

CHAPTER FOUR

Vanity should carry a health warning When it bites you, take action. Bleeding to death can kill you.

ROYAL HOSPITAL ROAD was paying its way. Pétrus was winning praise for Marcus Wareing’s cuisine. We were confident and on the look out for more sites, but – as it turned out – I was sleepwalking into my first failure. Good lessons are best learned early, but they are never easy, as I was about to find out in an ice-cold, down-your-neck way from a wild foray into Scotland at a time when I was still learning to walk in a business nappy.

This is a story of vanity, plain and simple. Open a couple of successful restaurants in London, and you are ready to take on the world without it ever occurring to you that there might be factors you’ve never thought about before.

As is so often the case, it began with a phone call and a proposition at the end of the line. In this case, it was Edinburgh beckoning with a prime site on the Royal Mile, and Chris was off like a gunshot. First, he checked out the proposal, talked to the finance director, who was on show-round duty, and then moved off. He was up there for the rest of the day to have a look around the Edinburgh restaurant scene before getting an early flight back to London the next morning.

The idea was to see if we could offer something to the stiff, up-your-arse society of professionals, financiers and low-spending tourists who exist side by side in the city. We knew that the Scottish Parliament would soon be opening – if someone could just control the shocking building overspends of public money and long delays – and that would mean a fucking big boost to the local restaurant trade.

But when Chris got back, he was not optimistic. He told me how the beautiful Princes Street was now a ruin, and asked what the fuck had happened there. It’s true: it’s like there’s been a hideous signage competition, with the world’s worst performers strung out in a line, and nobody seems to notice it. It’s plain fucking wicked that this has been allowed to happen. Is this the price of commerce? Business doesn’t mean instant shit in the face like this. Whoever was in charge must have been blind or an idiot. What a sad, fucking shame.