Gordon Ramsay - Gordon Ramsay’s Playing with Fire

We were, as they say nowadays, ring-fenced from the hotel operation, which was now in the hands of receivers. In practice, that meant it was run by accountants whose only aim in life was to cream every penny out of this financial flop for the creditors, and that was never going to result in a well-run, happy hostelry with residents queuing up to sample my menu.

Still, we paid countless visits to Amaryllis . Chris and I would leave London at 4 a.m. and race up the motorway to be there by 8.30 a.m. When we got there, we would talk to staff, listen to their catalogue of woes, and then do the motivational bit, sure that – this time, finally – everything would change. I would gather all the poor, wee lost souls in the main dining room with the high ceiling and slight mustiness in the air, and I would talk gently. ‘Guys,’ I would say, ‘we have some issues here that we need to sort out. We need to do this together, you and me, so that we can learn from our mistakes and make this so successful that the queue for dinner stretches right down to Sauchiehall Street. So tell me what you think might be wrong at present.’

Nothing is forthcoming, so I move it up a gear. I look for the face that shows that its owner wants to hide behind the drapes – those long, grey, funereal drapes that are looking more and more apt by the day – and I try and draw him out.

‘Harry?’ I ask. He’s the barman who has personally ordered fifty-seven varieties of Scotch in the mistaken belief that he will entice most of Scotland into his bar. ‘How are you with all of this? Do you feel that we can work this out as a team? What about you, Cynthia? How can we improve our daily reservations?’

And so I go on, asking and listening carefully. In their replies, the real answer is hidden. I need to hear the tone, the timbre and the inflection to see if they really think that this can work and to see – most importantly – if they want it to work.

I tell them that they are only here because they are good, and were chosen because of this attribute. I explain that London is not that far away, and that everyone in the office really wants them to succeed. Then I ask them if they can help me get the show on the road. And, bit by bit, I can see hope. They want this to work, and they know that I want it to do so as well. We can do it. We have the best fucking ingredients in the world on our doorstep. We need to spoil our guests with smiles and recognition. We need to deal with problems immediately, and always in favour of the customers. Are we together on this? The room tells me yes, and although it might be some way short of Billy Graham’s call to Jesus, I really believe that I’ve encouraged them.

The trouble was that it never did change and, as this became apparent, we felt less like going up to Amaryllis , knowing that the love affair was over.

London was having its own problems by then. Pétrus had moved to The Berkeley and we had kept on 33 St James’s. It had seemed simple enough to give the restaurant a new name, make some changes to the menu, drop the prices fractionally, and wait for the same old crowd to keep coming. Only they didn’t. Turnover plummeted, and we were suddenly no longer making £ 40,000 a month.

So Marcus Wareing and I were ‘invited’ to Chris’s office for a chat. It was a bit like attending the funeral of the family pet. There, on his desk, he had sheets of paper with the past six months’ profit and loss figures. We ploughed through them, starting with Royal Hospital Road , then on to Pétrus and the other restaurants we were beginning to open in London. They were bringing in total profits at the rate of around £ 250,000 each month, which was great.

‘What was wrong with that?’ we wondered, until Chris launched into a rundown on the two failing restaurants.

Marcus and I had a pocketful of reasons and excuses for this state of ruination, and, above all, we had the determination to fix it. There was a pause, and Chris said that he thought that we should shut the two restaurants the next day.

‘Had he gone mad?’ we asked.

Closing would be like admitting defeat, and, most importantly of all, how would it sound to the press?

There was another cold, stony pause from Chris before he delivered the well-aimed kick in the bollocks. ‘You can continue on one condition,’ he said, ‘and that is that the two of you personally pay over to the company a total of £ 41,000 each month until you have everything under control and the restaurants are no longer bleeding the group dry.’

He went on to explain that both cases were past redemption and that, unless we were happy to carry these losses personally, say for the next six months at a cost of £ 366,000, he suggested that we spend the rest of the meeting planning the two closures.

It was really strange, but this was suddenly a moment of great clarity, and I felt a huge relief. Of course it was heartbreaking, but both Marcus and I, dumbarses that we were, knew that the game was up and we would no longer have to dread the monthly figures. We would just hear about profit without the big minus pulling at the rear.

Why didn’t I see it before? It had to be vanity, and vanity – as I discovered – could be fucking expensive. But I had learned about the antidote: a bucket of cold reality and serious action if you want to avoid bleeding to death.

The only thing that I had to deal with was a loss of face in the Scottish press and a distant whisper about a small failure in London, but I was beginning to learn how to do that. Because, back in London, the biggest opportunity so far was about to fall into our laps.

CHAPTER FIVE

When you find a winner, groom it daily. Protect it with your life.

WHILE WE WERE battling with the problems in Glasgow, two things happened that suddenly shifted us into another gear. In January 2001, Royal Hospital Road received its third Michelin star. It was what I had been working my bollocks off for since I started in my first kitchen, and it broadcast to the world what we were about. It was also to bring the most important opportunity so far, as I was about to learn how to take on a major business challenge, rebuild it detail by detail, and then deal with success on a scale previously unknown to me.

Claridge’s is one of the very few old-style, glamorous places that are the real thing. It has been open since before the Battle of Waterloo, and it was among the first establishments to introduce French cooking to Regency London. The Prince Regent had a permanent suite there. And it was from Claridge’s, out of the blue, that we received another one of those phone calls with an invitation to talks about running its restaurant.

Ironically, Claridge’s new owners, Blackstone Private Equity, had been the very people who had delayed the launch of Royal Hospital Road . I had no idea back then, of course, that they would come to be such an important part of my life.

From the moment I first heard of the idea, I knew that Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s was going to take us into a different league. The deal had everything and, in particular, a new word for me: ‘synergy’, the coming together of two bodies whose combined force would be greater than the sum of their parts. Claridge’s from the history books, and me from a council house. Who would ever have thought it? I learned the significance of this little number rapidly.

The first hurdle was to get the new owners into believing that we could handle this operation. The man whom we negotiated with was John Ceriale, a name that would become iconic within Gordon Ramsay Holdings for years to come. I thought of him as a Bronx bruiser with an uncanny vision when it came to bringing old-fashioned, down-at-heel hotels into the twenty-first century. At this point in time, he had only been with Blackstone Private Equity for a year as their hotel real estate manager and had yet to make his name.