In the meantime, the hours were forever and blotted out any time in which to think about money, far less spend it. Time off was also for sleeping. Seventeen-hour shifts, an hour each way for travel, and the rest was for sleep. A day off once a week was also for sleeping. All fucking day. I needed rent money and I needed cash for fares, and then it was all gone. No movies, no restaurants, no cars, and I never drank.
After kitchens in London, my days in Paris were no different. I had gone there, as I knew that that was still the home of fine dining, and I was searching for the places that would inspire and teach me. This was my choice, even if at the beginning I couldn’t speak any French and knew no one. There was a constant obsession with learning, with looking for respect in a kitchen where the culture was to be as dismissive as a fly swatter. Asking for a rise was as far from my mind as ringing in with a sickie.
In time, I returned to London and started working with Pierre Koffmann at La Tante Claire. It was while I was there that I was approached by a diminutive Italian with an offer to start a new restaurant down some back street off the Fulham Road. When you have nothing except your knives, when everyone insists that you are nothing but a piece of shit on their shoes, a kind word with the promise of recognition and money is like discovering a high pair in your dysfunctional poker hand. Suddenly, there was someone inviting me to run their kitchen for them. I was going to be called ‘Chef’, with my own small brigade and, moreover, there might be some proper money on the table. The restaurant was to be called Aubergine.
A pair in cards seems a lot when you have nothing. It blots out the fact that all the other players might have a better hand, and the last thing on their minds around the table is your welfare. But, suddenly, here was this godforsaken, beaten-up old restaurant site that had already had a long history of failure. Had I but known it, this was the last-chance saloon for the Italian owners who had somehow gotten it into their minds that I could save the day for them.
Too bloody right. The salary was better than I could ever have imagined, and all I had to do was what I do best.
I had come back from Paris in 1993 and started Aubergine not long afterwards, by which time I was twenty-seven and the owner of a flat. Well, not quite a whole flat, as I went halves with a mate and we and the Building Society were the proud owners together. We let one room out, but were either too busy or too exhausted to collect the rent. The tenant didn’t come up with the goods very often, so one way or another, it was always a fucking fight to pay the mortgage.
From this early desperation, I suddenly had a boat to steer in the form of Aubergine, and it would not be long before I was getting married. Another thing happened that would also have one fucking big effect on my life, and that was meeting the father of my wife, Tana.
I had met Chris earlier on when Tana was dating another chef who, anticipating wedding bells, had brought her and her parents to Aubergine on the second night that I was open. I had gone up to their table, sat down and told them about how things were going. A nice, informal little chat and then they were gone. I learned later that Chris, Tana’s dad, had said to his wife, Greta, that I was totally preoccupied with myself and right up my own arse. Greta apparently smiled sweetly and said that I reminded her of Chris at that age. It wouldn’t be long before Chris would be playing a central role in this story.
Either way, Tana fell out with this other dickhead of a chef and, before I knew it, we were dating and got married in December 1996. In the meantime, Aubergine was fast becoming a big hit and I was earning £6,000 a month. £6,000 a month! My mate, the Building Society and I sold the flat, and Tana and I were able to put down a deposit on part of an old school building in Battersea. We moved in, and suddenly there was a seismic shift in my life because Aubergine had become a phenomenon.
The Aubergine phenomenon is interesting. This was the stage, this tiny little fledgling restaurant, where I started to make a name for myself, where I was suddenly the unknown winger who was filling the goal net every Saturday to the extent that the press looked up and started mapping out my future as a name in their columns. Newspapers, magazines and the restaurant media are always looking for the next story, and they hooked on to me big time. Why did this previously unknown, off-street restaurant suddenly have the most sought-after reservations book in London?
Celebrity status didn’t exist. Gordon Ramsay was a name that rolled off the tongue like broken glass, and the place had started on a shoestring with no big design budget, no PR and no launch party with 200 C-list celebs. If the truth were known, I didn’t really know what PR stood for. What worked was that I was putting superbly executed, modern European dishes on the menu at the lowest prices. When I look at an old Aubergine menu now, we were selling – no, giving away – three courses for £18. I also had the makings of a strong, motivated staff in both the kitchen and the dining room. The staff were all young and all looking for classical training. The hardship that we were enduring in the kitchen was probably the glue that bonded us all together. They could see me pitching in, and maybe stories of my days in Paris, mixed with the obvious dedication of working like a hungry dog, bonded us together. What would seal this bond was the success that suddenly swept over us. I had proved, with the help of my staff, that hard work and self-conviction really will work. What we all knew about was obsession and the pursuit of perfection, so every guest who came into the restaurant liked what they saw and went off to spread the word. It appealed to affluent locals who boasted about the little restaurant that they had discovered as though it were their own. No wonder I didn’t need a poncy PR firm.
On the other hand, it was also a question of timing. I can’t take any credit for that. We just happened to be pursuing perfection at exactly the right time and place. And there also were at least two vital things I didn’t yet understand.
One was that those days were producing what would be a fantastic stable of chefs-in-waiting who, one day, would put Gordon Ramsay on the world stage. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing when I hired them or when we worked alongside each other to get it right every time. I didn’t know it then, but they would be one of the most important factors in my later success.
The other issue was that, as successful as Aubergine was, I was doing everything wrong if I wanted to make money and run a business. The restaurant was certainly making money, but it wasn’t my money, and my head was buried in a hot stove all day. I had no understanding of the horizon, no wider picture, and – at least then – I didn’t realize how much I had become a means for others to feather their own nests.
The situation would not last.
Before diving in, break the ice and think through the basics.
AUBERGINE WAS OWNED by people who were more interested in the money than the food, and this was the lesser known side of the story. The constant rowing and the politics that spilled over from the boardroom were soon having an effect on me, and as the restaurant grew more successful, plans were being hatched for laying a string of golden eggs. And they would be spilling out of my arse. Pizza parlours and roll-outs featured regularly in the boardroom plans, and I knew that it was time to go.
I had been given 10 per cent of the shares in the firm that owned Aubergine and, occasionally, a few thousand pounds came my way as a sort of drip-feed to keep me happy. But with each director trying to secure my support against their opposing number, I soon began to look around in spite of the stratospheric reputation of Aubergine. My problem was that I just hadn’t thought through what I was really after. That was the first lesson