Gordon Ramsay on His First Real Mentor, Managing an Empire, and the Key to Success

By the time Gordon Ramsay burst into the American consciousness in 2007 as the star of a restaurant-rescue reality-TV series called Kitchen Nightmares, he was already among the most successful restaurateurs in the world. At 40, he controlled a seven-site empire that included dining rooms at the Savoy, the Connaught, and Claridge’s in London. His eponymous establishment in Chelsea, then just a few years old, had developed a reputation as one of the best anywhere.

At that moment, Americans were just waking up from a food coma induced by a decade of consuming astounding quantities of mediocre family-casual chow and realizing that cooking could be a vital part of culture. We were enthralled watching chef Rocco DiSpirito’s career implosion on The Restaurant, and “celebrity chef ” was fast becoming a viable career path for the culinary-school set—if you were agreeable and telegenic and could figure out how to operate a sous-vide machine. Meanwhile, the Food Network gave us 24 hours a day of chill bros in aprons à la Jamie Oliver. But Gordon Ramsay represented a more uncomfortable personality: difficult, unsparing, brash, exacting. “I’ve been cooking since the age of 19, and I’ve never come across a namsy-wamsy, incy-pincy kitchen where everyone’s a best mate,” Ramsay told a reporter back then.

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Nearly 20 years later, he still doesn’t apologize for his strident intolerance of mediocrity. He was raised in public housing in Stratford-upon-Avon, where his father was a struggling musician and his mom worked three jobs, including as a cook at a teahouse where Ramsay learned the fundamentals of his craft. He aspired to be a professional footballer, a dream he achieved as a teenager when he played on the youth squad of the Glasgow Rangers. But following a catastrophic knee injury, Ramsay enrolled in a hotel-management program at a vocational college, having been drawn in by the intensity of the restaurant kitchen.

In the ’80s, Ramsay bounced around until he found himself at Harvey’s, in London, under the guidance of Marco Pierre White, the first British chef to earn three Michelin stars. White, also famously combustible, lit a fire in Ramsay. Apprenticeships with greats including Albert Roux, Guy Savoy, and Joël Robuchon followed.

In the decades since, Ramsay has eclipsed the maestros. His flagship Restaurant Gordon Ramsay has been awarded three Michelin stars for 23 consecutive years. He has authored 25 cookbooks, hosted at least as many TV shows, and opened restaurants from Atlantic City to Dubai. Next year, he will unveil his most ambitious undertaking to date: a five-restaurant fine-dining experience and cooking academy at 22 Bishopsgate, the spectacular new office tower in Central London. At 57, Ramsay swears he’s not close to done and has no plan to slow down. He swats away discussions of his legacy.

But I can tell you what it will be. Not awards or records, not any television show or restaurant. Ramsay’s legacy will be about care, effort, attention to detail, and craft. His legacy will be showing us that perfection really is possible. If you’re willing to put in the work.

Let’s start with the why of things. What was the first thing about cooking that grabbed you? 

I grew up from the age of 8 witnessing my mom juggle three jobs, and so you think nothing of it when she asks you into work on a Friday and a Saturday before soccer practice to help her peel vegetables. There was something quite comfortable doing that for her, knowing I was helping my mom. She was a cook in a little restaurant serving mediocre food, but it was the energy that she brought to showing me things. The speed peeling a carrot, chopping a potato, multitasking in the kitchen. I was drawn to that level of excitement quite early on.

Culinary college was the only option I had. The other option was to join the navy, but I hadn’t had sufficient qualifications from school. So I thought the industry was exciting, and then it was the freedom—I think that was the most exciting thing for me. But nothing really resonated until I was around 22, when I was dropped into France. I didn’t speak a word of French. But I wanted to embed myself into the culture and become French. I refused to speak English. I became bilingual. And I knew that I would have to work twice as hard to be recognized.

That’s when I started to understand, without sounding cocky, “I can do this, it’s something I can handle.” The pressure was extraordinary—and it was a double-edged sword for me, because the pressure was in French! But I got up to speed with how severe the pressure was, and that’s how I got promoted early in my career, because I could handle that pressure in one of the best kitchens in the world.

Was there a mentor early on who made you see that you were on the right path? 

My first real mentor was Marco Pierre White. And he was, what, six, seven years older than me? He was like a big brother, almost like a sort of big brother-stroke-father I never had. And so this genius was at the top of his game, putting food on a plate like Picasso and no one could touch him, but I knew if I were to rival him I needed to leave the stable and go find something different to bring back to the fold. Because what he was teaching me as a 19-year-old cook was incredible—I just had to bank that knowledge and have the insight to save it for later in my career.

Within 18 months of me being with [White], he offered me the head chef’s job, which was ridiculous. Whilst it was very secure and wonderful, it woke me up. In business, when you get offered the very best job too early, it’s for a reason: They spot something in you that they can’t do. That was a very big learning curve for me, and it plays in my mind today when I spot young talent.

So what do you look for when you’re hiring? 

The first quality I look for in a chef is someone who’s a sponge, someone who can absorb everything that’s being presented. And the second thing is that cooking is a labor of love. It’s like studying medicine or reading law—food’s exactly the same. I always say to young cooks today, “The minute you think you’re the best cook in the kitchen, it’s time to move kitchens.” It’s going up and then back down immediately, to the ground floor, to learn again. I went through that process five times, working with five phenomenal individuals throughout my career. If I’d taken that head chef’s job and not seen the other kitchens, I would’ve crashed within 18 months.

The third most important thing is professionalism. Getting told off is important—it’s acceptable to make a mistake, but never make that same mistake twice. That’s crucial in business.

When you first came on the scene in the U.S., there was some mystification over your persona—you were brash and demanding, had something of a potty mouth, to say the least. It always felt to me that you weren’t a mean guy, it’s more that you’re driven and have high expectations. Nobody backs into global moguldom; you have to be tough, you have to be resilient, you have to be demanding, you have to be persistent. 

Go back to Kitchen Nightmares launching in the U.S. and the U.K. Those documentaries are 10-day shoots. It needs to be full-on in-your-face—not just to attract the viewers but to make compelling viewing. You vote with your remote control, and you’re out within two minutes if it’s not exciting enough. And I couldn’t win either way, because when these restaurants were fixed and put back on the grid and were successful, I got no praise, but when they failed, I got blamed. So you’re fucked either way. But what I did do was take that situation incredibly seriously. I treated that business like it was my own.

Sometimes with these restaurants, I had to fix the family before I fixed the business. I went into it with open arms and empathy, and from time to time I invested my own money. I’ll be honest, I was nervous with the [persona] because I thought, “Oh, shit—that’s not really me.” But if I put you in the dressing room at halftime at the Super Bowl, you’d be gobsmacked what kind of shit comes out in those team talks. It is serious. And sport is very similar to kitchens. Everybody wants to play in the Premier League. Everyone wants to be the very best, but only 1 percent of the industry will make it there. It’s the same in restaurants. That level of abruptness, frankness, straight to the point, the arguments—you’re looking at a 46-minute edited version from 150 hours of footage. So I never felt misunderstood.

How do you take a restaurant that’s failing, a group of people that are failing, and change them in just five or six days? 

I have to force that sometimes, because they’re caught in a time warp. They turn and tell me, “Hey, John and Jane have been coming here for 20 years, they love this place—who are you to tell me it’s shit?” I’m not interested in who’s going there, I’m interested in who’s not going there. That’s the problem with the business. The ones who have left, they don’t ring you and say, “By the way, I’m not coming back.” They just don’t come back. Customers vote with their feet. So that persona was not fabricated. It had fuck all to do with the cameras. I just had a job to do.

It’s a fascinating roller coaster of emotions, but I want it to work. I want them to succeed! I don’t care how successful you think you are because you’re a great Italian chef—it needs to come down to the bottom line. I got to the very top of my field before any TV, and so every level of insight, everything I attempted to re-create for their businesses, was from my own experience at the top. If I leave you the prescription and you don’t take that medicine, you are not going to get fixed.

Is there an art of creating a sort of friction in order to pull the best out of people? 

Let’s strip that down. The only thing I work on when young chefs come into my businesses is, I teach them how to taste first. If you don’t understand how it tastes, then you shouldn’t be cooking it. Let’s taste perfectly. Let’s educate that palate. Then, find the blend of what works and what goes with it. Once you understand the mechanics, how beautiful that rhythm is in terms of the blend and how ingredients enhance one another, then we’ll start cooking.

Each individual is different, and you need to know how far you can push them. You need to almost strip them of what they know. Then you start building, layer after layer after layer. And then you apply the pressure. You drop them in the deep end. But that’s the top-flight, three-star Michelin. Then there’s the two-star, then there’s the one-star, then there’s the all-day dining, then there’s the neighborhood bistro, then there’s the pub.

It’s a tough, arduous career, and you need to pace yourself like no other. And that’s absolutely key to success—pace.

So much is made about how hard it is to earn a single Michelin star, and also how soul-destroyingly difficult it is to keep it. Restaurant Gordon Ramsay has maintained three Michelin stars for 23 years, which is mind-blowing. Is Restaurant Gordon Ramsay perfect? 

Yes, it is—and I’ll swear by it. The model was set up to be perfect: 10 tables, five-days-a-week operation. We’re not rolling in the cash to please the banks and the shareholders. It’s a model that was conceptualized on what I discovered and then went out and studied.

You see chefs that are running glamorous five-star hotels, some of the most stunning hotels anywhere in the world, and they have dining rooms that are fit for a king—white linen, multimillion-dollar wine list. But that’s got nothing to do with it. It’s all about consistency. It’s like winning the Super Bowl every year for over two decades. And I still get nervous the night before. I still celebrate every chef and every waiter that’s ever worked in that place when that ranking is maintained.

Is the sort of perfection you’ve created there replicable? 

Yes, it is. There’s a formula in every business. Every decade, there’s a cycle of maybe 50 chefs, and out of those there’s one with that Midas touch, who absorbs and understands and takes everything you’ve given them and becomes a mini you. And then it’s time to pluck them out and drop them into their own business and watch them become a star. Clare Smyth is the perfect example. She spent 10 years at the helm of Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, and now she’s the first-ever British female chef with three stars.

At 34 years of age, when I won my third Michelin star, I took a good look at every three-star chef on the planet and asked myself, “Do I want to be like them?” And 95 percent of them, I didn’t. I recognized that I needed to learn to delegate—that if I was ever going to really grow this business, I would have to develop talent and off-load responsibility. To do that, you have to become the most unselfish individual on the fucking planet. And if you don’t, you’re going to die. You’re going to drown. You’re going to get taken down. You’ll be stressed with a heart bypass by the time you’re 50. It’s happened to so many individuals in my position.

The other 5 percent of the three-star chefs I looked at, I wanted to be like, because they got the balance. That became the thing that I worked on: Balance, educate, hand over the reins, and move on. Develop that talent, develop that business, and then grow. Don’t stay there chained to the stove—grow. That was instrumental.

You mentioned being unselfish and learning to delegate. How, as a person who craves control, do you learn to let go? 

First of all, never micromanage. Let them grow. And when I say to drop them in the deep end, you’ve also got to have the floaties on standby for when the shit hits the fan. You have to let them fall, but you need to be there not only to pick them up and to dust them down but to keep that confidence at an all-time high. Delegation is all about understanding the point of the mistake. And at that level, I’m talking about tiny details that very few people can spot. But it’s those tiny details that accumulate into one big problem.

You’ve been talking a lot about extremely hard work, which is inspiring, but I wonder if there have been moments of dumb luck along the way? 

No. Potluck doesn’t exist in perfection. Perfection needs to be mastered, and it needs to be looked after.

We’re about to embark on the biggest opening of my career at Bishopsgate. The knives are out. The position and the location of this thing are extraordinary: We’re spending $25 million to open five restaurants in one of the most stunning locations anywhere in the world. So I will collectively use all those mistakes and all those learning moments of every restaurant I ever opened, and they will go into that.

We are fine-tuned, and as an individual I’m equally fine-tuned. I did my three-hour cycle this morning from 6 a.m. until 9 a.m., and then I went and sat in the sauna, and then I did cryo-chamber therapy for three minutes, and then I came back fit as a fiddle. Everyone thinks that level of training is hard and damning for me, but it’s a release and an incredible way of reviewing and processing everything you’re doing. So, no, there’s no potluck with perfection. You never get fucking lucky at perfection. It’s like trying to win the lottery—you’ve got no chance, and if you ever wake up in the morning thinking it’s just going to happen, you’re fucked.

What has been the most joyous part of this ride for you? 

Honestly, when I meet the customers. It’s nerve-racking because of the joy and delight and what you give them in terms of the moment, that special engagement, breaking bread and creating lifelong memories—it’s quite life-changing. Some people prefer to buy jewelry, some people prefer to buy cars, but you’d be surprised how uplifting an exceptional meal is. And so I love walking into the restaurants, I love meeting individuals that have saved up for the last month to indulge.

We work a lot with Make-a-Wish and St. Jude’s, and when we get these families in for dinner sometimes, sadly, it’s the last meal with these kids. But it’s the moment you want to capture in a bubble and then just think about for the rest of your life, because two weeks, two months, six months later, someone from that table’s missing. If you can be part of that, uplift them, yeah, that’s like no other.

Tell me about your approach to time management. 

I cannot tell you how important an hour is. We strategize and work on a diary between 12 and 14 months ahead, and straight off the bat I can give you the next six months where I’m going to be. I have an amazing PA, Rachel Ferguson. She’s been with me seven years. She’s more than a PA—she taps into the resources, she’s a sort of a big sister for the chefs and a sort of Mother Teresa when shit hits the fan on that side.

There are three factors to the business: I’ve got a CEO running the restaurants, a CEO running the entertainment studio, and then I have a team on the brand side. The studio creates content and exciting new IP ideas—they have an office in L.A. and an office in London. We have the brand office in London, in Soho Square. And then we have Gordon Ramsay North America in Dallas and Gordon Ramsay Restaurants in London. We synchronize and join up so I don’t need to attend every board meeting unless it’s really important. I promise not to waste their time, but don’t fuck with my time.

So what do you say no to? I saw a Welch’s fruit-snack commercial that looked like it was maybe a day’s work for you, but that’s still a day. 

When these deals come in and it’s substantially rewarding, we do them because there are seven charities that we make significant donations to on a yearly basis. They’ll ask for 12 hours to shoot that commercial, and I’ll say, “I’m not available unless it’s for four hours.” Get your shit together, because we can get this thing done in four hours. We’re not new kids on the block. We know our shit, and I know how to do a commercial.

Let’s go back to 22 Bishopsgate. How do you tackle a project of that size? 

We had to fight off stiff competition to conceptualize what we were doing—there were big hitters chasing those sites. The first time walking through that building was just breathtaking. I could see as far as Oxford. There were helicopters below us, the Gherkin was below us, and I saw an opportunity like no tomorrow.

So yeah, it’s a lot to bite off, but the team has been on board for the last 12 months. We’ve got a 32-week build-out. I wanted something personal, so we started off on the extreme left-hand side, overlooking Tower Bridge, with Gordon Ramsay High. There’s this 12-seat table, that has just the best view in the world, and an open-plan kitchen. You’ll arrive, you’ll mingle with the chefs, you’ll see the canapés put together, and it’s live—it’s not coming out of the water bath, made up before you get there. It’s live. That experience is going to go on for three, three and a half hours. In between courses, you get up and see that level of perfection, because you’re going to sit in the kitchen. There’s no dining room—the table’s in the kitchen.

Adjacent to that, we’ve got Lucky Cat, based on a 1970s Japanese whisky house. It’s fabricated beautifully, the banquettes are raised, there are no tables in the middle—the bar’s in the middle—and everyone’s looking out. We have this beautiful revolving roof with a Japanese garden, and it’s going to be an 80-seater open terrace.

Underneath that we go to the Academy. I get incredibly frustrated studying all these phenomenal cooking schools across Europe, across the U.S. These kids get excited to enroll, and, listen, Johnson & Wales, CIA [Culinary Institute of America]—they’re fantastic. But these kids are in there for two or three years, and they’re coming out with a hundred grand worth of debt. Then they can’t take a job for the experience, they have to take a job to rid the debt, and therefore they’re not on track with their career. It’s dysfunction. It’s the same course that was fucking taught in 1980, and the same five mother sauces that were on menus in New York in 1985. That shit’s got to change.

The idea of this is a fast-track funnel. It’s a 30-, 60-, 90-day course. I’m going to teach you 12 recipes, and you’re going to perfect those recipes. And once you’ve done those recipes and you’ve got the knowledge, you’ll create something else, ad hoc, from the 12 recipes you’ve been given. Month two it goes up to 18, then month three it goes up to 20—all of a sudden, you’ve got this repertoire of a hundred dishes. I’ll guarantee you a job before you graduate that’s in line with your aspirations, as opposed to one for ridding the debt because you’ve got a hundred grand stacked on your back.

This academy is really important for me. It’s my third one, but I’m going to bang the drum and then I’m going to bring it to the U.S., because we’ve got to give these future-facing students less baggage and not sandbag them before they get to the starting line.

All of this gets us to the subject of legacy, right? Is the plan to do this forever? What do you want your legacy to be? 

I’m not fucking done yet, Alex! Ask me that question in 30 years’ time, please. Shit, man. I’m halfway there. Are you saying I’m done at 57?

Not at all! The amount that you’ve accomplished is incredible. I can’t believe you’re only 57. 

Family’s important. Family for me is the bedrock. My oldest, Meg, is now working as a senior police officer in London. Jack, my eldest son, is a Royal Marine commando—I had one of the hardest moments in my life dropping him off at the airport to get deployed. That was heartbreaking. Holly is into fashion. Tilly just graduated and is now in the midst of launching her own show on Amazon.

We’re starting back again with the two young boys, Oscar and Jesse, but I know I’m a much better father because I’ve got experience from the first time around. It seems prolific, but we’re very measured and we’re organized. We are so organized. I think that’s what business does to you: It makes every minute, every day, every week, every month, count. We don’t waste time. We don’t hold froufrou dinner parties. I don’t sit in my wine cellar sipping Château Petrus thinking we’ve made it. We have an amazing lifestyle, but it’s all in moderation. That’s the balance.

And I think fundamentally, underneath all that, I came from jack shit. I started with nothing. If you’d said to me all of those years ago, as I sat in that dressing room at Glasgow Rangers playing East Bride in a testimonial game, playing left back at the age of 18, 20 minutes before that injury, that this would be my life, I would never have fucking believed you. That I can educate a palate, train a palate, and run a business, not having come from a fine-dining background? My mom was a cook earning £5.50 an hour in a third job. So I suppose that’s drive, isn’t it?

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