Humble Pie

I suppose I expected to walk in and see him sitting at a table writing menus or something. Not a bit of it. I walked into this dingy alleyway, and said to a guy who was standing there: ‘Can I speak to Marco?’ The guy turned round and looked at me. It was him.

‘Are you Gordon?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Stand there.’

I did as I was told. I just stood there for about twenty minutes while he boned pigs’ trotters. I didn’t know what to think. Part of me wanted to go ‘fuck this’ and walk out, but another part of me was so fascinated by what he was doing that I stopped noticing how much time had passed.

Finally, he took me through to the dining room there, sat me down and gave me a coffee.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘We work so fucking hard here. This kitchen will be your life. There’s no social life, no girlfriends, and it’s shit money. Do you want to leave now?’

‘No, no. Not at all.’

So that was it. Next thing, he’s telling me to get changed and come into the kitchen. He was making pasta. I’d never made pasta in my life. He showed me how to do a ravioli, he showed me how to do a tortellini, then I had a go.

‘Those aren’t going on the menu,’ he said. ‘They aren’t perfect. But things are moving pretty quickly here.’

I was scared of fucking up. But it was almost like doing an assault course. No matter what happened, you had to finish that fucking course. So even if I was clumsy, I was determined to get there in the end.

‘Your fingers move fast,’ he said. ‘Do you want a job?’

‘Yeah, I’d love a job.’

‘You start Monday.’

But Monday was going to be a problem. ‘I’ve got to give a month’s notice,’ I said.

‘Well, if you really want the job that fucking badly, you start Monday.’

I was shitting myself, but there was nothing for it: later on that day I phoned him and told him that the people at Braganza were refusing to pay me that month’s salary unless I worked my notice.

‘I’ve got this to pay and that to pay,’ I said. ‘I’m going to have to stay put.’

‘What hours are you working?’

‘I’m on earlies for the next month.’

Problem solved. I did the early shift at Braganza from 7 a.m. until 4 p.m., and then I got the tube to Victoria, and the train from there to Wandsworth Common, where I’d work at Harvey’s until about two o’clock the following morning. I kept this up for the whole month. I had no choice. It turned out that Marco’s warning about the restaurant taking over my life was only the half of it.

In the beginning, I admired Marco more than I can say. I wasn’t in love with the mythology – you know, this screwed-up boy who’d lost his mother at six and had been dedicating dishes to her memory ever since – but his cooking left me speechless: the lightness, the control, the fact that everything was made to order. In the kitchen, there’d be six portions of beef, or sea bass, or tagliatelle, not fifty. Everything was so fresh, everything was made to order.

There was one dish I particularly admired – Marco’s tagliatelle of oysters with caviar. In his most famous book, White Heat, he spouted all kinds of shit about that dish, about how it was his first ‘perfect flower’, how some chefs spend a lifetime looking for a dish like that. Bollocks. Still, I do believe that it will go down as a classic. The oysters had been poached in their own juices; the shells had twirls of tagliatelle in, and the oysters on top of that, and some wonderful thin strips of cucumber that had been poached in oyster juice, all topped with caviar. It was elegant, delicious and simple. It was extraordinary. Not that I ever got to eat it. We tasted, tasted, tasted, but we never actually ate. I never saw Marco sit down and eat. Never.

It was as if I was putting on my first pair of football boots all over again. I felt very low on the ladder. Speed-wise, I was fine; my knife skills were great. But everything else I’d learned, I’d had to forget fast. Everything we produced had such great integrity: it was clean, honest food, and it tasted phenomenal. You’d taste a sauce ten, maybe fifteen times for a single portion. Then you’d start all over again when the next table’s order came in. One portion, one sauce.

But it was the toughest place to work that you could imagine. You had to push yourself to the limit every day and every night. You had to learn to take a lot of shit, and to bite your lip and work even harder when that happened. A lot of the boys couldn’t take the pace. They fell by the wayside. When that happened, you felt that you had been able to survive what they hadn’t.

Marco was running a dictatorship: his word, and his word alone, was all that mattered. He fancied himself as a kind of Mafioso, dark and brooding and fucking terrifying. He had favourites, and then they would be out in the cold. He would praise you, and then he would knock you down. He would abuse you mentally and physically. He would appear when you were least expecting him, silently. His mood swings were unbelievable. One minute, he was all smiles, ruffling your hair, practically pinching your cheek. The next he was throwing a pan across the kitchen. Often, the pan would be full. Stock everywhere, or boiling water, or soup. But you wouldn’t say anything. You’d wait for the quiet after the storm, and then you’d clear up, no questions asked. Marco was never in the wrong. If you didn’t like that, you were more than welcome to walk out of the door and take a job in some other restaurant. But he knew, and we knew, that there wasn’t anywhere like Harvey’s. There were better kitchens, with more stars and older reputations, but this place was something different. We were a tiny, young team, and we were blazing a trail. White Heat, with its arty black-and-white photos and its breathless fucking commentary, was well named.

The first time I saw Marco pummel a guy, I just stood there, my jaw swinging. It was a guy called Jason Everett. He got bollocked and I didn’t know where to look. I mean it. He was physically beaten, on the floor. Another time, Egon Ronay was in the restaurant, and we had this veal dish on the menu. Well, Jason had overcooked all the kidneys. So Marco went bananas. ‘Okay, Marco,’ Jason said. ‘I fucked the kidneys. I’ll go and apologise to Egon Ronay. I’ll go out there and apologise. Let me go. I’ve had enough.’ He went out into the alleyway outside the restaurant and that’s when Marco said: ‘Those chef whites, those trousers, that’s my fucking linen. You fucking take them off and walk round in your underpants.’ So that’s what the poor bastard did. He ripped off his whites and his trousers and he was bawling his eyes out, and then he had to walk past the front of the restaurant half naked.

We were all young and insecure, and he played on that. A lot of us were guys with a lot of baggage. He’d find out about your home life while you stood there peeling your asparagus or your baby potatoes. Then, four hours later, when you were in the middle of service and you’d screwed up, he would say: ‘I fucking told you that you were a shit cook. You can’t fucking roast a pigeon because you’re too busy worrying about your mum and dad’s divorce.’ One time he turned round and said to me: ‘You know the best thing that’s happened to you, Ramsay? The shit that ran down your mother’s leg when you were born.’ But if you answered back, you only made things worse. Best just to get on with boning the trotters, or whatever. Once, he was telling us all some outlandish story about jumping off a train. Everyone was laughing. But then I said: ‘Bullshit.’ He picked up his knife, then he threw it down, then he grabbed me and put me up against the wall. It was almost like being back at home with Dad. Maybe that’s how I was able to put up with it for so long.

Another classic occasion was when Stephen Terry, another of the chefs, attended his grandfather’s funeral and made the mistake of going to the wake afterwards. When he got back a bit late, Marco said: ‘I told you that you could go to the fucking funeral but that you couldn’t go for tea and biscuits. I want you back in the fucking kitchen.’ Steve was really crying. We were making tagliatelle that day, and Marco was shouting: ‘Come on Steve, fucking turn it, fucking turn it, you cunt.’ So he said: ‘Yes, Marco, I’m fucking on my way.’ That was it. Crash. Marco slapped him in the face.

‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Get out of here. You may as well fuck off underground and join your granddad.’

After Jason Everett had left, we were all in the shit. Working at Harvey’s was physically exhausting anyway. On Sundays, you would sleep all day. But once we were a man down, no one got any breaks at all. Then one day Marco called me upstairs to the office.

‘I want you to do something for me,’ he said. ‘Jason is living in your flat, isn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I’ve sacked him – and yet he’s still in my kitchen.’

I had no idea what he meant.

‘I mean that he’s sleeping in your house, and you’re working for me. When you come into work in the morning, you’ve slept under the same roof. I want you to go home tonight and kick him out. I want you to put his clothes, and all his knives, and any chef whites out on the street.’

I told Marco that I couldn’t do this. I loved my job, but I couldn’t do as he asked. ‘Are you going to sack me?’ I asked.

‘Sit there,’ he said. The next thing I knew, he was on the phone. He rings some restaurant, and says: ‘Hi John, it’s Marco here. Look, I’m in the shit. My sous chef (that was me) is being fucking awkward.’

I couldn’t believe it. Awkward? After all the work I’d done?

‘So John, three cooks next Monday.’ Then he put down the phone and said to me: ‘You’re leaving. You’ll leave in a week’s time. I want your notice.’

I went back downstairs. ‘Everything okay?’ said the guys.

‘Yeah.’

I started making ravioli, because by then I was completely running the kitchen. I finished the first one and then something in me just snapped: I hurled it at the wall. Fuck this, I thought. I walked out and I went to the train station opposite, where I tore off my whites and threw them in the nearest bin. I went back to the flat in Clapham.

‘What are you doing here?’ asked Jason. ‘It’s only six o’clock.’

‘Get changed, mate – we’re going out to party. Marco’s asked me to kick you out and I can’t do that. He’s told me I’m going in a week’s time. Why should I wait a week?’

Fifteen minutes later, we’re just getting changed when suddenly Steve Terry and another chef, Tim Hughes, and all the French waiters come in. ‘Marco’s closed the restaurant because you walked out,’ says Steve. I couldn’t believe it. The restaurant manager had to ring all the customers to make excuses for Marco closing the restaurant.

It was a Saturday night. We NEVER had a Saturday night off. So we went to the Hammersmith Palais and we got absolutely mullered. The next night, we all piled off to a pub called the Sussex. All the chefs in London used to congregate at the Sussex on a Sunday. It was about nine o’clock. I was a bit tipsy when all of a sudden the music stopped and someone shouted: ‘Is there a Gordon Ramsay in here?’ There was a phone call for me behind the bar. When I took it, a voice said: ‘Gordon. Marco.’ I mouthed his name to all my mates and they all started shouting abuse.

‘It’s clear that you’re with your mates,’ he said. ‘But I think we should talk.’

I told him that I had booked a holiday: I was off to Tenerife the next day.

‘What are you going to that shit hole for?’