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We decided to get help from a small interior design firm that I had come across on an earlier project. The problem was that, years earlier, Pierre Koffmann had commissioned David Collins, who was then unknown, to design his restaurant, and his design had become so much a part of LaTante Claire and its cuisine that, inevitably, everything had to come out. This left a concrete shell and just thirty days to build something in its place.
The concrete shell is always going to haunt me. No one really knows what makes a restaurant successful. There are only a few real variables: the food, the location, the design, the price, the staff, the ambience and the clientele. But every time you think it can’t be too difficult to crack the code, up pops a restaurant that should fail because the food is overpriced and atrocious, the location is in the middle of a railway arch, the staff are arrogant arseholes or the clientele is fickle – and they have to eat in a concrete shell. We all know of examples. The amazing and galling thing is that sometimes they don’t fail.
So here we were, spending enough money on a designer to pay the gross national product of some African country while we knew of a famous fish restaurant on 55th Street in New York that is full every lunch and dinner in its original concrete shell. But then, I also know of a restaurant where the food is not fit for a dog, the fit-out cost 5 million quid and the tables are booked like Wembley for the Cup Final.
So, on balance, we had to do something about the walls at Royal Hospital Road. We needed to extract some kind of ambience out of this concrete, and I hadn’t a clue how to do that. The interior design firm came up with their ideas, simple and uninspiring, but easy to fabricate and install. Their one creative touch was to introduce us to an artist called Barnaby Gorton, who painted a large, dreamy figurescape in blue and grey for a bargain £10,000. His vision, speed and enthusiasm meant that we hung on to him for the future. It was a pattern that we followed with a range of people we were to meet later, and who became part of our team for years to come.
Even so, the timetable was fucking tight, and half an hour before we opened for our first evening service, the front desk was still being put together, the carpet was being vacuumed and the glasses polished. The night before, it suddenly occurred to me that the dining room was desperately bleak. There was empty shelving in recesses, and I remember coming up with some appropriate language for the fuckpots who had moved on from their design mission and forgotten the last chapter of their brief.
I called Chris, and he immediately took from his flat a collection of Murano glass. Just for the opening week, of course, until we could find something else, except that it stayed there for five years and became an iconic part of Royal Hospital Road.
In many ways, the building was the easiest part. We just had to get the builders to perform, and they did so with all the usual sucking of teeth, streams of tea and stonewalling of any question that required the answer: ‘Yes, we will finish on time.’ The transferring of staff from their Aubergine existence to Royal Hospital Road had been a sensitive part of this journey. When the crunch came and everyone walked away from Aubergine after the Marcus Wareing fiasco, the only meeting place we had was Chris’s flat in Mayfair.
There we all sat around this vast oak table looking with ashen faces at Chris, who was about to announce the new dawn. I often think back to that evening. Chris was sitting there in front of them, having just agreed to move forward with this unlikely band of refugees from Aubergine, all looking imploringly at him. They needed to know that, shortly, they would be transferring to Chelsea in peace and without the Italians. I don’t know what he was thinking, but it must have been nerve-racking for him, too. One of the partners in our firm of lawyers, Joelson Wilson & Co., who had known Chris for twenty years, asked him if he was sure he knew what he was doing. Nothing like a positive, well-timed question to boost morale.
The first few nights were soft openings to welcome family, friends and staff. These were dress rehearsals to give everyone confidence in what they were doing and to find the rhythm and flow between kitchen and dining room that you need in a well-run restaurant. By the time the first till-ringing night was upon us, we were ready. It was an exciting moment, and it was then – at about 8 p.m. – that the air conditioning suddenly went down in the kitchen and the temperature rose to a sweltering forty-five degrees. There was nothing to do but get on with it and wait for the engineers in the morning.
By midnight, sweaty from the kitchen, we were able to count our first day’s takings. By the end of the first month, September 1998, we had made money. Of course, that didn’t even come near to writing off the capital expenditure, but we knew we had a business that was making a trading profit, and this was a fucking great relief so early on. Within six months, we were clearing £50,000 every month, and our debt to the bank was beginning to come down. It meant we were able to draw the £175,000 from cash flow to pay the final tranche to Pierre Koffmann and thank him for his patience. The other indicator of success was that our reservations book was stuffed solid. I had restricted the bookings to one month ahead. I had learned from my Aubergine days that a reservations book without any time limit gave people the impression that they would never get a table, so they often simply gave up.
The whole concept of reservations is always tricky. You need a definite policy so that guests know the score. All sorts of myths have grown up around the reservations books of popular restaurants. Try calling The Ivy for a table at eight o’clock tomorrow evening, and all they will want to know is who you are. No fame is no name, and your chances of a table between the hours of six o’clock and 10.30 p.m. are slim. It became a joke at Aubergine that reservations could be bought or sold on a commodity market so that punters had to pay money to someone else – I never saw it – just to book a table, which ought to be free. No different to touts outside Twickenham, Wimbledon or Wembley.
Just as The Ivy sees celebrity table allocations as a commercial way to make the restaurant work, we had to have a plan, too. And it needed to be flexible. Think of table arrangements on two of the year’s big restaurant dates, St Valentine’s Day and Mothering Sunday. Who wants a table for four on St Valentine’s Day? The reservations manager has to plan ahead to get as many twos in as possible. Mothering Sunday is a family day, and suddenly, we need tables of four and upwards. Outside these special days, there has to be a balance of twos, fours and more. Too many twos need a lot of space, more laundry, more staff, and usually less money is spent on drink – and that’s a problem. Tables of four usually mean higher drinks bills. More guests bring a bonhomie, which means more wine being poured.
And whatever happened to the table for one? That’s always there in my restaurants. It’s never going to be a money-spinner, but any restaurant that refuses a single guest for a booking shouldn’t be in the business. Few people eat on their own in a restaurant, but there are some blessed people who come just to taste the food. What greater compliment can there be? One of Chris’s old haunts is a wonderful, laid-back restaurant called Rules, serving some great British dishes – coincidentally, it’s London’s oldest eating establishment – and there is a table that only accommodates one guest. I have never seen that table empty.
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 (#u004c6b85-702e-5977-9654-d6eef6fdad6f)
A SCOTTISH FAILURE (#u004c6b85-702e-5977-9654-d6eef6fdad6f)
Vanity should carry a health warning When it bites you, take action. Bleeding to death can kill you.
ROYALHOSPITALROAD 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.
Chris looked at a hundred different menus, checked the pricing and talked to bored waiting staff. A picture began to emerge, and he already knew that Edinburgh was not for us. Edinburgh makes money and keeps it. They spend it carefully and primly on school fees at Fettes or antique fire¬ guards. There is no joy here, nothing that drives people out to get rat-arsed on a Friday in an Armani suit with a midnight call to the wife to hand supper to the dog.
There was a lovely story while Chris was up there. That evening, he got a cab over to Leith to try out Martin Wishart, who was making a name for himself in his restaurant by the quayside. As always, Chris was dressed in a suit, and having sat down, he went through the card and managed a bottle of decent claret. Having finished, he asked if he could have a look in the tiny kitchen, and Martin obliged. The following morning, Martin was on the phone to me to say that, without any doubt, he had been visited by a Michelin inspector the previous night. I was really happy for him until I asked what the inspector had drunk, and, on hearing that a bottle of claret had been downed, I questioned Martin a bit closer. There is no way that a Michelin inspector would ever do that, and neither of us was any the wiser until Chris returned and mentioned what a great dinner he had had in Leith.
It’s a different story in Glasgow, however. Everyone knows how to have a good time there, and it’s not thought irreligious to spend a few quid on proper wine. It’s a more frenetic city, full of people who have no ambition other than to live life.
Just as we were discussing all this, the phone rang from Glasgow. Someone wanted to sell a big restaurant right in the heart of the city. We both went to look, and suddenly the old excitement resurfaced. Nothing thrills like the thought of a restaurant full of good food, good service and the musical whirr of the credit card machine. A million makeover versions swamped our minds. Everyone was writing their versions of the menu, sketching designs with seating plans on the back of used envelopes. The big question was: how far was the Rangers ground from there? How would it figure on a match day? I was dreaming, and already, in my stupid eagerness, I lost the plot.
Still, before I had time to think, the whole project had sprouted wings and suddenly there were surveyors, lawyers, electricians and rodent catchers, all present to put this together and submit fancy bills for their endeavours. I was getting a bit uneasy with the people who were selling the restaurant to us. They were keen – too keen – to impress me with the size of their other operations, and then suddenly they started to talk about the crappy abstract artwork in the restaurant. They pointed out that these early works of infants at school were not included in the sale, but could be made available as a side purchase.
Here we go again, I thought. However big someone is, Rule Number One is this: if there is cash, they want it, and these greedy arseholes were about to lose a deal because they wanted a few readies on top of a shedload of money for their restaurant.
Chris and I talked about it. We were both totally pissed off that, having talked through the heads of terms, some dickhead started to murmur about a few pictures so they could screw some more money out of us. We don’t do side deals. So the deal turned stone cold, and Chris told them why. It no longer matters now, but they were totally mystified.
Then the phone rang. It was Glasgow again, and this time, One Devonshire Gardens, Glasgow’s chic West End boutique hotel. Now this was a boner, and I was up there with Chris, as keen as a setter on the scent.
The place looked right immediately: three houses joined together and filled with browns, tweeds and long, elegant drapes, and with rooms the size of snooker halls. There was a smooth life going on here, but the one thing that they didn’t have was a restaurant. Fuck me! We can arrange that. And, in doing so, fine dining would come to my home town. The more I saw of this fantastic establishment, the more I fell in love with it, and any numerical doubts faded away, along with my sense of judgement.
We went back to London, and the whole process of negotiation, lawyers and contracts started all over again. We found Scottish lawyers, who are a different bunch to our beloved Joelson Wilson & Co., but Scotland is Scotland, and they play by a whole different set of laws. Soon we had a deal, and it was only a matter of time before wet ink was scrawled across a ten-year lease and an accompanying operating agreement.
The first base in this home run, as always, was a chef, and I already knew who was going to head north to run the kitchen. This remote outpost would also need a general manager, and I had just the person in mind. From then on, there was a long succession of trips to One Devonshire Gardens by our human resources manager, our operations staff and the kitchen designers. Gradually, a shape was evolving, and although the English press was pretty low-key about this adventure, the Scottish papers were lining up their sharpened pencils.
Amaryllis opened to a Scottish fanfare. We had a launch party that rocked late into the night, which was all very well, but the following day, we were open for business. The opening weeks went well. Nobody could believe that this restaurant was attracting forty covers for lunch and sixty-five in the evening. I did more television interviews and talked to more journalists than ever before. The critics moved in. Their reviews made good reading, and I knew we were already on the way to a Michelin star.
At what stage did I realize that things were going wrong and that the paste that held up the wallpaper was just too thin? Well, if the truth were known, it was not so for far too long.
But it was soon clear that the pressure from Glasgow on our London operation was beginning to grow. The northern kitchen brigade was rowing, absenteeism was at a level not known to us in the south. On top of all this, the owners of the hotel had just run into trouble.
It is always traumatic for everyone involved when there have to be changes in senior management. The finger of blame can only point to myself and Chris, and if we get an appointment wrong, then it will certainly be us who end up paying the price.
All you can do when you appoint someone is interview them and check out their reputation. But reputations are leaked, spread, smeared or openly published, and are often the stuff of crap and nonsense. I know how I can exaggerate and pass on stories about them as if I witnessed the whole thing myself – when, actually, I’ve never met them. As for the interview, well, that can be a trip to Disneyland. Nobody ever goes to an interview with a long list of their weaknesses. They save them for later, and drip-feed them when you least expect it.
So, a new appointment is made, and off we go into the woods, axes in hand, ready to build a tree house. All is sweet to begin with, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, ominous signs begin to appear. They may not have forgotten the axe, exactly, but, at some stage, it will need sharpening and the stone was left at home. The idea is that senior managers have to think things out for themselves. They have to plan, budget, foresee everything and make things happen. If you’re building a tree house, you need drawings, materials, a compliant workforce, safety procedures to stop Bob the Builder from falling off the tree holding his chain-saw, and the house needs to face the right direction to catch the sun. In fact, someone must be experienced enough to see the whole thing through.
If that doesn’t happen, you know you’ve got a problem. When a bend in the road appears, you get a choice. You can either steer around the corner or you can fail to notice it, ignore it, and crash. That’s when you have the odious task of saying goodbye and having to look for someone else, and you know in your heart of hearts that it is not so much a senior management failure, but your own fucking fault – or Chris’s fault, if I’m feeling that evil.
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 (#u004c6b85-702e-5977-9654-d6eef6fdad6f)
CLARIDGE’S (#u004c6b85-702e-5977-9654-d6eef6fdad6f)
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.
Chris got on particularly well with Ceriale. I think Ceriale saw me as the name above the door, whereas with Chris, he could see someone who could put in place a structure that would carry the whole operation. Their first meeting started with the question, ‘Would Gordon be happy to do breakfast in his restaurant?’ Chris is seated there with Ceriale and at least six of his ‘advisors’ and the senior management from Claridge’s. The answer to the question was about to launch a relationship that, in the fullness of time, would provide Gordon Ramsay Holdings with an incredible billion pounds’ worth of turnover in the coming years. A BILLION pounds. No firm in the world would turn that down, and we certainly weren’t planning on stalling over a simple matter like breakfast.
Fortunately, Chris got the answer right. Without a second’s hesitation, he said that that would be no problem and that Gordon would certainly be up for that, knowing full well that chefs just don’t do breakfast. This had been the stumbling block for all previous contenders. How the fuck Chris imagined he was going to smooth this with me became the funniest thing he ever said. He just looked at me and said that, if it was going to be a problem for me, he would cook the breakfasts himself. Chris can’t cook a breadcrumb.
The early days were difficult. It took an age before we finally got the nod, having been made acutely aware that I was probably the last in the line of those chefs whom Ceriale had invited to talks. Perhaps, understandably, he realized my reputation might not sit comfortably with Claridge’s rearguard. There were certainly plenty of people who were ready to confirm that, and although they liked their eggs boiled, they didn’t like the idea of them being ‘fucking’ boiled. I think what worked in our favour was that Ceriale was clearly a maverick and liked me. He had already realized that the rebirth of Claridge’s was not a move to pander to the hotel’s established clientele. What would happen when they were all dead and gone? What he had in mind was a rebirth of this old lady to accommodate the new money of a younger, wealthier generation. He sought to bring glamour by the bucketful, and he did so with top American designers and investment funds that no one had ever dreamed about.
Ceriale made it clear that, before we went any further, he wanted to meet me. He was one of those operators who was guided by his feelings about people. All his consultants were people he liked, and if we were going to secure Claridge’s, he and I would have to connect. I guess that I am a bit like that myself. It is not easy to work with people you don’t like, and it just so happens that I tend to like people who are good at their jobs. I think that it’s also linked to the search for loyalty. You want to feel that someone is with you for a bigger reason than just a pay packet.
It was arranged for Chris to take John and the general manager of Claridge’s to Royal Hospital Road for lunch, and afterwards, I would come into the dining room and meet them. It gave us a chance to show John what we were about. Impress him, maybe.
Lunch was a hard slog for Chris. The general manager, let’s just call him GM as in General Motors – was clearly not on our side. He couldn’t understand change, and yet was swept along by the energy and vision of his new boss. As Chris said, he had reached the pinnacle of hotel management and was now extending a very tentative toe into hotel realignment. But a step, perhaps, too far for him.
So these two pumped Chris for all he was worth during lunch, asking him all the questions and expressing their doubts about how I would appear as the spearhead for the new restaurant. Both Chris and I knew that I was, without doubt, the right choice, but, for the new owners, there were big bucks riding on the correct decision, so nothing was going to be decided there and then.
As I entered the dining room, I saw the three of them sitting in the corner. Chris did not look happy, and I was thinking that maybe things were not moving in the right direction. We all shook hands, and I could see at once why Chris was so impressed with John Ceriale. He is not tall, he is thinning on top to the point of balding, and he is straight out of the Mafia’s family album. He was dressed immaculately, with blue suit, cufflinks on double cuffs, and a quiet tie. I wondered if I should be kissing his hand. ‘Hey, Gordon, nice ta meet ya.’ He told me that he enjoyed lunch and that he was hoping we might do some stuff together with Claridge’s. He was definitely twitchy, and I saw his eye land on a waiter who had joined the company only a week before. ‘Haven’t I seen him before?’ he asked. My heart sank, as I knew that we had snatched this boy from Claridge’s. ‘Have you been stealing my fuckin’ staff, Gordon? Is this what you do over here? Is this how you operate?’ The man was all over me, and I saw Chris shifting from one foot to the other like he was trying to run through a trough of honey. GM was also uncomfortable with the way the conversation was going. More like a good slapping than a conversation, I was thinking. GM was chewing his top lip like there was a sticky wart on it.
‘If you don’t like me, Gordon, I’m outta here. Do you want me to fuck off out of the restaurant?’
Jesus! What have I done here? I looked at him and it just came out. ‘Yes, he came over from Claridge’s,’ – GM was looking on stonily – ‘and he tells me that the staff have a picture of the new owners on their dartboard. He says that your head has the most holes in it. Why is that, John?’
He looked at me, and the whole of Royal Hospital Road had a frozen moment. ‘Hey, is that so? They stick more darts in me than any other fella? Fucking brilliant.’ And with that, he laughed aloud, grabbed my hand and shook it like we’d been the best of buddies for years. I wondered afterwards what prompted me to say that. It was pretty dangerous stuff, and I can only think that either I was getting angry with this man for talking to me in my restaurant as though I was a criminal, or I just wanted to show him that we could toss in the occasional Molotov as well.
Somehow, although I was not sure as they left immediately afterwards, I thought we had made progress.
Our deal was eventually struck, and we got control of the dining room and kitchen. Blackstone paid for the design and refit in return for 11 per cent of our turnover by way of rent. Maybe a high rent, but just look at what we were getting: a beautiful dining room in the heart of Mayfair with all the glitz that was about to come shimmering through the door. Even the kitchen fit-out was paid for, although we had to wade in and replan the whole area after what we considered was a muddled first attempt. In later deals, this became our area of expertise, but that’s another story.
Within the old kitchen, there was a drink dispense area just opposite the main stoves where countless cocktails had been served to the waiting staff to take through to the dining room. It had been in my mind to look for a space to put in a chef’s table, and this looked perfect. A chef’s table was originally just a table in the kitchen for friends of the chef or visiting chefs who would sit down and taste the kitchen’s offerings. This simple concept developed so that guests of the restaurant could also eat in the kitchen and learn more about what they were eating, about the ingredients and how they are cooked. Chris will always maintain that it was his idea, but the idea went up to the Claridge’s management for their approval. They thought the concept hilarious, particularly the GM, and asked what we imagined the turnover generated by such a table of six would be. ‘Probably around £440,000 a year,’ Chris replied. They continued to laugh, but we got our way, and a year after opening it, had turned over £500,000 – probably more than Claridge’s Royal Suite took in.
The Chef’s Table became a trademark of our operation, and is a feature in nearly all of our restaurants. It makes great commercial sense. For years, guests never dreamed of coming near a commercial kitchen. Suddenly, everyone is interested – not just in food, but how it is put together, and its production has become theatre. The chefs love it when they see guests interested in what they do. Very often, they will invite the guests to the stove to help stir a pot or dice a shallot. The table is a great revenue source, and, occasionally, tips are exceptional – as once witnessed when the three ladies of a particularly lively Chef’s Table stood up and bared their tits in gratitude. The brigade cheered and the evening became buried in folklore. Unfortunately, it was my day off.
The Chef’s Table is also the guarantee of total hygiene. Everyone working in the kitchen knows that clean is not enough. It has to look as it did on the day it opened. Shine, polish, burnish, sparkle – the whole nine yards. No fucking excuses.
The opening of Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s was delayed by three months. It would have been inconceivable originally, but the combined noise of drilling and the preciousness expressed by hotel guests made the original opening date of July an impossibility. This had an unexpected benefit.
The taking over of Claridge’s restaurant had brought to my attention the concept of TUPE, the Transfer of an Undertaking Protection of Employment. In essence, this meant that anyone employed by a going concern, company or business was automatically transferred as an employee to the new owners or employers, irrespective of how the transfer of the business took place. Sounds reasonable in the first instance – until you realize that you may be taking on employment liabilities relating to people with thirty years’ service. In the case of Claridge’s, there were something like eighty such employees, and this was a real concern. Not only had they been around this establishment for years, but during that time, they had taken on personas that would in no way suit the operation that we had in mind.
What I didn’t realize was that they were as nervous about coming on board as I was about their existence. The easy life of serving twenty or so guests at lunch or dinner was about to come to an end. We were already working on 120 guests for lunch and 150 in the evenings, and word was out on what we expected from our staff. With this in mind, forty of the transferees had already tendered their notices and were on their way to pastures new or, perhaps, just out to pasture. With the announcement of a September opening, the others threw in the towel, every single one of them, and we were free to start afresh. Thank you, God.
For John Ceriale, there were always three fundamental components in opening a successful restaurant: the location, the chef and the design. Well, we certainly had the location, and the kitchen was never going to be a problem. The design – or, rather, the designer – was the ace up John Ceriale’s sleeve. Tucked away in an old converted cold store in New York’s Tribeca was Thierry Despont, who was given the commission to not only bring Claridge’s foyer into the new age of old elegance, but was also charged with the design of my new restaurant.
Claridge’s restaurant had been on the ground floor on the west side of the hotel for 100 years and had probably never turned a profit. It was a mausoleum – a huge, high-ceilinged cathedral where tail-coated waiters had pranced between the tables, dispensing arrogance and superciliousness while serving plates of grown-up school dinners. The task facing any designer would be daunting. It was easy to throw out the aspidistras and Victorian bric-à-brac, but all that was left was an echoing cave large enough to hangar a jumbo jet.
One winter’s day, we found ourselves in Tribeca about to meet the man who was going to change all that. His cold store had been transformed into an amazing five floors of sample rooms, drawing desks and Apple Macs. He was a tall, nasal Frenchman with a confidence and arrogance that I liked. Moreover, he was someone who listened to us when we started on the long list of considerations that he would have to take on board. He presented a three-dimensional concept of what he had in mind. Fucking breathtaking, as we sat and watched. This was the guy who spruced up the Statue of Liberty on its 200th birthday, and now he was about to design my new restaurant.
You may remember that, earlier on, I thought that the Claridge’s challenge was about to launch us into a different league and, in doing so, it would introduce me to a whole new world of international travel and an involvement with people who think in global terms. You know that I am already beginning to understand that this will become the template for the years to come, and I am shitting myself with excitement.
