Humble Pie. Gordon Ramsay

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ of days at a time. Then he started going on golfing trips to Spain for more like a week. That’s when it all got too much. It was getting heavy. Fucking heavy. Jackie told me that she loved me. The truth is that I loved making the jugged hare more than I did having sex with the boss’s wife, but the only reason I was in a position to buy and cook exactly what I wanted was precisely because I was shagging her. Things weren’t exactly going to plan and it was all getting too nerve-racking for me: that he might notice, that we might get caught, the fact that she was always telling me she was in love with me. So I told them that I was leaving to go and work in London. She went bananas.

      I actually went back to the Wickham Arms two years later, for a mate’s twenty-first. Someone must have told Paul because, while she was still being very flirtatious, he was clearly not too pleased to see me. I was in the kitchen, talking to the new chef, telling him how good I thought the buffet was. There was a carrot cake sitting there and, without thinking, I stuck my finger in it. Well, one of the waitresses must have snitched on me to Paul because a split second later, he came running in and shoved me hard against the wall.

      ‘I should have fucking done this three years ago,’ he said. ‘You know what the fuck I’m on about.’

      He then took a swing at me, but fortunately one of my mates intervened, which gave me enough time to make a very sharp exit. So I ran from the kitchen, jumped in the car and disappeared into the night. Hilarious. The next time I saw them was quite a long time later, when they turned up at Aubergine in the early part of 1998. They’d opened a new restaurant in a village in Buckinghamshire, and they brought their chef to meet me at Aubergine. By then, a lot of water had passed under the bridge. They had rung me, told me that he was a big fan of mine, and asked if they could come by. I said, sure, of course. It was embarrassing – I mean, I’d moved on, I wasn’t just poaching salmon and chopping aspic any more – but I made out it was good to see them all. The trouble was, they got pissed and a bit leery and then, when they missed the train back to Buckinghamshire, they started demanding that I offer them a bed for the night. We did try to ring around and find them a room, but hotels were £250 per night, which seem to make them even more aggrieved. I don’t know what they expected me to do – ask them back to sleep on the floor of my flat as well as cook their food? Well, I wasn’t having that. Tana was pregnant at the time, so I sent out their dessert and then I fucked off.

      At half-past one in the morning, I got a call from Jean-Claude, my maître d’. He was screaming at me down the telephone. This chef of theirs was holding him over the bar, demanding that the arrogant fucker who left without saying goodbye – i.e. me – come on the line. About fifty minutes later, I rocked up on my motorbike. I thought I better had, and I was right. It was total mayhem. There was Mark, my head chef, fighting with Paul, and Paul’s new chef fighting with Jean-Claude. Naturally, I just could not stand by and watch Aubergine get trashed or my staff take a beating. But they both moved towards me before I had time to think. Paul was going: ‘I trusted you. How dare you – you shagged my wife!’ All my staff were thinking: WHAT? I could see it on their faces. The resulting mêlée caused major headlines when the Old Bill arrived because there was so much blood everywhere. We all got taken off to make statements and then, when the whole thing was written up in the London Evening Standard, predictably, it was me who was supposed to have thrown all of the punches. It was all: ‘I came to meet the great master and instead found an arrogant bastard’, ‘Brawl that wasn’t on the menu’ and ‘Ramsay punched my husband in the mouth’. That kind of rubbish. I had to take legal action to clear that one up. I kept my powder dry until all the other papers had followed suit and then I issued proceedings. I won, of course. As for Paul, he sobered up pretty fast once he got back to Buckinghamshire. He sent me a fax apologising. That was the end of that.

      To be fair, they really looked after me, those two. Before it all went wrong. I mean, I wasn’t exactly as sweet as pie. Of course I wasn’t Mr Innocent. I was a little fucker, actually – no mum and dad around, a place to live, a girlfriend, thinking I was the dog’s bollocks. I would borrow my girlfriend’s father’s car all the time, even though I hadn’t passed my test. I used to leave the kitchen at half-past one in the morning and drive down the country lanes, over to Helen’s. One night, I left the pub in this car, and turned a corner only to be met by two sets of headlights: one car overtaking another on a bend. I pulled out of the way, but they hit the back of my car and it went into a spin, straight into the very prettily beamed sitting room of the nearest cottage. My head was cut, my knees were cut and all I wanted to do was to make myself scarce as quickly as possible because, of course, I shouldn’t have been driving at all. My test was still five weeks away. So that’s what I did – I absconded. Unfortunately, the police picked me up three hours later, hiding out in some fucking manure dump.

      Naturally, I was prosecuted. As it turned out, the case came up the day after I was due to take my test. My solicitor told me that he strongly advised me to pass it because it would help my case in court, but I failed and so, in the end, I was banned for a year even though officially I wasn’t actually able to drive. I was also fined £400. About five years ago, I got a solicitor’s letter from the new owners of the cottage I’d smashed up; they were still trying to claim the £27,000 worth of damage I caused. Pass the place today and, in the spot where I made my unannounced house call, you can see that the bricks are still two different colours. Yes, I might have been an extremely ambitious young man, but I was also a bit of a tearaway. I can’t deny it. I don’t really blame Paul for wanting to beat me up. Any man would have done the same in his position.

      

      So, to the starry lights of London. I was second commis, grade two, at the Mayfair Hotel, in its new banqueting rooms, as planned. I stayed about sixteen months, and I learned a lot. I used to make the most amazing sandwiches, the smoked salmon sliced incredibly thinly, because I had to do room service as well. On my day off, I would work overtime without getting paid, just for the chance to work in what we used to call the Château – the hotel’s fine-dining restaurant, where all the staff was French. If you fucked up during service, you had to work in the hotel coffee shop. That was the punishment. It was a tough place. If someone called in sick, you could easily end up working a twenty-four-hour shift. You’d work all day in the restaurant, and then during the night you’d man the grill and do the room service. At half-past four in the morning, all the Indian kitchen boys would sit down and have their supper, and then they’d go and pray for an hour, and you’d already be doing prep for the next morning’s breakfast. In those days, a hotel’s scrambled eggs were done in a bain-marie. You whipped up three trays of eggs and then you put them, along with some cream and seasoning, into the bain-marie so it could cook slowly, over a period of two and a half hours, at the end of which it was like fucking rubber.

      Naturally, like a true goody two-shoes, I said: ‘Look, I’m on breakfasts this morning. I’m going to make all the scrambled eggs to order, chef.’ And that’s exactly what I did, though I got fucked when I came back from my day off because there’d been so many complaints about how slow the breakfasts had been. ‘But chef,’ I said. ‘I may have been a bit slow, but at least they weren’t rubber eggs. They were freshly made to order.’ He wasn’t having any of it. ‘I don’t give a fuck,’ he said. ‘We had to knock about twenty-five breakfasts off bills.’ I got such a bollocking – a written warning, in fact. But when he gave it to me, in a funny way, it was helpful. It was there in black and white that I was working in a place that wasn’t for me – a place where you got a warning for failing to cook crap scrambled eggs. I knew I had to get out.

      In those days, there was a really cool restaurant called Maxine de Paris, just off Leicester Square, and I’d heard that they were opening a new restaurant in Soho called Braganza. So I got a job there as a sort of third commis chef, though I didn’t stay long because all the food went in a dumb waiter, rather than being picked up straight off the pass by a human being, which meant it was always a bit cold, and I just couldn’t come to terms with that. But there was an amazing sous chef there called Martin Dickinson – now the head chef at J. Sheekey – who’d worked at a restaurant called Waltons in Walton Street, a Michelin-starred СКАЧАТЬ