Humble Pie. Gordon Ramsay

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      ‘Get yourself into a decent kitchen,’ he told me. ‘This place isn’t for you. Trust me, you don’t want to be working in a place that serves smoked chicken and papaya salad. Get the fuck out of here.’

      I would have worked it out somewhere down the line, but I owe it to Martin that I moved so quickly. I went up to the staff canteen, which was just a grotty little room, really, where all the chefs would smoke, and I grabbed a magazine and I took it out into the garden in Soho Square. ‘Christ,’ I said to myself. ‘There’s Jesus.’ Because on its cover was a photograph of Marco Pierre White, all long hair and bruised-looking eyes. I was nineteen. He was twenty-five. He’d come from a council estate in Leeds and then, when I looked at who he’d worked with and where…Nico Ladenis, Raymond Blanc, La Tante Claire and Le Gavroche. I thought: fuck me, he’s worked for all the best chefs in Britain. I want to go and work with him.

      I phoned him up then and there.

      ‘Where are you working now?’ he said. So I told him.

      ‘Well, it must be a fucking shit hole because Alastair Little is the only place that I know in Soho, and if you’re not working there then don’t bother coming.’

      I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I told him, without even really thinking about it, that I was about to go to France because I wanted to learn how to cook properly.

      ‘Have you got a job out there?’ he asked.

      ‘No, not yet.’

      ‘Then come and see me tomorrow morning.’

      I left the phone box and went back to the restaurant. I couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d said.

      I turned up at what would become the legendary Harvey’s the following day, as requested. We’re talking about the earliest days of the restaurant. It had only been open about six months, and it would be another six months before it got its first Michelin star.

      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, СКАЧАТЬ