Gordon Ramsay’s Playing with Fire. Gordon Ramsay

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      The art of upselling is a sensitive but necessary subject. There is nothing more irritating than when a table is approached half a dozen times and asked if they want water. Once is fine, and the question has to be asked. After that, it is vital that an indicator is left on the table so that any further approach is avoided. Either remove the water glasses if it was ‘No,’ or place a bottle coaster on the table to indicate that a bottle is already on the way. So simple.

      Successful and intelligent upselling is bringing to the guests’ attention something that they want, but just hadn’t thought about. Sit a party down at the table and ask them what they may like to drink, and there will be total confusion. Particularly if the guests don’t know each other. Suggest the champagne trolley, and you’re home and dry. It cuts across the whole problem for a guest who doesn’t want to be the first to choose. And, in the meantime, you kick off with six glasses of pink champagne on the bill at £9.50 a glass, with six happy guests who are beginning to realize that they are going to enjoy themselves.

      Statistics on the Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s scale did my head in at the beginning. At Claridge’s, we agreed to put £1 on every bill in the months of November and December for a London charity called StreetSmart. The proceeds were to go to London’s down-and-outs, and we, in fact, decided to extend this to six of the restaurants. So, how much did £1 a table produce in those two months for six little restaurants? Something in the region of £23,000. That means that we served 23,000 tables – not guests – in sixty-one days. Extend this to the number of feet belonging to all the guests (allowing an average of two feet per guest) that make up these tables, and you begin to understand why we need a twenty-four-hour maintenance team, why we need to replace the fucking carpets every three years, and why, unless you do this, the place will wilt like a lettuce leaf at Ascot.

      What do guests look for more than anything when entering a restaurant? What they want is attention. They want to see a smile, an acknowledgement, a welcome the moment they enter, and the average restaurant is fucking crap at this simple courtesy. Either you are completely ignored and staff at the reception desk carry on talking among themselves, or someone challenges you with ‘Name?’ And on giving your name, they repeat it like a fucking automaton, without so much as a ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’. Their attention then flicks down the reservations list, and they proceed to highlight the name in Day-Glo green or rub it out like a gleeful schoolgirl, fresh from a shoplifting spree at Office World.

      People in a restaurant see it as their chance for recognition. Give them a warm, welcoming smile. Get their name right with the appropriate title, and make it sound like you are really pleased to see them. They are already flushed pink that they are recognized and have your undivided attention. A good restaurant manager understands this, and ensures that his staff are drilled to follow these simple rules. For Christ’s sake, the guests’ satisfaction is what your job is all about. Get it wrong and you will hear no more because there won’t be any guests left.

      Once past the desk, the guest is now looking out for two things: which table he’s going to get and whether any of the other guests are looking and thinking, ‘a regular’ or ‘Who is this git who’s getting the special stroking?’ All part of the service, and still not a menu in sight.

      So, in the early days of Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s, we decided to do something about the smile factor. I guess it stemmed from a remark that Chris made when he was asked what qualifications he had to run restaurants. He just looked up and said, ‘I eat in them.’ You see, what was going around in his maze of a brain was that chefs and waiters only see what they do from their own positions. They come through college, tiny kitchens and bistros, and never get to see the wider picture. I think it’s called one-dimensional. So what I decided to do was invite our own staff to experience their own restaurant. Get done up, bring their nearest and dearest, and have a good time. They’ll soon get pissed off if they are kept waiting for the main course or they have to pour their own wine or they have to try and understand what Zolga, the waitress from Latvia, is trying to say about the menu. It’s an advanced education so that they actually know what it feels like when things go wrong. Why don’t air crews get nervous when the wings on their planes flap hysterically in turbulence halfway across the Atlantic? They stay calm because they have been shown that the plane is built to survive, even when concrete blocks are dropped on it.

      And that’s what knowledge and understanding in Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s brought me. What we achieved as a team became an amazing success story. Ultimately, it depended on the little things like the smile people get when they come into our restaurants and the understanding of our guests’ expectations gained first-hand by our staff. As ever, it is the detail that counts.

       CHAPTER SIX

       FOREIGN FIELDS

       Control from afar will bring its own problems, and shouting from a thousand miles away becomes but a whisper.

      BY THE END of 2000, my two London restaurants were running well. Mark Askew was looking after Royal Hospital Road in his usual brilliant and protective way, and Marcus Wareing was steering Pétrus into its second year of trading. It was a time for me to get bored or to look for something else – or somewhere else. I felt that somewhere there was a greater pulse to life, but I couldn’t quite see how to grasp it.

      What I was about to learn were the basic, underlying secrets of how to expand globally, with restaurants that were thousands of miles away. Same standards of cuisine, same standards of service, but with lines the length of which we had to extend control.

      Then, just before Christmas that year, we had a call from Hilton asking if we might be interested in opening a restaurant in their new hotel in Dubai. It sounded a bit exotic, and both Chris and I were immediately all ears. This could be our first venture outside the UK, and, at the time, there were bucketfuls of hype about duty-free shopping malls and the unrelenting, bronzing sunshine of Dubai.

      After a blitz of initial e-mails, we both agreed to go to Dubai straight after Christmas.

      I have to say that, in those days, I never really got the hang of what Dubai was all about. Maybe you had to see it as a holiday resort where you just went and broiled yourself in the sun, but there seemed so little to do. Still, all we were doing was checking it out as a possible site to spread our wings.

      We arrived on a Thursday in January 2001. This, actually, was treated in the Muslim world as a Saturday, and Friday became Sunday. Different culture, different calendar. I could cope with that, so what’s next? Well, no stand-alone restaurants. All restaurants had to be in a hotel. Hmmm. OK.

      We were picked up at the airport and taken to the Hilton Dubai Jumeirah, immediately learning Lesson One, that there were two lived-in parts of Dubai: the city itself and the resort area, with forty-five minutes of motorway between them. Our itinerary was full-on, even if Hilton hadn’t quite got the hang of how to spell my name or, for that matter, the word ‘itinery’. It was filled with presentations of the project, visits to half a dozen restaurants and a dazzling venture into the desert, riding a four-wheel wagon along the ridges of the dunes in the early evening and then stopping to watch the breathtaking sunset.

      We were taken for lunch in a submarine to the seafood restaurant within the Burj Al Arab and then shown around this towering monument to the future of Dubai. The submarine, of course, didn’t move, and when I went into the restaurant, with its wrap-around СКАЧАТЬ