ESSENTIALS OF GREATNESS
Arrive asked Ramsay what makes
a great restaurant, and here’s what
he came up with:
• Consistency in the kitchen and in
the dining room
• A trusted, professional staff
• Top-quality ingredients, in-season
produce
• Good prep work, which
makes service and execution
that much easier
• A menu that has been well tested
and can be executed the same
way, day in and day out
• Great quality kitchen equipment
• A clean and orderly kitchen
The achievement is still a vast source of
pride for Ramsay.
“We had to stay on top of things, constantly looking for ways to improve,” he
says. “It’s all about consistency, too, with
the Michelin stars. You can’t just put out
a great meal every now and then. It has
to be every night. All the time.”
Clearly, he was cultivating an ambition that he’d never lose—
before Ramsay emerged as
televised spectacle, he’d
earned a respected reputation
as a top chef. His first wholly
owned restaurant, Gordon
Ramsay in Chelsea, won its
third Michelin star in 2001,
and other stars for other Ramsay restaurants followed.
Too often, Ramsay’s talent
gets lost among those made-for-You Tube moments, which is quite
common on the reality TV circuit. On
American Idol, Randy Jackson and Paula
Abdul constantly lapse into self-parody,
but the truth is that Jackson played
with Carlos Santana and Jerry Garcia,
was a member of Journey and even
recorded with Bruce Springsteen. Abdul
is a Grammy and Emmy award winner.
Switch the dial to the C W channel and
you’ll see America’s Next Top Model and
its host Tyra Banks, who dominated her
industry as a fashion model, the first
black woman to appear on the covers
of GQ, Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue
and the Victoria’s Secret catalog. This
isn’t to say that any of these arbiters
of judgment on inconsequential TV
gets things done, whatever the challenge,” says Josh Emett, executive chef
at Ramsay’s restaurants at The London
in New York. “But Gordon is so successful because he’s extremely well-rounded,
and that sets him apart from other chefs.
He’s good at all aspects of the job, including the business side of restaurants.
As a person, he’s very generous and will
always go out of his way to
help you. That’s in contrast to
what people see on the TV side
of things.”
His success has reached the
point where strangers on the
street do not shy away from
him. Actually, many ask for
Ramsay to abuse them.
programs will ever be placed in Nobel
Prize contention (note to self: pitch
reality show, So You Want to Win a Nobel
Prize?), but the bloody reality of reality
TV is that one doesn’t get the platform if
one hasn’t earned the chops. And Ramsay has chops to spare, associates say.
“The public sees the aggressive,
no-nonsense side of him, someone who
Presiding Over
a Culinary Empire
Still, once you get a hit show,
you can leverage it to expand
your reach, which is exactly
what Ramsay is doing. In 2005,
he opened Maze in London’s
Grosvenor Square and The Conrad
Tokyo. That year ended nicely, as Ramsay won an Order of the British Empire.
The next year, he opened his first restaurant in America, the New York property, while penning his autobiography,
Humble Pie. In 2008, before taking on the
Los Angeles expansion, he opened his
first restaurant in France, at the Trianon
40 Arrıve • January/February 2009 • ARRIVEMAGAZINE.coM
