Gordon Ramsay (24 page)

The business was set up in partnership with her brother, Adam, and Gordon was able to offer a simple suggestion when they started looking for premises. The building next to his new Boxwood Cafe had been up for rent ever since the superbly named Minema Cinema had closed a couple of years earlier. Tana and Adam took a look and realised it was perfect. By picking a location so close to one of Gordon’s restaurants, Tana was also emphasising just how close her husband had become to her family. Many was the time that she and her brother were in the shop, at 41–5 Knightsbridge, while Gordon was less than a stone’s throw away at the Boxwood Cafe with her father, Chris, finance director of Gordon Ramsay Holdings. And Gordon’s loyalty to his extended family was complete. When Chris hit the headlines after being fined for breaking company law with his former firm, Kestrel Mould and Tooling Inc, his son-in-law refused to say a single word against him and said his position at Gordon Ramsay Holdings was entirely secure.

Fitting out the new shop, to be called the Red Fort, took longer than Tana and Adam had expected. They wanted it filled with Indian treasures, including every type of furniture from beds and benches to tables and temple doors. They wanted cushions, rugs, saris, bedspreads, jewellery, candles, spice boxes – the list went on and on. They also wanted the connections and contacts in place so that they could source any other goods that clients might require, including architectural features and stonework.
And, as the ever-growing stock list proved, they were thinking big from the very start. This was no vanity project for a rich wife, Tana said. It wasn’t just a small local shop that could be managed on housekeeping money. The Red Fort was taking up several thousand feet of prime West End space and the stock and fitting out had cost £700,000. It had to make some real money from the moment it opened, so the pressure was on.

‘This is your night, enjoy it.’

Gordon squeezed Tana’s hand as they walked into the shop for its opening-night party. The event signalled the start of a new chapter in their lives together. For the first time they had hired a nanny to help out on the three days a week that Tana planned to work full-time, the days Megan was at school and the twins at a local nursery. And a few months later, when their new lives had bedded down, everyone was happy with the way it was working out.

‘I’ve been the girlfriend, the wife, the mother, now it is about me again,’ said Tana when she was asked how she felt. ‘It’s also like stepping out of Gordon’s shadow. I don’t need to go out and work but I don’t want to live on the back of Gordon. I want to do my own thing, to have a life of my own and to find a niche beyond saying that dinner’s ready and on the table at eight. The return to work has actually fitted well into our lives. Being at home with the children in the early years was a very important stage for them and I wanted to make sure that they had the best start in life. I was there for all the important moments, from the first words to the first steps. But the time came when it was right for me to go back to work. I love the buzz that my life has now. There is never a spare moment. Gordon has
always thrived on that and I suppose it has inspired me too. We both sit down exhausted at the end of the day but we know that, although things have been manic, they have also gone right.’

The couple’s late-night chats had also been given a new lease of life by Tana’s new venture. ‘Rather than: “Well, darling, I was washing up today and found this fabulous new brand of rubber gloves!” I can tell him about our achievements at work and ask his advice. We can have a proper conversation again,’ she says. The kids were also thriving under the new regime – though something they told their mother one day showed that the foursome still had a lot to learn about their father. ‘I am usually the one who disciplines the kids if they are being naughty,’ says Tana. ‘And after one telling-off they said, “Well, I’m going to cuddle Daddy now because he doesn’t get cross.” And off they all went to him.’ Clearly, Megan, Jack, Holly and Matilda had not been allowed to watch
Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares
.

When the children are in bed, Tana and Gordon say, they are not different from any other set of parents. ‘Like any couple with young children, we argue, of course we do,’ says Tana. ‘I actually think that’s important. It might be when he leaves his clothes on the floor thinking that the laundry fairy will come along and pick them up, or when he walks through the house in muddy trainers, not thinking that I’ll have to clear up after him. But we both speak our minds, so problems don’t get a chance to brew.

‘Gordon can be fiery at work because he’s a perfectionist and passionate about his job, so he takes it badly when things go wrong. But he doesn’t shout and swear all the
time at home, so I don’t tend to see that side of him. The time when he is most relaxed is lying on the floor with the kids crawling all over him, just being Daddy. When the children were babies, they terrified him. He thought they were so tiny and helpless. But he’s great with them now. Playing with them is how he relaxes.’

As the children got older, he also started, almost subconsciously, to take them into account when making business decisions at work. Would he ever serve ostrich and kangaroo meat in his restaurants? he was once asked by a catering student. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Because what are you meant to say to your kids when you take them to the zoo and they see all those animals running around? How are you going to explain that?’

Both Gordon and Tana also think long and hard about their children when they plan their very rare, very short holidays – because neither wants to spoil them. ‘My childhood holidays were spent in Blackpool, Scarborough, Bognor Regis and Loch Lomond and I didn’t get on a plane till I was 21, so doing so meant a lot to me. I don’t want the kids to be blase about all those things,’ says Gordon. So, while they have multi-millionaire parents, the Ramsay children still spent one of their first family holidays at Butlins in Minehead with their grandmother to ensure they keep their feet firmly on the ground. Other more upmarket family treats managed to leave Gordon cold. ‘Bores the crap out of me,’ he told BA’s in-flight magazine
High Life
about trips to Disney World.

What interested him a lot more were the secret ‘boyfriend and girlfriend holidays’ that he and Tana take once a year. Saying the breaks are vital escape valves that
help keep them both sane, the couple fly off for just a few days alone together while Tana’s parents and Gordon’s mum take turns to look after the children. ‘It’s like dating again,’ says Tana, who tries to recreate the holiday mood throughout the rest of the year as well. ‘It’s important to allocate time just for you as a couple. So, on Sunday nights, for example, when the children are in bed, we hire a babysitter and either go to the cinema or Gordon cooks dinner for me. I find it healthy that we are not in each other’s pockets all the time. Maybe that’s why we are still so passionate about each other.’

And, according to Gordon, ‘passionate’ is exactly the right word to use. Over the years, he has missed few opportunities to discuss the couple’s sex life, his own prowess between the sheets or sex in general. ‘Food is a very sensual thing. When you have a turbot in front of you, you can’t help but think along the lines of making a woman feel happy in ways that she wouldn’t believe,’ he said, bizarrely, at one point. ‘There’s something strangely sensual about making ravioli,’ he said at another, before admitting, ‘Cooking is like having the most massive hard-on plus Viagra sprinkled on top of it and it’s still there 12 hours later.’ And then there was the time in
Hell’s Kitchen
when he said he wanted the celebrities to take a stick of salsify or an artichoke to bed. ‘You will be surprised what you learn from it,’ he said, slightly worryingly, without going into any more details.

But absolutely nothing goes unsaid or is left to the imagination when Gordon starts discussing his and Tana’s own personal lives. ‘I ring Tana up from the restaurant and ask, “Are you up for it?” Then, in the middle of the chat,
there will be a fuck-up in the kitchen, I’ll get angry with one of the staff and Tana will go, “Ooh, can you come home right now, that sounds amazing!” So, if I can, I head right off.’ Gordon also claimed that Tana likes him to keep his chef’s outfit on while they make love – something she has never publicly confirmed.

What Tana has found is that, when your husband talks to journalists about your sex life at the drop of a chef’s hat, you then get all the same questions when you give interviews yourself. And, while she is far more discreet than Gordon, Tana does back up a lot of his claims. ‘Sometimes, if we’re at a party, he will look across the room and wink and I just think, Hello! Yes, the chemistry is still there and we do have a very passionate sex life,’ she says when questioned directly on the subject. ‘But I’d really rather keep it to myself. I say to Gordon, “You do realise that my parents might be reading this?” I think he is finally getting the message that I feel a little bit embarrassed and I’m not comfortable with him bragging about it all.’

What neither Gordon nor Tana brags about is the work they both do for charities. For example, they regularly make quiet visits to the shelter for battered wives where Gordon’s mother had sought shelter from her husband when Gordon was living in London. ‘They never make any fuss but they always bring down some of the children’s old clothes and toys,’ says Helen. And in London, Gordon’s old clothes and size-12 shoes are taken to a centre for the homeless and people with alcohol problems.

In a more high-profile manner, Gordon has managed to raise well over £100,000 for a host of different charities over the years through his marathon running. A regular at
the London Marathon (where he was once humiliated to learn that television gardener Charlie Dimmock had beaten him by eight minutes), he has picked causes ranging from the women’s refuge and the Food Chain, which offers meals to people with HIV, to the premature-birth charity Tommy’s and Sport Relief, which helps youngsters in inner cities and other areas channel their energies into sport rather than crime or drugs.

Running marathons has always been a favourite activity for Gordon, and one he shares with Tana. It seems a strange choice because the training takes up so much time and time is the one thing Gordon has very little of. But it is obvious when you consider his background as the utterly driven, fiercely competitive son of a sports-centre manager. Fitness was clearly vital for Gordon as a professional footballer. And when he became a chef his nightly runs brought two other key benefits. First, they allowed him to clear his head and freshen up after long hours in the hot, humid, noisy and angry kitchen environment. Second, and very simply, they offered him a convenient and cheap way of getting home after a late-night shift when public transport was thin on the ground and he was surviving on rock-bottom wages.

‘I would run down along the Thames totally alone, watching the patterns on the water from the embankment and from the bridges. It’s so quiet when there’s not much traffic, a magical, beautiful experience,’ he says. ‘Running gives me fresh air, freedom and quiet time to myself. It’s the best way of de-stressing.’ Running also helped him woo Tana in the early days of their relationship. With next to no spare time, they turned Sunday-morning jogs into dates,
pretty much running, talking and falling in love all at the same time, according to Gordon.

The man who has spent a lifetime testing, proving and pushing himself was never going to be content just jogging at the weekend, or running home from work in the week, however. He started entering races when he was still working with Michel Roux at Le Gavroche, not knowing that years later he and his mentor would both be running in the same London Marathon. (To his embarrassment, despite a massive media interest in the rivalry between the two chefs, Gordon’s finishing time of three hours eighteen minutes would put him behind both Michel and fellow runner Tana in the cold and rainy 2004 event.)

Over the years, Gordon has kept running and competing in order to fight off the downside of kitchen life. ‘Chefs don’t sit and eat proper meals during the day – we graze – and that’s a bad way to live and eat. By running, I am able to enjoy eating without putting too much weight on.’ He wasn’t alone. Over the years, he has persuaded scores of his colleagues to join him out on the road. In the seven most serious months of pre-London Marathon training, they tend to run two nights a week, normally Tuesdays and Thursdays, as well as doing half-marathons on Sundays. On the big day, Gordon has sometimes had at the starting line with him up to a dozen staff members, from wine waiters to dish washers, plus his equally dedicated father-in-law.

Tana’s dad often arrives at the Ramsays’ front door in his running kit early on a Sunday morning to see if either his daughter or son-in-law is ready for a pre-breakfast race. And, unable to compete with his own father, Gordon is almost always prepared to compete with Tana’s. That could
go some way to explain why, having realised he is unlikely to match the 50-plus marathons Chris has finished, Gordon decided to try to beat the older man at a slightly different game. In 2001, he decided to take up double marathons, including the ferociously testing ‘Comrades’ challenge that takes place every year in South Africa. ‘It is 59 miles and the terrain is as tough as the distance,’ says Gordon. ‘You need to give it everything you have from the start because, if you don’t finish the first marathon in less than a certain amount of time, you are pulled from the competition.’ In his first attempt, Gordon made the cut and crossed the finishing line in ten and a half hours.

But, in 2004, he wasn’t as successful and had to stop at the 30-mile point before being taken to hospital by helicopter suffering from leg injuries and exhaustion. So, with 40 just a couple of years away, was Gordon’s body no longer up to the challenge? Not surprisingly, he was having none of it. As he became increasingly notorious for his expletive-strewn television appearances, he says, the problem was that, if he could train at all, he had to try to do so in disguise – even in the early hours of the morning. ‘There always seems to be groups of builders in white vans yelling out: “Table Onze, you fucker!” if I’m not hidden away under a cap,’ he says.