When you start spreading yourself too thinly, you can fail to meet the same standards the second or third time round. We've worked hard at this and now have 12 restaurants across the world.
It's been a process over the period of a decade. However, for me the secret is to make sure the business is running to perfection, with or without me. That's a challenge. You need to master that, and make sure there are no discrepancies, with or without you being there. But it's a tough card to play.
That’s absolutely paramount. We have traceability across the board, where we have a certification of whether it’s organic beef, or whether it’s a hand-picked scallop or a line-caught sea bass.
I’ve never seen anyone so far removed from the reality of what it takes to get a restaurant right. All that horrible brown glue and white béchamel sauce. I wouldn’t even serve that to my kitchen porters if they hadn’t turned up to work for three weeks. It was just gunk. It wouldn’t even go down the sink.
There was a microwave that looked like it had come out of a Harry Potter movie. It was like someone had sprayed it with glue, doused three kilos of porridge oats inside, then shaken it up and lined it with things dripping from the inside.
The secret of a successful chef is to put yourself in the customer’s position. By that I mean thinking about what they want.
It was too fancy, and it was a big learning curve.
We streamlined it, knocked it back and embedded ourselves into the community as opposed to becoming the destination for every 50th wedding anniversary, and every gran and grandpa’s 80th party.
You can’t have your menu laced with offal, fois gras and 50 or 60 pounds worth of caviar. You need your mainstream lamb and your simple salads. Not everyone who comes into your restaurant is going to be a foodie. There'll be two foodies out of six on one table. You can't overdo it. You've got to find that balance. I put myself in the position of the customer, not the chef. That means excitement and creativity.
For me, the biggest frustration about vegetarians is that chefs don’t look after them enough. They oust them as if they’d been diagnosed with leprosy. They don’t treat them as normal customers. Here, we make sure they have just as exciting food.
Discipline yourself, become hard on yourself. I’ve never had dinner in my own restaurant. I’ve never sat and had a glass of champagne with customers. Don’t indulge yourself in your business – treat it as a business.
Running your own business is scary. That’s where you get the adrenaline from. It’s not like going to work for a boss every day: you are the boss and you have to maintain standards. That’s an amazing challenge not once a week or once a month but each and every day that business is open.
In terms of starting out, you have to find gears you felt you never had, where you push yourself to the absolute extreme, both mentally and physically.
There's just as much to be learned from a bad experience as there is from a good one. We come back and talk about it, and we look at the negatives.
In terms of creativity, you cannot afford to get carried away. If I come up with a dish and I’m really excited about it in the middle of lunch service, it’s not about that one dish. The question is can we do that 20 times? And then, can my staff do that, with or without me?
I get scared every day, twice a day – before lunch and before dinner. Customers vote with their feet. They don’t ring you up and say, ‘By the way, I had a mediocre lunch. I’m not coming back.’ They just don’t come back… They come back for that magic, that excitement, that level of perfection, and that's not easy to achieve. It's a fight to get there.
Keep moving all the time. That’s the exciting thing about cooking in this country: we are seasonal, so every three months there’s a move. We’re moving from spring into summer and suddenly the food becomes a lot lighter.
There are two things, the level of consistency and not becoming static. You can't be good on a Thursday, and then not bad on a Friday.
[He] was out of his depth, and more intent on playing golf than putting in the hours of food preparation.
I came out of the kitchen and saw it and was absolutely gobsmacked. If I saw a car like that outside Claridges, I’d stone it with eggs. He was so carried away with the cosmetic and glamour side of cooking. And there’s nothing glamorous when you’re busting your nuts off.
Employ somebody to do it for you. Play on your strengths, and improve your weaknesses.
Chefs are s*** at running businesses. When you look at the f***-ups with Marco [Pierre White] and [Jean-Christophe] Novelli, and what they’ve done in terms of how their businesses have disappeared without a trace, it’s because they’ve tried to run those businesses themselves.
One thing we’ve never done – and I think it’s crucial to the success of the business – is taken customers for granted. We’ve never sent out a dish and said, ‘They won’t notice the difference, send it! They won’t know what the sea bass is two-and-a-half minutes overcooked. I'd rather keep the customer waiting 15 minutes and get it perfect.
We're as good as our last meal.
From the minute a customer picks up the phone to make a reservation to the point where he or she receives petits fours, it's a huge team effort. So now, I suppose, I'm a player-coach.
The transition from chef to restaurateur requires you to have one foot in the restaurant and one foot in the kitchen. You can never afford to become static.
The choice of restaurants today is phenomenal so the competition's really intense. For me, pressure's healthy, and I say to my guys: 'Put yourselves under immense pressure.' It only becomes really unhealthy when you can't handle it, and then you shouldn't be there.
From a chef’s point of view, you have to stay six months ahead of your customers.
I’m only as good as my team. Building a team is part of the foundation of a good business.
Everyone thinks you’re an arsehole to work for because you get straight to the point. I’ve the most amazing relationship with my guys, and yeah, if things go wrong, they have to take it. But I expect just as much from myself as I do from them.
No one calls me Mr Ramsay, it's Gordon. It's not chef, it's Gordon. We spend more time at work than we do with our families, so they're our family and we have to make them feel included. That's how you get the best out of your team.
You stay on top of it by building momentum. I expose my staff by really dropping them in at the deep end. It's sink or swim. If the sink they are going to drop down and division and if they swim, they're going to go on and become successful.
It's important not to rely on approval from outside the team. It's about every day achievement; we have to start from scratch every day. We don't think in terms of what we've got and how good we are. I'm not interested in reading a complimentary letter; I want to see a complaint letter.
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