“When you start spreading yourself too thinly, you can fail to meet the same standards the second or third time round,” says Ramsay. “We've worked hard at this and now have 12 restaurants across the world.”
If you have ever watched Ramsay on any one of his television cooking shows, then you know what a stickler he is for having high standards. It does not matter if he is dealing with his own high-end restaurant in London, or a mom and pop hamburger joint in the Bronx, Ramsay understands that for either one to be successful, they need to have the same level of regard for maintaining high standards.
“It's been a process over the period of a decade,” he says. “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.”
To that end, Ramsay insists on buying meat for his restaurants that have been ethically bred and collected. “That’s absolutely paramount,” he says. “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.”
For Ramsay, sourcing his food and buying the highest quality ingredients is one of the major reasons behind his success. In fact, that is one of his major gripes with some of the restaurants he tries to help revive in his television series “Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.”
In one episode, Ramsay was trying to help an Italian restaurant in Letchworth, La Lanterna, get back on its feet. Ramsay had trouble with the fact that Alex, its owner and head chef, was getting his ingredients from plastic bottles in a local supermarket, or the local butcher. “So what’s Italian about your restaurant?” he had to ask.
The troubles went on. Ramsay discovered that the restaurant was using pre-prepared sauces from packets and frozen food that had been left to defrost under running water. All the while, the business was running a huge debt and its owner was forced to take a second mortgage out on his house.
“I’ve never seen anyone so far removed from the reality of what it takes to get a restaurant right,” says Ramsay. “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.”
The kitchen’s sanitation was no better than the food it served. “There was a microwave that looked like it had come out of a Harry Potter movie,” says Ramsay. “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.”
Ramsay knows that not every restaurant can afford to have the same calibre of ingredients or the same skill in preparing them that he has. But, that is not the measure of its success. For Ramsay, whether a restaurant is serving French fries or his own sweet potato, spinach and feta frittata, it has to maintain a high calibre of service if it is going to be successful.
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