“Discipline yourself, become hard on yourself,” says Ramsay. “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.”
Ramsay may be a chef, and one of the world’s finest at that, but he is first and foremost a business owner, and he knows it. He is not like many of the restaurant owners that have been featured on his television shows, who continue to cook, enjoy themselves, and have fun in their kitchens despite the fact that the restaurant as a whole is losing money. Ramsay does not want his restaurants to lose money. He wants them to be functioning and money-making restaurants, and for Ramsay, rarely does having fun feature into that equation.
“Running your own business is scary,” he says. “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.” And, it is precisely that freedom of being an entrepreneur and not having anyone breathing down his shoulders that requires Ramsay to focus and discipline himself.
“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,” says Ramsay. Part of pushing himself physically, for Ramsay, means showing up to every opening of one of his new restaurants to be there with his staff. And, if it opens to negative reviews, he stays there for that too. “There's just as much to be learned from a bad experience as there is from a good one,” he says. “We come back and talk about it, and we look at the negatives.”
For Ramsay, disciplining himself also means not letting the chef side of him take over the business side. “In terms of creativity, you cannot afford to get carried away,” he says. “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?” In Ramsay’s restaurants, an extraordinary dish will always take a backseat to whether or not it makes business sense to put it on the menu.
Despite Ramsay’s achievements, he also keeps his confidence in check, making certain he never gets too sure of his success. “I get scared every day, twice a day – before lunch and before dinner,” he says. “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.”
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