Gordon Ramsay Interview

15 May 2005

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He has been the bête noir of the vegetarian community ever since he confessed in an interview to having fed a dish to a vegetarian party that contained chicken stock. He has also been known, on the odd couple of hundred occasions, to make scornful pronouncements about vegetarianism, so what he says next is something of a surprise.

“We have the most amazing vegetarian menu here. 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.” Not that every dish meets with their approval. “We always get the trendy student vegetarians protesting outside here when I put a new Foie Gras dish on the menu. The General Manager says ‘Oh, your mates are here again.’”

He does, however, insist on acquiring meat that has been ethically reared and collected. “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.

We’re anti-fish farming. We have a problem with our waters in this country where everything is over-fished because we’ve been so indulgent. No one’s understood the preciousness of cod.”

Sourcing food, and buying the correct ingredients, is one of the key fundaments of running a restaurant. It was the first thing Ramsay discovered that chef and restaurant owner Alex was getting wrong at La Lanterna, an Italian restaurant in Letchworth that is the subject of the first of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.

He recounts their opening discussion. “’So, it’s a local Italian restaurant. Where do the peppers come from?’ ‘Tescos’. ‘Where do you get your courgettes from?’ ‘The butcher’ ‘Where did you get the ‘Lazy Lemon’ juice in plastic bottles?’ ‘Oh, Cash & Carry’. ‘So what’s Italian about your restaurant?’”

It didn’t end there, as the appalled Ramsay discovered. Food was left to defrost under running water, while Alex ate Pot Noodles for lunch. Vegetable platters were prepared and then left sitting all over the kitchen, and sauces pre-prepared from packets.

Meanwhile, the business was losing £1,000-a-week, Alex had re-mortgaged his house, and hadn’t slept in months. “At that stage, I was just more upset for the customer,” says Ramsay. “It was them that were getting the mickey taken out of them.

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.”

Hygiene, too, was somewhat lacking. “I was horrified. 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. He said it had been on the floor, tucked away and forgotten about. I asked how long he’d had it. He said two years, so I asked when he’d last cleaned it. He said ‘I don’t think we have’.”