What do you love most about running your own business?
It's about a sense of freedom that requires focus and discipline. And 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.
Do you still get scared?
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. So, from a chef's point of view, you have to stay six months ahead of your customers. 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.
Do you have any tips for anyone growing their own small business?
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.
You wouldn't regard that as market research, then?
Definitely not! 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. Your staff will only do what they see you do. So, whether I'm scaling a salmon or sticking my fingers in a pigeon's backside and cleaning its livers, if I do it, they'll do it. Building a team is part of the foundation of a good business. 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.
What's the most common pitfall businesses come up against when expanding?
They can trip up if they fail to consolidate. Consolidating gives a positive foundation to any business. When you start spreading yourself too thinly, you can fail to meet the same standards second or third time round. We've worked hard at this and now have 12 restaurants across the world.
Has that growth been quite gradual and is that the key?
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.
It must be. How do you stay on top of it?
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.
What's the difference between a good chef and a good restaurateur, and are these qualities compatible?
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. When you have 10 out of 10 in the Good Food Guide and three Michelin Stars there's nowhere to go, other than to maintain that.
We're as good as our last meal, and 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, and one thing we've never done - and I think it's crucial to the success of the business - is take customers for granted. We've never sent out a dish and said, 'They won't notice the difference, send it! They won't know that that sea bass is two-and-a-half minutes overcooked.' I'd rather keep the customer waiting 15 minutes and get it perfect. Never, ever allow yourself to question their integrity. 'Send it, they won't notice it...' - when you start hearing that in a kitchen, when you see short cuts in restaurants, it's time to get out.
The secret of a successful chef is to put yourself in the customer's position. By that I mean thinking about what they want. 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.
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.
It's full on, but at the end of the day, the same customers come back to us that we've had since October '93. So we've never upset them enough, and given them something to go elsewhere for. I like it when customers go to other restaurants. I recommend they go and eat in other restaurants because I always know they're going to come back to me.
What have you learned from your mistakes?
First, that I'm only as good as my team. And second that, 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 a 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'll never expect a cook to follow and replicate my dish unless he or she can identify what the flavours are. My cooks will all have blindfolds on, they'll eat a dish and if they can tell me what they're eating, then they can cook it. If they don't know what they're eating, how can they cook it? If you have the palette and the flavour, and that little bit of magic, you can execute it on a plate quite easily. But if you're cooking with your eyes, you just want to create a picture, you won't understand exactly what the balance is.
Business is successful because, every time a new restaurant opens, whether it's in Barcelona or California, my staff are there within 24 hours of it opening. And, every time a bad restaurant opens, when it's been panned by the critics, we're there as well. 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.
Have you had a negative business experience that you've turned around?
We had a restaurant in Glasgow that became a 'special occasion' place. So, while we were fully booked on Saturdays and Sundays, from Monday to Thursday no one was going there because people thought, 'Oh, that's where we've got to go for a celebration.' 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 birthday party.
You touched on this earlier, but how do you keep customers coming back? What's the key?
Consistency. You can't be good on a Thursday, and then not bad on a Friday. At Royal Hospital Road [in Chelsea], where we have three Michelin stars, there are 12 tables. We have 40 seats and 55 staff; the attention to detail is extraordinary. It has to run to perfection, with or without me. There's no discrepancy there. So there are two things - the level of consistency and not becoming static. Keep moving on 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'll be no brown chicken stocks. Instead, there'll be lots of light vinaigrettes and purées of basil and lemon grass - it's very fresh and fragrant, with a lot of fish and salad so the whole thing becomes a lot lighter. Then, at the end of September, we'll start getting slow braising, slow roasting and broiling. We'll start becoming a little bit richer.
How do you keep up your enthusiasm, and that of your staff?
I've always been a great motivator - it's important not to rely on approval from outside the team. I never allow them to read an amazing review because this business is not about self-indulgence. 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.
What kind of complaint?
That our switchboard is blocked. We average 2,500 calls a day to our call centre. For Royal Hospital Road we get around 500 calls a day for 12 tables, so there's quite a demand. That's nerve-wracking in itself. It keeps me and all my staff on our toes.
Back to top