Kitabı oku: «Gordon Ramsay’s Playing with Fire»

CHAPTER THREE

ROYAL HOSPITAL ROAD

When the time is right with plans, designs, borrowings and staff, mix them in a bowl with a spoonful of intense passion.

IT IS STRANGE, but of all the influential chefs who have been documented in my life, the one who gave me the greatest leg-up is hardly ever mentioned. I had worked for Pierre Koffmann at La Tante Claire, and had even taken Marcus Wareing from him to be my right-hand man at Aubergine, and it was he who was about to give me the very opportunity that I needed.

Pierre had been running La Tante Claire for twelve years in a strange backwater of Chelsea called Royal Hospital Road. The road was named after the home of the Chelsea Pensioners, the retired ex-soldiers who bring colour to the area with their scarlet coats and incredible personal histories. It runs parallel to the River Thames from Pimlico to Cheyne Walk, a rat run where National Express buses come barrelling along to avoid the snarl-ups of the Embankment traffic, and its buildings camouflage a wealthy population of socialites and Sloanes.

I had worked at La Tante Claire as head chef after returning from France. It was a brief period of employment, marked by Pierre’s disappearance the day before I arrived, leaving an enigmatic, dismissive note. He was on holiday, and a three-day handover before he entrusted me with his beautiful cuisine would have been helpful. But he was a man of few words and, being very French, had little time for anything except cooking and rugby.

La Tante Claire had three Michelin stars and, as such, it was a destination restaurant. It wouldn’t have mattered where it was located because people sought it out as a centre of gastronomy. Any other restaurant in this location might have struggled if it relied on customers just passing by, as nobody ever did, except to buy a newspaper or walk the dog. But Pierre was comfortable there. He had a fabulous reputation and was happy to close seven weeks each year for holidays, as the French tend to do, and his staff were more than happy to follow suit.

I didn’t really know why he wanted to move, but he had lost his wife not long before, and had also been offered the chance to move La Tante Claire to The Berkeley, a hotel that was part of the Savoy Group. So his immediate problem was how to shift the existing lease on the Royal Hospital Road restaurant, at which point his Gallic gaze fell on me. Would I be interested in buying the unexpired lease for £500,000? I had no money and, quite frankly, he could have been asking for £5 million. But this was where Chris came in. I was happy to sit on the sidelines and watch him deal with this tiny obstacle.

I had no idea about Chris’s personal finances. What I did realize was that the money Pierre wanted would be just the half of it. There would be a much bigger bill if we were ever going to change this rather tired restaurant into Gordon Ramsay’s début as a chef patron. That sort of money was just not lying around in people’s bank accounts, and we were going to have to get involved in the world of banking.

Chris put together a proposal and sent it down the wire to a bank manager he had known and dealt with for years at the Bank of Scotland. Iain Stewart had been involved in earlier restaurant businesses at the highest culinary level, including none other than my much-respected boss in an earlier era, Albert Roux. This was lucky because it gave the bank an insight into the economics of Michelin-starred dining – what it cost, but also what it could earn. Claudio Pulze, one member of the Italian trio at Aubergine, once told Chris that a three-star restaurant could never make money. Fortunately for us, Iain Stewart had seen the living proof that Claudio was wrong, and he was able to reassure the bank’s credit committee. This removed any lingering doubts that the bank might have had about lending us the money.

So I dug out my one and only suit from a very sparse wardrobe and set off with Chris to the old P&O building at the bottom of Trafalgar Square for an introductory meeting. I could feel my bollocks shrinking as I was shown into the meeting room with three or four banking individuals dressed in grey suits, blue-striped shirts and forgettable ties.

So forgettable, in fact, that I can remember little else. All the talking from our side came from Chris, and I just prayed that no incoming missile of a question came my way. Do you know today’s price of a barrel of oil, Mr Ramsay? What return on your equity capital do you expect in Years Two and Three, Mr Ramsay? Fuck me. I kept my head between my shaking legs.

Just as I felt we were getting these people on our side, Chris suddenly let loose a tirade of abuse about greedy bankers who screwed their clients wherever they could. They had just suggested an administrative fee of a couple of thousand pounds, and Chris countered it with £500. I didn’t know where the fuck to look. If this was business, then I would stay in the kitchen, where I could safely bollock my brigade without getting involved in any confrontation.

It was such a nightmare that I nearly missed the men in grey agreeing to Chris’s revised figure. Their suggested £1,500 fee was big wonga, and not only had Chris saved it, but he had also shown me that bankers really can be wankers. The exception was Iain, who, I could see, had a sardonic smile on his face for much of this ‘delicate’ negotiating. He knew that what we were setting out to do was just the beginning of bigger stuff to come, and he was instrumental in these first, tentative steps.

Suddenly, the meeting was at an end, and there was this short-arsed, gritty Scot with a sharp eye and tongue smiling, shaking hands and wishing us well. Fuck. Easy as that.

But, of course, it wasn’t quite so. It’s one thing to borrow the money, but then you have to pay it back – with interest. Also, just as we were getting the loan agreed, there were things happening that would later have a big effect on my business. But at the time I didn’t know that, and it just seemed to be threatening my deal. In fact, there seemed no solution. What had happened was that the Savoy Group had been approached by what was then an almost unknown financial animal called ‘private equity’.

Private equity has become controversial for a number of reasons, and it is a familiar phrase today. It means powerful investment funds not available to the general public or traded on stock exchanges, which buy up companies in return for a share in the ownership. In this case, Blackstone Private Equity were the Savoy Group’s suitors, and it was the first time that I ever heard the name that would become so important to us. On this occasion, they were offering over half a billion pounds to shareholders of the Savoy Group to buy Claridge’s, The Connaught, The Berkeley and, of course, The Savoy.

Once this deal had gone through, the idea was that these private equity players would bring about changes to increase the value of the Savoy Group in order to make it saleable at a profit acceptable to their investors. The trouble was that it meant that everything to do with the Savoy Group was on hold while the deal was going on, and that included Pierre Koffmann’s move, too – which, in turn, meant ours. Before we knew it, we were back on the streets looking for alternative premises. We searched and looked at half a dozen sites, and each new potential restaurant we saw made us realize that Royal Hospital Road was, by far, what we wanted most. It was heart breaking to accept that it just wasn’t going to happen.

Months went by. Updates on the Blackstone front were hard to come by. Their deal had eventually gone through, and they were now busy thinking about a million different changes they wanted to make in the way the Savoy Group was run. Whether they wanted Pierre Koffmann or not was just one of the decisions that they would make in the fullness of time, and we just had to wait. Pierre’s advisors had long ago stopped returning calls, and I could feel the deal going cold.

One of these advisors was a particularly irritating ‘fixer’, a slobby suit who had clearly eaten well and frequently at La Tante Claire. Perhaps he sensed that this cosy arrangement was coming to an end and, as it became clear that Pierre’s deal with The Berkeley actually might happen after all, Slobby became more elusive. Luckily for us, there was a lively partner from Pierre’s accountancy firm who grabbed the ball and ran with it. Without him, I think we would still be on the touchline.

The deal progressed, and suddenly, there we were in the offices of the lawyers who were acting for La Tante Claire with a mile-long paper trail of agreements, leases, indemnities and guarantees ready for Chris and me to sign. As the snowstorm came to a finish, the lawyers wheeled in lunch and champagne to mark this momentous occasion. In all the completion meetings that took place later – and there were a lot of them – this was the one I’ll always remember. Not just because it was the first, but because of this small gesture of kinship and kindness.

The bank had sent down a lesser minion to make sure the right signatures were attached to the borrowings documents. He was last to leave, having drunk enough bubbly to match what he considered an onerous task.

It was, without doubt, a fucking relief. I could now be open about my plans. I could leave Aubergine and stop stalling about signing the contract they had been pressing on me. I could now tell Marco Pierre White that I would not be part of his stupid plans for the Café Royal, as I now had the beginnings of what I had dreamed about: my own restaurant.

But I owe Pierre Koffmann for more than just placing the opportunity of my own restaurant in front of me. I don’t know whether or not he thought £500,000 would be more than I could afford, or whether or not he just wanted me to succeed, but, without me asking, he delayed payment of £175,000 for a year to let me get some cash flow coming through.

Even so, we now had this vast loan, with monthly interest payments to go with it. So you didn’t have to be a partner in super-league finance like Blackstone to realize that, having bought this tiny little restaurant, we urgently needed to get it open. We now had a staff ready and waiting, because forty-six of them walked out of Aubergine when Giuliano Lotto sacked Marcus Wareing. We certainly had our menus set out, but we needed to make the restaurant look right – and there wasn’t much time.

We decided to get help from a small interior design firm that I had come across on an earlier project. The problem was that, years earlier, Pierre Koffmann had commissioned David Collins, who was then unknown, to design his restaurant, and his design had become so much a part of La Tante Claire and its cuisine that, inevitably, everything had to come out. This left a concrete shell and just thirty days to build something in its place.

The concrete shell is always going to haunt me. No one really knows what makes a restaurant successful. There are only a few real variables: the food, the location, the design, the price, the staff, the ambience and the clientele. But every time you think it can’t be too difficult to crack the code, up pops a restaurant that should fail because the food is overpriced and atrocious, the location is in the middle of a railway arch, the staff are arrogant arseholes or the clientele is fickle – and they have to eat in a concrete shell. We all know of examples. The amazing and galling thing is that sometimes they don’t fail.