Gordon Ramsay
Flash Gordon !
By Laurent Feneau

Is it really still necessary to introduce Gordon Ramsay, the famous British chef with ten stars? Now a true star himself, he reigns over an empire uniting about twenty establishments worldwide.

It's hard to catch Mister Ramsay between planes, three television shoots, four book dedications and six photo sessions… So when finally one has him right there, close by, we are impatient to ask him: "so Gordon, when you were little…".
We really want the chef to the British crown to tell us the story of his Scots childhood. How he lived, grew up, far from the Highlands, ensconced in the lower end of the worker's city that is Glasgow. We want him to demonstrate how he dribbled the ball between a country singer father and a nursing mother to end up among the Glasgow Rangers, the football club venerated by half of Scotland - the other half idolizing the Celtics, the competing club. We want him to go on, perhaps shedding a tear, to show us the injury that forced him to give up his career has a professional football player.
And we want him to end by confessing that cooking was just an accident, "a real accident", an element of chance in this tumultuous life that finally led to Oxford hotel school. Cooking as a second choice? No rather a second wind, with enough time for a few courses and a rest before arriving at Harvey's, to work with the guru of "new British food": Marco Pierre White.

Gordon bleu
Then Gordon would become more intimate, confiding that he "learned at lot with Marco", even if the latter was "very hyper, sometimes violent" and particularly dexterous with his kitchen knives. No way… Mister White made young Gordon want to go elsewhere, to reach for the stars, to go to France.
Then the Scotsman's blue eyes would shine as he evokes his arrival at Guy Savoy, his servant's room rue de la Roquette and the pleasures of Paris life. Undoubtedly he'd sigh remembering this extraordinary experience of this incredible crab risotto invented by Mr. Savoy. But a cloud would cross his face as he remembers that 1991 was decidedly too short and too quickly eclipsed by a stint in another kitchen, that of Joël Robuchon. The most well-known of British chefs would then attempt to compare that stint to a sort of "military service". A particularly interesting experience that enabled him, above all, to learn to avoid the plates and utensils thrown at him from the other end of the kitchen.
Gordon would then tell us of his return home, ready to transpose the French model in London and how he worked day and night to open L'Aubergine in 1995 and the Gordon Ramsay on Royal Hospital Road the following year, the first today with its two stars and the second with three.

Transposition or sublimation ?
In the meantime, the small blond Scotsman would have defined his cooking as "an excellent product to which is applied a good dose of technique, all for maximum legibility of flavor". We would even have taken the time to taste it to discover surprising associations of tastes and textures like this monkfish filet enhanced with a little bit of Parma ham and a subliminal touch of Sicilian lemon. And then we would have been daring and said to Gordon: enough of false modesty Mister Ramsay, this is more sublimation than transposition!
Then we would even have taken the liberty of asking the British star why he wasn't content with the first two restaurants that combined earned him five of the ten stars he's harvested to date rather than advancing his pieces on the chess board of world cuisine with the regularity and speed of a Bobby Fischer playing Gasparov for the world title… He'd certainly have replied: "with 17 restaurants and 1,400 employees across the globe, today I can't do anything else but move forward". After a short silence, just enough time to ask ourselves if Gordon's new restaurant at the Trianon Palace in Versailles, like in Dubaï, Tokyo, New-York or Hollywood, is just a dot on the map of lands to conquer or if it is a culinary and historic revenge by the British crown on the motherland of gastronomy.

But Gordon would have cut our meditation short and said, "I'm coming to France with the greatest freedom and no ulterior motive; my only worry is to run into my former owner of rue de la Roquette to whom I have owed two months rent for twenty years." And with a laugh a click would have been heard and we would have exchanged a few jokes, really gotten to know one another and perhaps even become friends. But a voice sounds out to tell us that our thirty minutes of interview obtained with the sweat of our brow are over…It will be for next time, so long Mister Gordon.

"A British Empire"
Gordon Ramsay, British chef, 10 Michelin stars, sets up business in France. He chose Versailles and the Trianon Palace, where he is opening two concerns: "La Véranda" a brasserie where one can become familiar with the chef's French-inspired cuisine and the gastronomic restaurant, the "Gordon Ramsay au Trianon" inspired by his three-star London establishment. This is Ramsay's 17th address, after New York, Tokyo, Dubai, Prague, Dublin etc.

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