Gordon Ramsay Read Online Free

arrived, she was collecting less than £200. The basement restaurant could comfortably seat 50 diners. But most nights they were serving no more than five. Sue’s bankers were getting twitchy and her staff were getting worried. Tim, in particular, thought his dreams of becoming a television chef and running his own chain of restaurants would be dashed if Bonaparte’s went under. The Ramsay touch was required.
    The thinking behind the new show was simple. Originally due to be called Cutting the Mustard , it was to feature Gordon arriving at and assessing a variety of different struggling restaurants. Over up to two weeks of daily work and filming, he would try to show the staff how to raise their game and turn things around. They would then be left to their own devices for a month before he and the film crew would return to see if the transformation had worked. The idea was to be reality television with a difference. Gordon wanted to be constructive rather than destructive, and to be compared to Troubleshooter ’s quietly spoken Sir John Harvey-Jones rather than Pop Idol ’s famously angry Simon Cowell.
    Unfortunately, his first impressions of Bonaparte’s head chef left no room for Sir John’s calm reasoning. ‘Ramsaydoes not merely eat Tim alive, he tenderises him with a mallet and then spatchcocks him,’ wrote the food editor of The Times after watching a preview tape of the show.
    The problems began when Gordon had to persuade Sue to offer free meals to diners just to get enough people into the restaurant so that he could see what £300-a-week chef Tim was capable of. It wasn’t a lot.
    ‘I see myself as cooking fine cuisine,’ Tim claimed unconvincingly.
    ‘Bollocks,’ Gordon responded. ‘Cook me an omelette so I can see how you do the basics.’
    But Tim didn’t know where to start. And when he put his strange, egg-based creation in the oven instead of on the hob, Gordon called a halt. Which was when the real television drama began.
    Tim was given free rein to create his ‘signature dish’ in an attempt to impress his new mentor and repair his reputation. The result became known as Scallop-gate. Without realising that the scallops he cooked alongside black pudding and hollandaise sauce had gone off, Tim proudly served his creation to Gordon. ‘Fucking minging,’ was all Gordon could say, before rushing outside to try to throw them back up in full view of the cameras.
    ‘It wasn’t exactly the best start it could have been. I felt a bit sick myself,’ Tim admitted afterwards. ‘I thought, Oh my God, I’ve poisoned Gordon Ramsay, and I felt terrible.’
    But the young chef would soon be feeling a whole lot worse. Next under the Ramsay microscope came the kitchen itself. And it turned out that the rancid scallops weren’t the only horrors on the shelves. Mouldy strawberries, rotting tomatoes, ingrained dirt, grime andgrease. Having bitten his tongue to keep the nervous television producers happy, Gordon finally let rip.
    ‘I’ve got a good fucking mind to get hold of fucking Sue and just tell her to fucking shut the place. This is the fucking pits. I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire fucking life. This is a fucking disgrace and a fucking embarrassment to catering.’
    With these seven f-words in less than a minute, British television passed a new milestone.
    Tim, however, had more humiliations and X-rated ear-bashings in store. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, Gordon wanted to see if he could cook better at home than he could in the restaurant. But he couldn’t. With Tim’s parents and grandparents sitting alongside him, Gordon watched as the youngster let his croutons catch fire and saw his weekend roast end in disaster. The head chef who had started out washing dishes in a restaurant five years earlier appeared to have learned little of value since.
    Back at the restaurant, Gordon put Tim alongside his fellow chef and best mate Lee Symonds to see how well the pair really knew