Gordon Ramsay Read Online Free Page B

Day, a still outspoken Gordon headed back down south to leave the transformed Bonaparte’s crew to it. ‘They were lazy little fuckers and I had to go back to Claridge’s and just watch the kitchen run like a beautiful machine, the dishes passing before my eyes, before I felt calm again,’ he told friends afterwards.
    But things were not as calm in Yorkshire. A month later, Gordon and the film crew were back to see if business was still booming. It wasn’t.
    Tim and Sue were back fighting each other about the way the kitchen and the restaurant should be run. The dirt, the grime and the piles of rotting food were back behind the scenes. And the customers had all but disappeared. Tim was on his way out and Bonaparte’s, Sue said, was closing its doors for good.
    At this stage, Tim was taking it all on the chin – though a war of words between him and Gordon would soon be played out in the tabloids as the youngster tried everything from getting on GMTV to getting into Big Brother . ‘I can’t cook as well as I thought I could, clearly, but I can cook a bit otherwise I would never earn a wage,’ was his initial assessment of the lessons he had learned. ‘I have damaged my reputation but it is not true I was sacked from the restaurant. I had already resigned.’
    Interestingly enough, he and Gordon did share one surprising concern in the days after their show was broadcast. Tim was worried about what his mother would say now she had seen her son smoking on television, while Gordon was terrified about what his would say about his swearing.
    ‘Wherever he learned to talk like that, it certainly wasn’t at home,’ was her initial verdict when reporters asked her for her views. ‘I always make sure he says sorry if he uses any bad language in front of me.’
    What the show’s production company, Optomen, realised the moment the cameras had stopped rolling in Silsden was that in Gordon Ramsay they had a real, gold-plated star on their hands. So the show’s original title, Cutting the Mustard , was thrown out and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares was born. The swearing, they decided, would just have to be seen as part of the package and they would take any official criticism as it came.
    On an unofficial level, Gordon faced an immediate backlash from residents of Silsden and other viewers after the first show was aired. ‘All Gordon Ramsay and the programme makers were after were ratings,’ said Chris Bone, one of Tim’s best mates, who had watched the Bonaparte’s programme with horror. Other locals said Gordon had deliberately patronised the town’s residents by suggesting they were too stupid to appreciate anything other than hotpot or fish and chips when they went out to dinner.
    Some criticism was even more personal, however. ‘Ramsay is just another fat millionaire going on television to make more money, humiliate people less fortunate than himself and try and keep everyone else in their place,’ Terry Clarke from Ipswich wrote on the internet chatroom DigitalSpy. ‘Just like Simon Cowell he doesn’t care about anyone but himself, he doesn’t know the first thing about hard work and he wouldn’t last ten minutes in the real world.’
    But Terry could hardly have been more wrong. Hard work had long since been imprinted in Gordon’s DNA. He knew, and none better, how tough it is to come from nowhere and climb to the top of a profession where you have no friends, no contacts and no connections to help you. The failed footballer from a broken home on one of Glasgow’s toughest estates had been fighting against the odds from the start. Whatever the critics might say, Gordon was the perfect person to show others how to overcome obstacles and turn their careers around. He had been doing that all his life.
    When you take the time to find out where Gordon is from, what he has seen and how far he has travelled, it is little wonder that he’s so angry. Little wonder he has no time for failure, for underperformance