How I reduced Ramsay to a blubbering wreck

By Richard Alleyne
Last Updated: 11:03PM BST 29 Jul 2006

Marco Pierre White claims he launched Ramsay's career

Gordon Ramsay, the flamboyant celebrity chef, is famous for his hard man image and is known for tearing strips off anyone who crosses him in his kitchen. But it seems he has not always been so fearsome.

According to the autobiography of Marco Pierre White, Britain's original enfant terrible of cooking, Ramsay, his then protégé, was reduced to a sobbing wreck after one of his "bollockings".

White, who made his name at Harveys in Wandsworth, south London, claimed that Ramsay "cracked" after a particularly fearsome rebuke.

White said: "He had been a protégé at Harveys and he was always a hard worker and showed tremendous resilience when it came to my bollockings. He never cracked. Or rather, he never cracked until his final night at Harveys.

"I don't recall what he'd done wrong but I yelled at him and he lost it.

Gordon crouched down on the floor in the corner of the kitchen, buried his head in his hands and started sobbing. 'I don't care what you do to me,' he said as he wept. 'Hit me. I don't care. Sack me. I don't care.' I was hardly going to sack him; he was leaving the next day - I'd got him a job working for Albert Roux at Gavroche."

White, 44, who gave up cooking after becoming the youngest chef in the world to get three Michelin stars, has since fallen out with Ramsay, whose own success has eclipsed that of his former master.

In his memoir, entitled White Slave, which is being serialised in The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, the so-called Byron of the Backburner claims that he launched Ramsay's career, helping him set up Aubergine, his first restaurant.

He said: "I cut the umbilical cord a few years back. There were a few incidents and I just decided I didn't want to talk to him any more, so I stopped returning his calls.

"Perhaps I created the monster Ramsay, the monster who ended up as a TV personality screaming at celebrities on Hell's Kitchen, doing to them what I had done to him.

"In the Nineties I helped him launch Aubergine and even came up with the restaurant's name. In its first few months his kitchen wasn't right, so my chefs cooked a lot of the food for Aubergine and his boys came over to collect it."

He says he cut Ramsay out of his life after he made some disparaging remarks and after he turned up at his third wedding with a television crew in tow without asking permission.

He said: "I wasn't happy and decided my life would be enriched if I saw no more of him. It's unlikely we shall ever know each other again. When I cut, I cut."

White, who was born in Leeds and whose antics in the 1980s led to him being referred to as a rock star in an apron, describes a recent and frosty meeting between the two men as they ate at the Fat Duck, the restaurant of their mutual friend and three Michelin-starred chef Heston Blumenthal.

White said he was dining with his wife Mati and Ramsay arrived with his wife Tana at the eatery in Bray, Berks.

He said: "I wasn't on speaking terms with Gordon, but by coincidence he happened to be in the restaurant on the same day. I said 'You'll have to ask him to leave'. Heston called Gordon away from the table. 'Gordon, Marco says he's not going to stay if you are here. I think you should have a word with him.'

Heston then scurried away into the kitchen, asking his maitre d' to keep him informed of developments.

"Gordon came into the garden and said, 'Thank you very much Marco for ruining a nice day.'

"I said, 'Why don't you sue me for loss of enjoyment?' He came back with, 'You fat bastard. I've always wanted to call you that'. I said, 'Is that the best you can do?' Gordon left. There was silence in the garden."

For his part Ramsay, who grew up on a council estate but is now worth £60 million, has acknowledged his debt to White, despite their current animosity towards each other. He has described working with White as "like sitting with your pants down on a meat cleaver".

"He was awesome, vibrant and wild. He was a power freak. But I went in as a kitchen hand and emerged as a chef." As for the falling out, he claims it stems from an arm-wrestling match in which he beat his former teacher.

It will not be long before we hear his side of the story in more detail.

He is due to publish his autobiography, Humble Pie, in October.

A spokesman for Ramsay said: "Do you really believe this? We don't want to be part of a slanging match but Gordon has his autobiography out soon and that will give his version of events."