Gordon Ramsay is undoubtedly one of the most successful chefs in the world.
Beneath that dining empire and his huge fortune, however, he's a man with a
serious dark side. These are the controversial things everyone ignores about Gordon Ramsay.
It seems like there's no shortage of celebrities these days who get a
little shy when the time comes to pay their taxes, and Gordon Ramsay is no different.
In 2009, Ramsay appeared in London's High Court, having failed to pay taxes on a restaurant he
owned at Heathrow Airport. In the end, he was forced to pay the equivalent of over
$9 million in unpaid taxes. Then, in 2010, the New York Post reported that Ramsay owed some
$2 million in taxes off his New York-based restaurant, Gordon Ramsay at The London,
which he had sold at the end of 2009. At the time, a spokesman for Ramsay told the News of the World:
"Conversations are in hand with US authorities to settle outstanding corporate liabilities."
In 2013, Ramsay's tax woes became even more serious when documents surfaced written by his
ex-finance director, revealing that the chef's business had misled the British government to
reduce its tax bill. Faced with accusations of fraud and a huge, seven-figure unpaid tax bill,
a spokesperson for Ramsay insisted that the chef himself had triggered the investigation
when he became aware of misconduct by his business' employees. Deloitte,
Ramsay's law firm, declined to comment on reports that five of its senior partners
had been trawling through 30,000 emails in an attempt to clear Ramsay's name.
And it looks like these particular controversies have taken their toll
on Ramsay's patience with the taxman. In 2018, he told the press that he's hoping
to move to Las Vegas — partly, he said, because he'd save a fortune in taxes.
Gordon Ramsay's troubles with the law extend far beyond his clashes with the taxman,
however. His first known run-in with the police came in 1993, when he was arrested and cautioned
for gross indecency after an incident that took place in the bathroom of a London Tube station.
When The Mirror asked about the incident during a phone interview in 2013,
Ramsay was lost for words and quickly hung up.
Later, a PR representative for the chef contacted The Mirror to explain the incident, saying:
"The incident took place in the early morning after a whole night of drinking
and celebrating with friends. It culminated in the three of them
horsing around in the loos of Green Park underground station. The station master,
disturbed by the commotion, got the wrong end of the stick and notified police."
Just under 10 years later, Ramsay was in trouble with police again, when he was arrested and
charged with driving under the influence of alcohol. He had been found driving the wrong
way up a one-way street in central London during the early hours of the morning. After being given
a breathalyzer test, Ramsay was taken to a police station and charged with the crime.
The charge was later dropped due to a so-called "procedural error" made by the police.
Much of Gordon Ramsay's notoriety has come off the back of his sharp
attitude towards the people who appear on his shows. Sometimes, however, it goes too far.
For example, in 2004, the chef landed himself in trouble when he became embroiled in a fight
on the set of Hell's Kitchen. Allegedly, a contestant had provoked Ramsay so much
that the two had ended up in a shoving match, with the contestant eventually
falling and spraining his ankle. According to The Scotsman, Ramsay told a colleague that he had
been in constant meetings with lawyers trying to avoid a lawsuit. Ramsay is reported to have said:
"The people at Fox are frightened there is going to be a massive lawsuit.
The guy wound me up and I got angry. He hurt his ankle when he fell. It wasn't intentional.
I'm Gordon Ramsay, for goodness sake: people know I'm volatile. But I didn't mean to hurt the guy."
Years prior to this, Ramsay was accused of assault and reported to the police
after allegedly confronting his pastry chef over a banana parfait.
At the time, Ramsay denied the accusation, although there is a precedent for Ramsay's
troubling attitude towards his own staff — and the chef's earliest TV appearances
were frequently mired in controversy over the way he treated his employees.
Having a quick temper is one thing, but many people have levied a number of altogether darker
accusations against Gordon Ramsay. For example, according to the BBC, he has been branded a sexist
in the past for saying that women should be kept out of professional kitchens. He has also admitted
he could never have married a chef himself. According to the Guardian, Ramsay has subsequently
been hesitant to hire women to work in his kitchens in the past — because, in his words:
"PMT is a well known problem."
Ramsay has also complained that women only work three weeks a month, that he can never
get into the staff bathroom when women are around, and that it's impossible to yell at
somebody who's pregnant. Worse still, Ramsay made headlines in 2019 when footage resurfaced from a
2010 appearance on The Tonight Show alongside Sofia Vergara, during which the chef repeatedly
talked over her, mocked her, and touched her leg. For the duration of the interview,
Vergara appears to be genuinely uncomfortable — until, at one point, she finally snaps.
"Okay, this is my interview." and Ramsay moving chairs
In 2009, Gordon Ramsay attracted the ire of, well, pretty much everybody,
when he became embroiled in a row with Tracy Grimshaw, an Australian journalist. During a
demonstration at a food show in Melbourne, Ramsay allegedly referred to Grimshaw,
who had interviewed him a few days earlier, as a "lesbian" and an "ugly old pig." Even worse,
it seems like the comments had been pre-planned, because he then showed the audience a grotesque
image of a woman "doctored with the features of a pig." When the audience made clear their dismay
at Ramsay's remarks, the chef carried on, and even referred to her using a homophobic slur.
Blogger and commentator Perez Hilton later said that Ramsay had "crossed the line" with
what Hilton called his "sexist, homophobic remarks," while FoxNews.com called it:
"An obscene, sexist rant."
In the days that followed, journalist Wendy Tuohy wrote in the Herald Sun:
"Gordon Ramsay is an outrageous self-promoter who keeps raising
the rudeness bar to stay at the top of his game."
Later, Hell's Kitchen winner Heather West defended Ramsay, saying:
"He has never had a problem with it. In fact, all three sous chefs on the show have been lesbians
and he has many other lesbians working for him. He's always been cool with it."
Nonetheless, Ramsay was eventually made to
publicly apologise for his comments about Grimshaw.
"It was not clever. But I'm gonna put my hand up in the air,
and apologise for hurting her feelings."
Back in 2012, chef Marcus Samuelsson released his memoir, Yes, Chef. In the book, Samuelsson
alleges a particularly unpleasant interaction with Gordon Ramsay earlier in his career.
Samuelsson had spoken to the media before taking on a role working in the restaurant at
The Lanesborough, a luxury hotel in London. He had been asked who his favorite British
chefs were, and mentioned a number of names. Unfortunately, Ramsay was not among them.
On his second day at the Lanesborough,
Samuelsson was working in the kitchen when a phone call came through for him — from Gordon
Ramsay. Ramsay apparently screamed a number of expletives down the phone at Samuelsson,
one of which followed up with an explicit reference to Samuelsson's race. Worse still,
Samuelsson wasn't even surprised to have been on the receiving end of such a rant. He writes:
"I had cooked with Gordon Ramsay once, a couple of years earlier,
when we did a promotion with Charlie Trotter in Chicago.
There were a handful of chefs there [...] and Gordon was rude and obnoxious to all of them."
Samuelsson continues:
"What I finally realized in London was that I wasn't an
underling anymore. I didn't have to take that kind of bulls--- anymore."
In 2007, The New Yorker ran a profile on Gordon Ramsay that featured an interview with the man
himself. As part of this profile, the magazine recounted a story from 1998,
when Ramsay was worried that his bosses and financiers at Aubergine, his Michelin-starred
restaurant, were about to replace him with the renowned chef Marco Pierre White.
When a negative review of Aubergine appeared in the Sunday Times,
Ramsay became convinced that White had made it happen,
as part of a desperate conspiracy to stop Ramsay from overtaking him as London's best young chef.
Not too long after, a man on a motor scooter pulled up in front of Aubergine,
entered the restaurant, grabbed the reservation book, and fled. Back in the days before
computerized reservations, a book such as this was arguably the most crucial part of a restaurant's
business. In a subsequent interview with the Evening Standard, Ramsay voiced his suspicion that
White was the culprit, and that he had attempted to sabotage Aubergine's business in order to make
the restaurant his own. White, however, has always denied that he had anything to do with the theft.
So who was behind it? Well, when The New Yorker's Bill Buford interviewed Ramsay for his feature,
the truth finally came out. Ramsay said:
"It was me. I nicked it. I blamed Marco. Because I knew that would
f--- him and that it would call off the dogs."
For almost 25 years, Gordon Ramsay has been married to his wife, Tana,
with whom he has five children. But despite its longevity,
their marriage has been the subject of some speculation in the tabloids.
In 2008, the now-defunct News of the World accused Ramsay of engaging in
a seven-year affair with Sarah Symonds, a notorious so-called "professional mistress."
A source told the tabloid that Ramsay and Symonds had met in a nightclub in 2001. The source said:
"Ramsay and Sarah exchanged mobile numbers
and became lovers just a few weeks later. So much for him being true to his wife."
Another unverified source told the Mirror that Ramsay was devastated by the revelations,
allegedly telling one friend:
"I'm so sorry I've put Tana through this. I've apologised to her and feel absolutely dreadful."
Publicly, Ramsay vehemently denied the accusations. In 2009, he said:
"Did I know her? Yes, of course. She'd met Tana for God's sake.
But did I have a torrid 7-year affair with her? Did I f--k!"
Referring to Symonds, Ramsay continued:
"It is all crap. She's deluded. Not a stalker, exactly, but that sort of thing. Everywhere
I go — the US, even bloody Reykjavik — she is there the next day, trying to flog her book."
It seems that few people can escape Gordon Ramsay's ire, and vegetarians are no different.
Despite a recent epiphany on the subject,
the chef has spent years mocking and degrading vegetarians and vegans.
"Did you like the foie gras? Did you like it?"
"I'm vegetarian."
"You're vegetarian? Did you not get the message, vegetarians aren't welcome?"
In one example, whilst filming Kitchen Nightmares, Ramsay handed out pizza to passers-by on the
street. When a man turned up claiming to be an avid vegetarian, Ramsay offered him some
vegetarian pizza — and, after the man had eaten it, revealed that one of the toppings was Parma
ham. When the man became upset, Ramsay simply pointed out that he hadn't come out in a rash,
offered him more, and yelled to his kitchen staff that they'd converted a vegetarian.
Moreover, he once found himself facing legal action after boasting that he had told a
table of vegetarians that the artichoke soup they'd just eaten contained vegetable stock,
when in fact he had used chicken stock. Then,
in 2012, Ramsay attracted further criticism when he told the Mirror that:
"My biggest nightmare would be if the kids ever came up to me and said
'Dad, I'm a vegetarian.' Then I would sit them on the fence and electrocute them."
A joke, sure, and by Gordon Ramsay's standards,
not even a particularly mean-spirited one. But doesn't that just say it all?
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