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In 1890, Richard D'Oyly Carte, flush with Gilbert and Sullivan money, hired 2 Frenchmen to make his new Savoy hotel the Empire's most glamorous address. César Ritz ran the front of house. Auguste Escoffier built the kitchen, and in doing so built most of what a restaurant still is: the brigade system, the military chain of command that runs every serious kitchen on earth, the reason cooks answer "Yes, Chef" instead of "take it easy". He wrote Le Guide Culinaire, still in print 123 years later (and still not surpassed, even by Larousse). He lent his name to Maggi stock cubes, and, if you believe the legend, the verb 'to scoff'. He was the first great chef to let his reputation leave the building without him. In 1898, the Savoy sacked him for taking gifts and commissions from his suppliers, and he signed a confession the hotel kept in its archive for 87 years. He left in disgrace and kept the fame. The hotel kept the building. In 2022, the Savoy opened a restaurant on the site of his dining room, and the door reads "1890 by Gordon Ramsay". The year Escoffier arrived is trademarked by the man who currently holds his job.
The Scoff himself
I have eaten Gordon Ramsay's food at the Savoy, so in the interest of declaration: It was superb. I went with a healthy dose of trepidation and the expectation of being underwhelmed by the sauce béarnaise, and instead had one of the best meals of my life. What lingered past the eye-watering bill was the gravity of the arrangement. The Savoy has been grand for 137 years. It survived 2 world wars and every dining trend since the Empire, and it still decided its own restaurant needed a more famous name.
He earned that name in the trade's toughest arena. Harvey's under Marco Pierre White, where he finished at least one service in tears. Le Gavroche under Albert Roux. Then Paris, under Guy Savoy and Joël Robuchon, in kitchens run somewhere on the far side of what English law considers reasonable. In 1998, as the head chef who had won Aubergine 2 Michelin stars on somebody else's lease, he walked out and took nearly the whole brigade with him, to a site on Royal Hospital Road with his own name above it. He earned the third star in 2001, when he was 34. The restaurant has held all 3 for 25 years, the longest run in London. We know exactly what the brand is doing, and we want the table anyway.
Cooking has carried the same curse since the first inn. A chef sells the work of his hands, and his hands can be in only one place at a time. Every other kind of famous person escaped this centuries ago: a song plays in a million places at once, a book sells while the author sleeps, a film runs forever. A plate of beef Wellington exists once, for one table, for about 9 minutes. The curse is also the gift. A great meal works like theatre: it happens in front of you, once, and then it lives only in the memory of the people who were there. Nobody can stream it, lend it, or taste it twice. We keep going back because it will not keep.
The entire history of the celebrity chef is a history of attempts to escape that room. Escoffier tried the cookbook and the stock cube. The next generation tried television. Ramsay went further than any of them, and he went because he was pushed. In late 2008 Gordon Ramsay Holdings breached the covenants on a £10.5m loan from RBS and owed £7.2m in unpaid tax, and KPMG, brought in to advise, recommended bankruptcy. He and his father-in-law put in almost £9m of their own money, 69% of it Ramsay's. The restaurants he owned abroad- Hollywood, Paris, New York, Boca Raton- were handed to the hotels that housed them and converted into management contracts: the hotel kept the kitchen, dining room, risk, and payroll, and paid him for the name and the standard. Owning restaurants is what nearly broke him. The name came through 2008 without a scratch, and he has run the company on that rule ever since
There are now 2 ways to open a Gordon Ramsay restaurant: his company runs it, or you pay to borrow the name, and we know exactly what borrowing it costs, because the price of renting it would still be a secret if Caesars Entertainment had not gone bankrupt in 2015 and been made to show its contracts to the court. Ramsay takes 5% of gross sales at his Caesars restaurants up to $10m, 5.5% between $10m and $15m, and 6% above that.
The scale runs backwards: in most licensing deals the rate falls as volume rises, and his rises, which records in black and white who the casino believes is driving the customers. If a restaurant grosses under $8m a year, Caesars can terminate. Caesars flies him first class or private, puts him up in 3 deluxe rooms, and gives him 30% off the incidentals. My favourite clause is the smallest one. He must visit each restaurant for at least 24 consecutive hours a year. A year contains 8,760 hours. The contract specifies the minimum legal dose of Gordon Ramsay: 24. For the other 8,736, the restaurant is run by the name.
Last week his UK accounts went in at Companies House, and they read as if they are 2 different businesses stapled into one filing. The 34 restaurants his company actually runs here posted record sales of £100.7m, up 3%, and lost £5.8m doing it. The worldwide business, 103 restaurants, most of them licensed or managed, took £151.8m in sales, up 7%, and grew underlying profits 12% to £14.4m. The half that actually cooks loses money. The half that signs licences pays for everything.
That £5.8m loss says less about him than about the country kitchens live in. On UKHospitality's figures from last week, a UK hospitality business now pays the equivalent of 82p in tax for every £1 of pre-tax profit. The sector has lost 93,000 jobs in 2 years. Its accounts make the fair counterpoint themselves, reporting £8.5m of positive EBITDA, money earned before interest, depreciation and the rest of the cost of existing. Both are true, and that is the current condition of the entire British trade: the cooking earns, the being a British business loses. Against that backdrop, a licensing arm paid in dollars by other people's balance sheets is the only place in the house the taxman cannot enter.
He is, to put it mildly, hubristic and modest at once, which should be impossible, and watching him manage it is most of the fun. The hubris is public property: the shows, the swearing, the Vegas restaurant named after his own white-hot fury. The modesty sits in the asset register, where it counts. Royal Hospital Road has never been franchised, licensed, lent, or diluted into a departure lounge, because every borrowed burger in the empire is borrowing against those 3 stars the tyre man gave him, and he has never once squandered that collateral. He understands his own brand the way David Beckham understands his: what works, what to exploit, what never to touch, and exactly how much of it to sell.
People love him for the same reason your dad loves gangster films. It is people behaving badly and getting away with it. Television is supposed to finish a boss who screams at his staff; his screaming built the estate. The rage became a format, the format became clips, and a woman called an idiot sandwich in a sketch now sits in the marketing canon of the most efficient customer-acquisition machine in hospitality. Every ounce of that fury converts to bookings, at 5% of gross.
Theatre has lived with all of this since time began, because it sells the same unrepeatable evening, and it settled on the same answers. A play and a restaurant are the same wager. The economics are identical. Every cost lands up front: the fit-out or the rehearsals, the rent or the theatre hire, the brigade or the cast, all paid before a single customer walks in, and then the doors open and you pray you sell the covers or the seats. The West End solved the name problem the same way Vegas did.
Richard D'Oyly Carte - Theatre impresario and Restaurateur
For the same reason: a playwright of Tom Stoppard's rank takes a royalty off the top of the gross box office, historically in the region of 7%+, paid whether the production profits or never does, because the name is what sold the seats in the first place. Stoppard on the poster fills the stalls before the curtain moves, the way Ramsay over the door fills the room before the stove clicks into life. Theatre keeps one discipline that restaurants have never attempted: it rations the name. While a Stoppard runs in the West End, the estate carefully limits how many productions can trade on him at once, protecting the name by starving the market. Ramsay is at 103 restaurants and opening more: no estate, no agent, no ration. Nobody in the history of the trade has found the number at which a name wears thin, and he has volunteered to run the experiment at full scale, in public.
Tonight the 8 pm seating will file into Hell's Kitchen at Caesars Palace, and at some point a ticket will go up, the expediter will call it, and a brigade of cooks will answer together: "Yes, Chef." Those 2 words are palpably moving, because of what they actually contain. They mean: your standard is the standard. They mean: I will cook this your way, not mine, and if it goes wrong, I will say so out loud, in front of everyone. Almost nowhere else in modern work is obedience like that given freely, and no kitchen on earth gives it to a weak chef for long. The cooks in Vegas most likely don’t know him. They answer anyway, to the standard rather than the man, the one proved in tears at Harvey's and over 25 unbroken years of 3 stars on Royal Hospital Road. Escoffier wrote the call-and-response at the Savoy in 1890, for a chef standing close enough to the pass to taste every sauce. The words have carried 136 years and an entire ocean, and they keep their full meaning on nights when the man is nowhere near the building. The trade's greatest invention is an absence you can answer to.
See you on the next one.
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