Gordon Ramsay’s Playing with Fire. Gordon Ramsay
Joelson Wilson & Co., but Scotland is Scotland, and they play by a whole different set of laws. Soon we had a deal, and it was only a matter of time before wet ink was scrawled across a ten-year lease and an accompanying operating agreement.
The first base in this home run, as always, was a chef, and I already knew who was going to head north to run the kitchen. This remote outpost would also need a general manager, and I had just the person in mind. From then on, there was a long succession of trips to One Devonshire Gardens by our human resources manager, our operations staff and the kitchen designers. Gradually, a shape was evolving, and although the English press was pretty low-key about this adventure, the Scottish papers were lining up their sharpened pencils.
Amaryllis opened to a Scottish fanfare. We had a launch party that rocked late into the night, which was all very well, but the following day, we were open for business. The opening weeks went well. Nobody could believe that this restaurant was attracting forty covers for lunch and sixty-five in the evening. I did more television interviews and talked to more journalists than ever before. The critics moved in. Their reviews made good reading, and I knew we were already on the way to a Michelin star.
At what stage did I realize that things were going wrong and that the paste that held up the wallpaper was just too thin? Well, if the truth were known, it was not so for far too long.
But it was soon clear that the pressure from Glasgow on our London operation was beginning to grow. The northern kitchen brigade was rowing, absenteeism was at a level not known to us in the south. On top of all this, the owners of the hotel had just run into trouble.
It is always traumatic for everyone involved when there have to be changes in senior management. The finger of blame can only point to myself and Chris, and if we get an appointment wrong, then it will certainly be us who end up paying the price.
All you can do when you appoint someone is interview them and check out their reputation. But reputations are leaked, spread, smeared or openly published, and are often the stuff of crap and nonsense. I know how I can exaggerate and pass on stories about them as if I witnessed the whole thing myself – when, actually, I’ve never met them. As for the interview, well, that can be a trip to Disneyland. Nobody ever goes to an interview with a long list of their weaknesses. They save them for later, and drip-feed them when you least expect it.
So, a new appointment is made, and off we go into the woods, axes in hand, ready to build a tree house. All is sweet to begin with, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, ominous signs begin to appear. They may not have forgotten the axe, exactly, but, at some stage, it will need sharpening and the stone was left at home. The idea is that senior managers have to think things out for themselves. They have to plan, budget, foresee everything and make things happen. If you’re building a tree house, you need drawings, materials, a compliant workforce, safety procedures to stop Bob the Builder from falling off the tree holding his chain-saw, and the house needs to face the right direction to catch the sun. In fact, someone must be experienced enough to see the whole thing through.
If that doesn’t happen, you know you’ve got a problem. When a bend in the road appears, you get a choice. You can either steer around the corner or you can fail to notice it, ignore it, and crash. That’s when you have the odious task of saying goodbye and having to look for someone else, and you know in your heart of hearts that it is not so much a senior management failure, but your own fucking fault – or Chris’s fault, if I’m feeling that evil.
We were, as they say nowadays, ring-fenced from the hotel operation, which was now in the hands of receivers. In practice, that meant it was run by accountants whose only aim in life was to cream every penny out of this financial flop for the creditors, and that was never going to result in a well-run, happy hostelry with residents queuing up to sample my menu.
Still, we paid countless visits to Amaryllis. Chris and I would leave London at 4 a.m. and race up the motorway to be there by 8.30 a.m. When we got there, we would talk to staff, listen to their catalogue of woes, and then do the motivational bit, sure that – this time, finally – everything would change. I would gather all the poor, wee lost souls in the main dining room with the high ceiling and slight mustiness in the air, and I would talk gently. ‘Guys,’ I would say, ‘we have some issues here that we need to sort out. We need to do this together, you and me, so that we can learn from our mistakes and make this so successful that the queue for dinner stretches right down to Sauchiehall Street. So tell me what you think might be wrong at present.’
Nothing is forthcoming, so I move it up a gear. I look for the face that shows that its owner wants to hide behind the drapes – those long, grey, funereal drapes that are looking more and more apt by the day – and I try and draw him out.
‘Harry?’ I ask. He’s the barman who has personally ordered fifty-seven varieties of Scotch in the mistaken belief that he will entice most of Scotland into his bar. ‘How are you with all of this? Do you feel that we can work this out as a team? What about you, Cynthia? How can we improve our daily reservations?’
And so I go on, asking and listening carefully. In their replies, the real answer is hidden. I need to hear the tone, the timbre and the inflection to see if they really think that this can work and to see – most importantly – if they want it to work.
I tell them that they are only here because they are good, and were chosen because of this attribute. I explain that London is not that far away, and that everyone in the office really wants them to succeed. Then I ask them if they can help me get the show on the road. And, bit by bit, I can see hope. They want this to work, and they know that I want it to do so as well. We can do it. We have the best fucking ingredients in the world on our doorstep. We need to spoil our guests with smiles and recognition. We need to deal with problems immediately, and always in favour of the customers. Are we together on this? The room tells me yes, and although it might be some way short of Billy Graham’s call to Jesus, I really believe that I’ve encouraged them.
The trouble was that it never did change and, as this became apparent, we felt less like going up to Amaryllis, knowing that the love affair was over.
London was having its own problems by then. Pétrus had moved to The Berkeley and we had kept on 33 St James’s. It had seemed simple enough to give the restaurant a new name, make some changes to the menu, drop the prices fractionally, and wait for the same old crowd to keep coming. Only they didn’t. Turnover plummeted, and we were suddenly no longer making £40,000 a month.
So Marcus Wareing and I were ‘invited’ to Chris’s office for a chat. It was a bit like attending the funeral of the family pet. There, on his desk, he had sheets of paper with the past six months’ profit and loss figures. We ploughed through them, starting with Royal Hospital Road, then on to Pétrus and the other restaurants we were beginning to open in London. They were bringing in total profits at the rate of around £250,000 each month, which was great.
‘What was wrong with that?’ we wondered, until Chris launched into a rundown on the two failing restaurants.
Marcus and I had a pocketful of reasons and excuses for this state of ruination, and, above all, we had the determination to fix it. There was a pause, and Chris said that he thought that we should shut the two restaurants the next day.
‘Had he gone mad?’ we asked.
Closing would be like admitting defeat, and, most importantly of all, how would it sound to the press?
There was another cold, stony pause from Chris before he delivered the well-aimed kick in the bollocks. ‘You can continue on one condition,’ he said, ‘and that is that the two of you personally pay over to the company a total of £41,000 each month until you have everything under control and the restaurants are no longer bleeding the group dry.’
He went on to explain that both cases were past redemption and that, unless we were happy to carry these losses personally, say for the next six months at a cost of £366,000, he suggested that we spend the rest of the meeting planning the two closures.
It was really strange, but this was suddenly a moment