Gordon Ramsay by Neil Simpson Page B

a free meal for a review and said she could only come at 8.30pm that Friday night,’ he recalls. ‘The restaurant was fully booked and the critic refused to accept that paying punters who may have made their plans months ahead could not be excluded just to make room for her and her companion.’
    In the end, Gordon said he could offer the critic the table she wanted at 8.30pm on the Saturday night instead. What he ‘forgot’ to tell her was that Gordon Ramsay didn’t open on Saturday nights. ‘It was wicked, I know,’ he says. ‘I wanted to drive round in a car with tinted windows to see what happened when she turned up.’
    This fearless attitude to critics, opinion-formers, celebrities and all the other people that chefs normally suck up to was yet another way Gordon drew himself apart from his peers. It had always been part of his personality; now it had become part of his appeal. And it was on full display on the infamous night that Joan Collins came to dinner.

SIX
JOAN COLLINS? YOU’RE OUT
    T o this day, Gordon says he never intended to throw Joan Collins out of his restaurant before she had even tasted her starter. His problem, he says, was never with her. It was with the man sitting opposite her, the restaurant critic AA Gill.
    Gill is easily one of the most acerbic and idiosyncratic restaurant reviewers in the business. His pieces are often hilarious – sometimes focusing almost entirely on himself, his companions and on his journeys to and from the restaurant in question, with just a brief mention of the food or the atmosphere tacked on to the end. Readers have always loved it – but restaurant owners and chefs are not always so keen.
    One of Gordon’s contentions was that Gill veered too far and too frequently from discussing the food or theambience of a restaurant and ended up commenting on the one set of people Gordon saw as above approach: the customers. For someone with an ever-growing reputation as an angry, aggressive and frequently unpleasant perfectionist, Gordon always felt genuine warmth towards the paying punter, and after all it was his wish to please the customer that made him so demanding of his staff.
    â€˜One night a lady ordered the caramelised duck with a puree of dates,’ he says, to illustrate his attitude towards diners. ‘She asked for the duck to be well done and Jean-Claude, my manager, asked me, “How do you feel about that?” I said, “Jean-Claude, she’s paying, she can have it fucking raw if she wants. I’ll serve the neck if she likes and she can have the feet to take home for a consomme.”’
    Gordon didn’t believe that AA Gill was always quite so respectful of the general public, however. ‘Bloated Godalming plutocrats and their popsies’ was just one unpleasant image of Gordon’s typical customers recently conjured up on Gill’s keyboard. In a bid to stop things escalating and provoking more verbal attacks, Gordon went over to the critic one night when they were both eating at the Ivy, in London’s theatreland. He told him that if Gill didn’t stick to criticising the food and the service he would no longer be welcome at his restaurant.
    That, Gordon thought, was that. The journalist thought differently. Shortly afterwards, AA Gill booked into Gordon Ramsay under an assumed name, as he always did, and took his seat with his girlfriend and the actress Joan Collins. Sensing a potential problem, the maitre d’ went into the kitchen to tell Gordon who was there, and the chef came out to tackle the problem head on. He shookthe critic by the hand to say hello, no voices were raised and no threats were made. He simply asked Gill and his guests to leave and they did so.
    The newspapers, of course, didn’t see things so simply. They went wild when they heard that Joan Collins was among the three diners ousted from the restaurant and the story even made it on to The News at Ten . As the affair