He shouts, he swears, but is Gordon Ramsay as scary as he'd like us to think? And with 15 restaurants on three continents, is he getting a bit too big for his boots? Louise Eastfalls for the charm of the outspoken chef ahead of his first Irish venture, opening in October at the Ritz Carlton in Enniskerry.
It's the morning of my interview with Gordon Ramsay and this not-so-Little Red Riding Hood is a trifle nervous about meeting the Big Bad Wolf. As the star of a string of shows with hyperbolic titles (Boiling Point! Hell's Kitchen! Kitchen Nightmares!) the 40-year-old chef has become the textbook ogre: potato-faced and foul-mouthed, stomping round his lair, hurling saucepans at the weak.
But fairy tales are nothing if not ambiguous, and Gordon Ramsay the TV villain is also Gordon Ramsay, chef extraordinaire, a man who has cooked up three Michelin stars for himself, with a further seven stars decorating other kitchens in his £60 million restaurant group. Even his worst critics don't dispute that Ramsay is a chef and restaurateur at the top of his game.
While he traditionally reserves his bile for other cooks (Antony Worrall Thompson is a "squashed Bee Gee"; Ainsley Harriot is a "f**king comedian"; Raymond Blanc, "a little French twat"), journalists aren't exactly his best mates either. On the day before our interview, he even had a go at a radio journalist for having bad breath.
Already, I've had a polite phone call from his PR company requesting I mention neither his brother, Ronnie, a long-term heroin addict facing 10 years in a Bali prison for drug possession, nor the $1 million lawsuit recently slapped on him by one of the restaurants featured in the American series of Kitchen Nightmares.
The temptation is to play it safe and ask him about his lovely-seeming wife, Tana Ramsay, who has become a best-selling author in her own right with Family Kitchen; his four kids whom he clearly adores; and Fast Food, a tasty collection of recipes from his latest hit series, The F Word.
But I just can't do it. With Gordon Ramsay, there's way too much juicy stuff for any journalist to be satisfied with chit-chat about the time he grazed his home-reared lambs on the Beckhams' lawn. How does he feel about his much-hyped New York restaurant getting a lukewarm reaction from the New York Times critic, for example, and what's the real story behind the writ served on him by fellow chef, Marco Pierre White? And does he really sneak rotten meat into the restaurants featured in Kitchen Nightmares?
Ramsay, when he arrives at Claridges, is wearing that dodgy pink Argyle sweater familiar to viewers of The F Word, and is full of apologies for being a tiny bit late. The chef's table is being fitted with cameras for the final show of the series, so Ramsay orders a pot of tea and we make do with a table in the bar. In real life, the pantomime villain is rather soft-spoken - at times I have to strain to hear him - but his chopped-off, verb-heavy sentences will be familiar to anyone who has listened to him intone, "Chop. Braise. Flambe. Taste. Done." on The F Word.
First up, we discuss his plans for the new Ritz-Carlton hotel in Powerscourt, which will house Ireland's first Gordon Ramsay restaurant when it opens in October. Ramsay has already started meeting Irish producers - he wants to source 90 per cent of his produce locally - with the idea of putting together a menu that is "modern European with a home-grown feel".
Although he acknowledges the difficulties of tracking down quality produce year-round, he's optimistic he can do it. "Irish produce tends to be artisan, which can be a problem for high volume cooking. But we're not doing volume. We only have 70 seats in the restaurant. I don't want to cook for half of Ireland."
Earlier this month, he and his team embarked on a "research development" trip, aka eating at other Irish restaurants. "There are some phenomenal restaurants out there, some exciting chefs. I'm constantly looking at the competitors. Even a bad restaurant is competition."
As in his other overseas restaurants (New York, Dubai, Tokyo and later this year Paris and LA), Ramsay will rarely cook in Powerscourt but will install a head chef who has spent at least five years in Ramsay's own kitchen. So who's it to be? "I have a choice of three. I want somebody Irish and we have a lot of Irish working on the team so it's a tough one. They're all fighting for pole position. He or she will be young and tenacious with a big pair of balls."
Aside from the fairly lightweight criticism of Ramsay's swearing (111 uses of the word "f**k" in one episode of Kitchen Nightmares), a more serious charge regularly levelled at the chef is that the expansion of Gordon Ramsay Holdings is too ambitious, too fast, too untenable. The company now consists of 15 restaurants on three continents. Even allowing for restaurants such as Petrus, The Connaught and Maze, where chefs such as Marcus Wareing, Angela Hartnett and Jason Atherton are well capable of taking care of themselves, surely there is a danger of too many restaurants spoiling the Ramsay broth? Gordon, characteristically, hasn't much truck with that idea.
"The majority of chefs I know couldn't run a f**king bath let alone a restaurant . . . People say I'm stretching myself too thin. God, there's some phenomenal chefs out there - Alain Ducasse, Jean-Georges Vongerichten - who have 30-plus restaurants.
"I had an argument with a lady in Tokyo three months ago who said 'The food's not the same without you.' I said, 'Eh, yes it is.' She said, 'Well, who cooks when you're not there?' I said, 'Same people who do when I am there. When you bought your Armani suit, did you ask if it was Giorgio who stitched it?' "
In 2006, Ramsay opened his first restaurant in New York, Gordon Ramsay at The London. It was a $10 million investment and a much-anticipated opening. But after the New York Times's food critic, Frank Bruni, a man who can close restaurants overnight, handed down a lukewarm two out of four stars and the indictment, "seldom has a conquistador as bellicose as Mr Ramsay landed with such a whisper", there were those who thought it would bomb spectacularly.
"Unfortunately, I've gone past that era of being judged by my food. I'm being judged by my character. I don't really give a f**k to be honest because I've got to be thick-skinned. Does it hurt? Of course it hurts, but I don't walk around taking it all personally . . . There's a very frustrating point for a chef of 40 years of age with a phenomenal touch when you get really pissed off being judged by individuals who know less about food than you do."
Ramsay is buoyant about The London now, claiming the restaurant broke even at the start of May and consistently has a waiting list for tables, but the New York experience does beg the question of whether Ramsay's massive media presence (which includes TV series with massive ratings on two continents, as well as the books, the porcelain range, the ads for BT and Threshers) is jeopardising his considerable reputation as a chef.
Ramsay looks momentarily at a loss before cheerily pointing out that he has just signed an exclusive contract with Channel 4 until 2011. "I enjoy what I do. I take Kitchen Nightmares really seriously. Although, what's all this nonsense in the States?" His eyes lights up and he starts to laugh.
"Another day, another lawsuit. Hilarious. Do they actually think I'm bringing in mouldy ingredients and then planting them and discovering them? I mean, are they stupid?" He cackles merrily, "So am I worried about overexposure? I don't know really. I see so many synthetic crap TV shows, I cringe. I try to keep The F Word as close to being real as possible, with very little rehearsal."
Sometimes, this has unforeseen consequences, as when a segment of the show featuring Ramsay and Janet Street-Porter cooking horse meat provoked an animal rights group to dump a ton of horse manure on the doorstep of Claridges.
He is similarly unrepentant about the endless column inches earned by his potty mouth and media outbursts. "I don't want to walk around being precious and careful. Every time a PR wants to sit in on an interview in case I make a mistake, I say 'Oh f**k off, will you? What do you mean in case I make a mistake?' Who cares? I certainly don't want to send the wrong message to parents about sending their children into this industry. There's no six-and-a-half hour days and 'Please be so kind as to pass me the spinach.' You work your arse off. Nothing comes for nothing in this world."
Ramsay's childhood was not a happy one. Along with his three siblings and his mother, he trailed his alcoholic, abusive father who moved the family from Glasgow to southern England and back again as he lost one job after another.
"We had tea, shared the bath water and went to bed. There was no such thing as dinner or fruit or a nice thick creamy yoghurt. I always thought Ready Brek was for posh kids."
However, Ramsay is determined his own children will grow up with their feet on the ground. As well as the violin lessons, the football coaching and the judo, they spend 10 days in Butlins every July with Ramsay's mother.
When scouts picked Ramsay to play for Rangers youth team at 16, it seemed like his chance to escape but an injury at 19 put paid to that. Ramsay turned his focus on cooking, a career dismissed by his father as "gay".
While his brother, Ronnie, reacted to their dreary childhood with heroin addiction (Ramsay has paid for him to go to rehab countless times), Ramsay believes it gave him his drive and ambition. "I got nervous of living life like [ my dad]. When I flip my lid, I know where to draw the line because I always have flashbacks to having my mum stand in front of him and him punching her . . . The shit-fight we had growing up was something I ran away from a long time ago but I've kept the momentum up in terms of focus and not taking my eye off the ball."
Of all his mentors, including Guy Savoy and Albert Roux, it is Marco Pierre White with whom Ramsay is indelibly associated; not just because of the many years Ramsay was White's right-hand man (and when the time came, his best man) but because they have so spectacularly fallen out. The ins and outs of their feud are Dynasty-esque and centre on control of Aubergine, the restaurant in which Ramsay won his first Michelin star.
In March, the controversy reignited after Ramsay told the New Yorker magazine that a reservations book he once claimed White stole was actually purloined by himself in order to discredit his former boss. White promptly served a writ for defamation of character. Since then, Ramsay has remained uncharacteristically quiet on the matter, but when I ask whether he and his former best friend will ever talk, he can't resist mulling the idea over.
"We haven't spoken for years. When you love and respect and work so f**king hard for someone, it's very hard then to feel the knife being put in and not take it personally. Being as insecure as I was, as a 28-year-old chef, my only possession then was my reservation book. I stole it because that's all I had. I didn't steal it, I just misplaced it. I didn't blame him. I had to treat that restaurant as a game of chess and play some very serious moves. Defamation of character? I never said that he's a crap chef. He was a huge inspiration. But will we talk? I hope not."
As it turned out, the hour I spent with Ramsay was more Oprah Winfrey than Grimm's fairytale. It may not always work in his favour, but Gordon Ramsay's honesty is hugely refreshing, even if it isn't always quite "nice". You can't help thinking it would be great to be one of his mates - he's funny, sincere, charming - and interestingly, Ramsay's staff tend to be immensely loyal to him.
Family aside, nothing seems more important to Ramsay than his "team". He loves the rivalry, the banter, the running gags. He loves giving chefs their own restaurants, even buying a pub for one long-term employee who didn't fancy fine dining. He loves seeing "some little chef de partie, 10 years down the line a partner and an integral part of the business. Now that's exciting."
Although he bridles when I suggest that he seems to get as much of a buzz out of business as he does out of cooking, it's clear that building his empire and installing his best friends in the coolest rooms is what pleases him most. Before I leave, I ask him what three words he would use to describe himself. Straight away, he comes up with "Pressure-junkie, disciplined and a big f**king heart. That's my problem. Or I'm too f**king honest. That's four. I like cooking in the danger zone and when it gets really boring and mundane and sedate, I f**king turn the place upside down to create havoc. I don't like it when it's perfect. I like getting there but I don't like staying there too long."
Fast Food by Gordon Ramsay is published by Quadrille priced £19.99