Humble Pie Read Free Page B

fish stock, you should only cook it for twenty minutes. Otherwise it will get cloudy. Then you should let it rest before you pass it through a sieve, or it will go cloudy again.’
    For this, I would get roundly bollocked by the chef. He didn’t give a fuck for college. I stayed for about six months, and then I got a job at a really good place called the Wickham Arms, in a small village in Oxfordshire. The owners were Paul and Jackie, and the idea was that I would live above the shop, which was a beautiful thatched cottage. Jackie was in her thirties. I must have been about nineteen. Paul was away a lot. Perhaps you can imagine what was going to happen.
    One day, while Paul was off on one of his trips, Jackie rang down to the kitchen.
    ‘Can I have something to eat?’ she said.
    ‘What would you like?’
    ‘Just bring me a simple salad, thanks.’
    So I got together a salad with a little poached salmon and took it up.
    ‘Jackie, your dinner is ready.’
    And she opened the door – stark bollock naked. I put the tray down, and went straight into her bedroom.
    For the next six months, I led a kind of double life, and it was getting heavy. Jackie told me that she loved me. The truth is that I loved making the jugged hare more than I did having sex with the boss’s wife, so I told them that I was leaving to go and work in London. She went bananas.
    In the early part of 1998, they turned up at my restaurant, Aubergine . They’d opened a new restaurant, and they brought their chef to meet me. The trouble was, they got pissed and missed the train back to Buckinghamshire. We did try to ring around and find them a room, but hotels were £250 per night, which seemed to make them even angrier, so I sent out their dessert and then I fucked off.
    At half past one in the morning, I got a call from Jean-Claude, my head waiter. He was screaming at me down the telephone. This chef of theirs was holding him over the bar, demandingthat the arrogant fucker who left without saying goodbye – me – come on the line. About fifty minutes later, I rocked up on my motorbike and there was Mark, my head chef, fighting with Paul, and Paul’s new chef fighting with Jean-Claude. They moved towards me before I had time to think.
    Paul was going, ‘I trusted you. How dare you? You shagged my wife!’
    All my staff were thinking: WHAT? I could see it on their faces.
    The resulting punch-up caused major headlines when the Old Bill arrived. We all got taken off to make statements and then, when the whole thing was written up in the London Evening Standard, it was me who was supposed to have thrown all of the punches. It was all: ‘I came to meet the great master and instead found an arrogant bastard,’ ‘Brawl that wasn’t on the menu’ and ‘Ramsay punched my husband in the mouth.’ I had to take legal action to clear that one up. I won, of course. As for Paul, he sent me a two-page fax apologising. That was the end of that.
    To be fair, I don’t really blame Paul for wanting to beat me up. Any man would have done the same in his position.
    So I went to the starry lights of London. I was Second Commis, Grade Two, at the Mayfair Hotel, in its new banqueting rooms. I stayed about sixteen months, and I learned a lot. On my day off, I would work overtime without getting paid, just for the chance to work in the hotel’s fine dining restaurant. It was a tough place. If someone called in sick, you could easily end up working a twenty-four-hour shift. You’d work all day in the restaurant, and then, during the night, you’d man the grill and do the room service. At half past four in the morning, all the Indian kitchen boys would sit down and have supper. Then they’d go and pray for an hour, and you’d already be preparing for the next morning’s breakfast.
    In those days, there was a really cool restaurant called Maxine de Paris , just off Leicester Square, and I’d heard that they were opening a new restaurant called Braganza . So I got a