say about the menu. It’s an advanced education so that they actually know what it feels like when things go wrong. Why don’t air crews get nervous when the wings on their planes flap hysterically in turbulence halfway across the Atlantic? They stay calm because they have been shown that the plane is built to survive, even when concrete blocks are dropped on it.
And that’s what knowledge and understanding in Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s brought me. What we achieved as a team became an amazing success story. Ultimately, it depended on the little things like the smile people get when they come into our restaurants and the understanding of our guests’ expectations gained first-hand by our staff. As ever, it is the detail that counts.
Control from afar will bring its own problems, and shouting from a thousand miles away becomes but a whisper.
BY THE END of 2000, my two London restaurants were running well. Mark Askew was looking after Royal Hospital Road in his usual brilliant and protective way, and Marcus Wareing was steering Pétrus into its second year of trading. It was a time for me to get bored or to look for something else – or somewhere else. I felt that somewhere there was a greater pulse to life, but I couldn’t quite see how to grasp it.
What I was about to learn were the basic, underlying secrets of how to expand globally, with restaurants that were thousands of miles away. Same standards of cuisine, same standards of service, but with lines the length of which we had to extend control.
Then, just before Christmas that year, we had a call from Hilton asking if we might be interested in opening a restaurant in their new hotel in Dubai. It sounded a bit exotic, and both Chris and I were immediately all ears. This could be our first venture outside the UK, and, at the time, there were bucketfuls of hype about duty-free shopping malls and the unrelenting, bronzing sunshine of Dubai.
After a blitz of initial e-mails, we both agreed to go to Dubai straight after Christmas.
I have to say that, in those days, I never really got the hang of what Dubai was all about. Maybe you had to see it as a holiday resort where you just went and broiled yourself in the sun, but there seemed so little to do. Still, all we were doing was checking it out as a possible site to spread our wings.
We arrived on a Thursday in January 2001. This, actually, was treated in the Muslim world as a Saturday, and Friday became Sunday. Different culture, different calendar. I could cope with that, so what’s next? Well, no stand-alone restaurants. All restaurants had to be in a hotel. Hmmm. OK.
We were picked up at the airport and taken to the Hilton Dubai Jumeirah, immediately learning Lesson One, that there were two lived-in parts of Dubai: the city itself and the resort area, with forty-five minutes of motorway between them. Our itinerary was full-on, even if Hilton hadn’t quite got the hang of how to spell my name or, for that matter, the word ‘itinery’. It was filled with presentations of the project, visits to half a dozen restaurants and a dazzling venture into the desert, riding a four-wheel wagon along the ridges of the dunes in the early evening and then stopping to watch the breathtaking sunset.
We were taken for lunch in a submarine to the seafood restaurant within the Burj Al Arab and then shown around this towering monument to the future of Dubai. The submarine, of course, didn’t move, and when I went into the restaurant, with its wrap-around fish tank, I began to realize that I had entered a Disneyland for crustaceans. I can’t even remember what the food tasted like, and I guess that most people left with the same experience.
The hotel was just a building site in the city next to the Dubai Creek. It was also the first building I had ever been in while it was being built. It is so difficult to visualize a bar area or the entrance to your restaurant when all you see in front of you is raw concrete and piles of sand, tiles and hard hats. But I couldn’t help being impressed. It was to become a beautiful steel and glass boutique hotel, probably not in the best position for the Dubai tourist, but graceful and upmarket.
But when we went on an early morning visit to the fish market it was a different story – and a frightening experience for the prospect of doing business there. The heat was fucking incessant, and there was all this fish lying around in the least hygienic environment imaginable. Great slabs of tuna weighing 200 pounds were left for an hour on the tarmac of the access road while someone went off to get the truck. The place was a fucking shambles, and I was glad to move out of the smelly, dirty sales halls. The thought of coming down to market in the early morning to buy the day’s fish supplies for the hotel didn’t give me a rush of confidence. Here, for sure, was a clash of the old Arab culture and today’s new hotel culture, with all its Western expectations.
Nor was the welcome from the owners exactly overwhelming. This was going to be a three-way deal between them, Hilton as the operators, and us for the food and beverage consultancy. So, I guess, in the owners’ minds, we were just a Western name that had to be imported. They would have little control over us, so we were an irritating necessity that had to be tolerated.
It struck me then, as it has many times since, that hotel operators around the developing world have to adapt themselves to a million different cultures. I have met one or two senior hotel people who do nothing but act as diplomats, easing the relationships between operators and owners. I always think of it as a hard way to earn money.
After all that, the trip was a success. We left Dubai agreeing to move forward, and the deal was relatively simple. We would license the name of Gordon Ramsay to Hilton for its use in anything to do with promoting food and drinks in the hotel. We would also supply ten senior staff members and the menus, and be consultants about food and drink. All that was left was for Hilton to come over to London, with the owners’ representatives, so that we could show them we were the right choice.
But there was an immediate problem. We could hardly sail into our shoebox office in the Fulham Road with our guests and announce that this was our headquarters. Not much commercial cred there. So, Chris’s sitting room in Mayfair, with its enormous oak table, had to become our central office. Miraculously, it worked. By the time they had been to the restaurants and listened to Chris’s spiel, we were in, and they were happy to start the legal process. Looking back now, it was probably the last time we had to puff out our cheeks to make ourselves look bigger than we were.
In the following months, we did everything necessary to get the the hotel ready for its opening. We had already decided on Angela Hartnett to lead the team in Dubai. She would leave our employment and join Hilton for a two-year tour. This was an inspired choice because Angela was so much more than just a chef. She could organize and motivate people and still remain the beautiful survivor of the Aubergine days. No one could resist her charming manner, and I always knew that our name in Dubai would be safe.
Towards the autumn, the hotel began to open. I say ‘began’ because that’s how it was. First, the foyer and a few floors were open to the public. Then the food and beverage operation kicked in, and, gradually, the show hit the road. That is, until the fateful date of 11 September 2001. This was to guarantee an almost empty hotel for weeks to come. Suddenly, nobody wanted to go near the Middle East.
It was a bit like John West tinned salmon and Perrier water. They both collided with commercial reality, but memories faded a little bit with each dawn. It just needed the rawness of what happened to blur a little, and then things began to return to how they were – or in our case, how they were meant to be.
The one thing that we, as restaurateurs, hadn’t yet experienced was the difficulty of dealing with problems so far away. If something flares up in Mayfair or St James’s, we can be there in ten minutes. Not so when your restaurant is thousands of miles away, in a different time zone and, for that matter, on different days of the week. What’s more, we were already dealing with the beginnings of Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s and the end of our first