together, and deal with Dubai at a distance.
The early problems were about hiring and keeping staff when they were far more used to our salary scales than the budget-driven rates of Hilton employees. That was when we started to do something really stupid. To keep our people there to protect our name and promote all things Gordon Ramsay, we started to pay them a supplement from London. Apart from our signing-on fee, all we got was a flat percentage of the monthly food and beverage turnover. After 9/11, this revenue stream was so thin that our staff supplements were gobbling up the whole lot.
Worse, our main restaurant – which we called Verre – was short of most of the elements that go into a restaurant for fine dining. Chris went over a number of times and would leave pages of notes on how to turn this around. Most of all, he begged for a carpet. It was perfectly clear that the wooden floor, glass wall and absence of any drapes or soft furnishings needed a rethink. Quite apart from anything else, the quietest conversation would echo around the room. A carpet would have been a good start, but a year passed … and still no carpet.
It was so difficult for Hilton to persuade the owners to respond that I began to think that this wasn’t about running a decent restaurant or hotel, but some private battle of wills. Or maybe the owners just decided to do it in their own time. For some bizarre reason, we were never allowed to contact the owners directly. This was their rule, not Hilton’s, and it was the one and only agreement we ever had where we never got to speak to our partners.
I’ll say one thing for Hilton. They were always tied to their budgets and hotel culture, but they were sometimes capable of thinking outside the box. Chris explained that, if they insisted on giving tiny rooms to the Gordon Ramsay inmates and salaries to match, there would soon be no staff worth having. They agreed to tear up the agreement – or, at least, rewrite the relevant clauses. At last, we were able to drop our salary supplements. Even a new carpet threatened to happen, and solutions to all the changes that we had whinged about. Finally, and it was an enormous fucking relief, Gordon Ramsay at the Hilton Dubai Creek began to take off. Both parties had acted like grown-ups and, at last, we were marching on together.
We have never made much money in Dubai. There have been regular revenues fed over to us and paid in what must be the world’s weakest currency, the US dollar. But the one message that came loud and clear was that a lot of the guests who came to our London restaurants also visited Verre in Dubai. They go there, I think, because they feel that they can rely on the quality and the standard. It repeatedly won Time Out Dubai’s Restaurant of the Year, and was clearly rated as the pinnacle of cuisine in the city.
Angela came through her two years like a shining star. Her rapport and loyalty with the staff were legendary, and she was able to keep her head in a crisis. Sometimes, the crises were extreme. After one successful Christmas, she organized an evening on a barge in the creek with a buffet and dance for all the staff. As she sat next to her senior sous-chef at the stern of the rusting tub, the handrail gave way, and both plunged into the black waters. By the time they were fished out, the sous-chef was dead. This was like the loss of a family member, and yet, the following morning, Angela was back in her kitchen and there for her staff when they needed her.
By then, things were happening in London, and we were putting together ideas for The Connaught. Angela was brought back to take charge of this. She had proved her worth many times over, and now it was time to reward her work with a new operation and a small stake in the equity. She had also brought on her Dubai successor in the person of Jason Atherton, who, in time, would cut his teeth there and return to London to open maze, a groundbreaking new restaurant that was to bring him to the forefront of the rising stars.
If running top restaurants around the world simultaneously was the problem, this was our solution, and it was the exact opposite of my press caricature as an uncontrollable boss, shouting and swearing at the staff. It was all about finding the best people and making sure we kept them. Everything we do depends on loyal staff on whom we can rely.
Finding great talent, looking after staff and nurturing their talent is what we learned to do well. Losing good people is symptomatic of only one thing: truly crap, appalling and abysmal management.
It also meant that I didn’t have to be there in person so much. My visits to Dubai were supposed to take place four times a year. This was no great problem in the early days, but it gradually decreased to two visits, as the pressure on my diary grew elsewhere. In the meantime, the city of Dubai was also growing like a fucking monster. I remember, on my first visit, how someone had pointed along a road where there were three hotels and told me that eighteen more were being built there. Five years later, there were close to 100 hotels going up. No wonder I kept hearing that 27 per cent of the world’s cranes were there, swinging around a million building sites.
Once we had sorted the initial problems, all our staff who went out for a two-year tour enjoyed life there. It’s tax-free, of course, and there is plenty of free time to improve your golf handicap. Jason Atherton not only got his down to scratch, but also found the time to acquire himself a beautiful wife.
That is jumping ahead in the story. By the time Dubai was beginning to run smoothly, we had made the leap – in little more than a year – from being a very successful operator of two small London restaurants to being a global group. That brought challenges of its own and, for me, an urgent lesson that was absolutely fucking vital. I had to learn what to do when we got complaints – and the hidden benefits of people complaining.
WE WRITE TO TELL YOU HOW DISAPPOINTED WE WERE
You are never always right, and in your customer’s view, you are probably wrong. Sometimes it’s best to give them the benefit of the doubt.
IN THE AUBERGINE days, I had become an arrogant little fucker, and whenever a letter of complaint arrived, it went straight in the bin as an appropriate testimony to the writer’s credentials. When we started at Royal Hospital Road, this tradition carried on. It seemed normal enough, until one day Chris found out and came storming into the restaurant to point out a couple of home truths. Fuck! He can rant when so moved. And what pissed me off, of course, was that he was bang on the button.
He went on about binning the most valuable management tool in the chest, not to mention a page from the guest services’ bible. I always grit my teeth when Chris’s face starts to turn puce. You know you’re in for a bollocking and a lecture, but you just fear the bastard is going to have a heart attack before he delivers the point. On this occasion, he went on about how one stone thrown in the pond causes ripples from the centre to the edges and you can’t stop them, and how important words like humility, feedback, reputation and word of mouth are if we want to be serious restaurateurs. A guest has gone to Gordon Ramsay and has, of course, told friends, family and half of fucking Islington that he (or she) is going. So, the next time he sees everyone, they ask what it was like. If the reply comes back ‘Crap,’ the ripples have reached the edge of the pond. Time to launch the lifeboat. So spake Chris. He cooled down, and we then changed our policy.
The letter of complaint is the one chance to do two things. I now know this.
The first move is to read it and work out what sort of letter we have here. Has this guest who has bothered to write got a genuine point, or is he just whingeing? Was he kept waiting for forty minutes for the menu? Did the sommelier sound sniffy when asked for table water? Was someone ironing a tablecloth in view at 4.30 p.m., ready for the evening service? Or is this letter so vitriolic about every aspect of dinner that you might begin to suspect that this is an arsehole looking for a freebie?
What we need to know is whether or not we did something really stupid, and can we improve ourselves? Is there some blemish that has gone unnoticed until now? It is important for us to take a step back and look at the complaint with objectivity. Although it is vital to redeem our name with a