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How anxiety pushes Gordon Ramsay on and up

Dani Valent
Dani Valent

Gordon Ramsay on the 2020 season of MasterChef Australia.
Gordon Ramsay on the 2020 season of MasterChef Australia.Supplied

In an early episode of the new season of MasterChef Australia, premiering next Monday on Ten, a challenge called Keeping Up With Gordon sees contestants trying to match legendary chef Gordon Ramsay as he fillets a fish. No matter how far behind they fall, or how badly they butcher their Murray cod, the season 12 competitors never need fear the treatment meted out to Gordon Ramsay when he was coming up through the ranks.

As a 19-year-old in 1988, Ramsay worked for rising star Marco Pierre White at Harveys in London. One night, filleting scallops during dinner service, Ramsay's boning knife slipped and he jabbed his arm. "All of a sudden I'm bleeding everywhere," he says. We're sitting in a suite at Melbourne's Sofitel in mid-January, bushfire smoke blanketing the city, but Ramsay is instantly back in London, back in the day. "Marco grabbed my arm, put my hand in a bowl of salt and a crust formed. He wrapped it in clingfilm and told me there was no way I was going to hospital before we finished service."

For Ramsay, that was simply motivation to do better. He practised White's signature dishes after hours, between midnight and 2am six days a week. Dealing perfectly with seafood was his first project.

"We had a sea bass dish where we stuffed the belly with scallop mousse," he says. Sea bass is expensive. "You couldn't afford to slit the belly when filleting the fish because the mousse would spill out," explains Ramsay, who wasn't trusted to make the dish until he practised on cheap mackerel. "They have the exact same belly structure as sea bass. I filleted 90 pence mackerel until I could do them with my eyes closed. When I got given that first sea bass, I absolutely nailed it."

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Lobster ravioli was a Harveys' signature but Ramsay wasn't allowed near it in his first months under Marco Pierre White. "I practised with mashed potato," he says. "I'd ball it up into a beautiful scoop and set it in the freezer so it was nice and firm like lobster was. When we'd finished clearing down each night, I'd get the leftover pasta, take the pasta machine back out and make all these perfect ravioli."

Ramsay credits his tireless pursuit of perfection with an early experience of failure as a soccer player. He played as a junior for Warwickshire and was trialling with Glasgow's Rangers but his promise was continually marred by injury and he was forced to step away.

Marco ... told me there was no way I was going to hospital before we finished service.

"It was a huge upset," he says. "I was hellbent on becoming an athlete and it got taken away from me. You either get bitter or you get even."

He fell into cooking and found that he could apply a similar athlete's focus. "I had the insecurity of not making it, and all of a sudden this chapter opens up with something else I wanted to get better at," he says. "It wasn't about the money, it wasn't about the hours, it was about learning. When I had that second bite of the cherry, it was about pushing myself to become the best."

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Soccer still helped, if only with the metaphors. "I wanted to get to the top of the Premier League and then when I sat at the top of the Premier League, I wanted to get to the Champions League."

Now 53, Ramsay has excelled by any measure. His flagship Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in London's Chelsea has been awarded three Michelin stars each year since 2001. Restaurants bear his name from Atlantic City to Singapore, serving everything from burgers in Vegas to pizza in Dubai to lamb with preserved lemon at London's fancy Petrus. His television shows and online cooking courses attract viewers from around the world and are produced by his own Studio Ramsay. Unusually among busy, stressed, world-hopping celebrity chefs, he's been married just once. He and Tana have five children, the first born in 1998 and young Oscar arriving just last year.

Success has not meant complacency. "I still push myself," he says. "I still have an anxiety attack once a week, worrying that I'm going to get outsmarted."

His solution is to put himself on the line, dipping into day-to-day menu development and working alongside chefs in his kitchens.

"I push myself into vulnerability packed with insecurity and hope I don't make myself look stupid," he says. "But you have to go for it."

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He recently worked with Restaurant Gordon Ramsay head chef Matt Abe on a caviar dish. "We got hold of some rare golden caviar from an albino sturgeon," Ramsay says. He was on a plane when he had a brainwave about what to do with it. "I do my best thinking while flying," he says. "We emptied out a 50-gram tin of caviar then we layered it with a wonderful yuzu and scallop jelly, then scallop tartare, and then we topped it with the caviar and we put the lid on."

Ramsay's eyes roll back in his head as he recalls the pleasure of eating it. "It was madness because it was so out there and expensive. Matt said, 'Oh my god, the food costs!' and I said, 'Don't worry about the food costs, think of the food experience.' "

It's the undying, unending passion for creation and perfection that appeals to Ramsay about MasterChef Australia, and particularly this season where previous front-runners have returned for another shot. "These are seasoned pros," he says. "Many of them have had huge success since being on the show, and they've come back for more. The stakes are high."

There might be a tiny part of him lamenting the fact that none of his MasterChef charges will ever be spurred on by salt-encrusted, cling-wrapped wounds but he accepts that the school of hard knocks isn't the only one that turns out brilliant graduates. They're just as likely to come from a show like MasterChef.

"Success is down to an individual's DNA and personal desire," he says. "If you want to get there, nothing is going to stop you. No matter how much you're driven, success really comes from pushing yourself."

MasterChef Australia – Back To Win premieres Monday, April 13, at 7.30pm on Ten.

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Dani ValentDani Valent is a food writer and restaurant reviewer.

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