Chef Gary Rhodes dies in Dubai
Chef and sparkling television presenter who championed traditional British cuisine and built up an international dining empire
Steve Bird Helena Horton
THE celebrity chef Gary Rhodes was set to launch his television comeback before he died suddenly during a break in filming.
The father of two, 59, died from “natural causes” with his wife, Jennie, by his side at their home in Dubai on Tuesday.
The television chef had spent two weeks working with a British film crew in the United Arab Emirates on a 10-part series for ITV.
The show, which was due to be broadcast on weekend mornings, would have been the first full series he had hosted in the UK in just over 10 years.
His wife and sons, Samuel and George, said they were “deeply saddened”. Chris Rhodes, from Kent, said he had “not only lost a brother, but a best friend too”. Many top chefs paid tribute to Rhodes for promoting British cuisine, having appeared on shows including Masterchef, Ready Steady Cook and Hell’s Kitchen.
Rhodes had begun building a restaurant empire in Dubai in 2007, before moving there in 2011 after opening restaurants at Grosvenor House Dubai and Le Royal Meridien Beach Resort and Spa. He divided his time between businesses in the UAE and UK, where he continued to appear in both cookery programmes and prime time shows, including Strictly Come Dancing in 2008.
The chef Brian Turner told The Daily Telegraph he visited Rhodes in Dubai three weeks ago, just before he was due to start filming for his “comeback on British television”.
He said: “He was looking fantastic and was excited about starting filming.”
A spokesman for Rock Oyster Media, the company filming with the chef, described Rhodes as a “driven, fastidious and incredibly hard-working” man.
“Gary was taken ill very suddenly at home during a break in filming and died a short time afterwards,” he said.
A Dubai police source said that Rhodes had “died from natural causes”.
GARY RHODES, who has died aged 59, was in the vanguard of young celebrity chefs that began to appear on British television screens in the 1980s and 1990s.
Known as much for his spiky gelled hair as for his flamboyant style of cooking, Rhodes became a leading light in cutting-edge British cuisine, giving a modern twist to such gutsy traditional favourites as faggots, fish cakes, braised oxtails, treacle sponge and bread and butter pudding.
Rhodes’s 1994-95 BBC Two series, Rhodes Around Britain, regularly wooed between three or four million viewers a week to the channel. Home cooks were said to be setting fire to tea towels, distracted by trying to copy the cook’s finger-and-thumb gesture when he said: “That is truly delicious”, or burning themselves attempting to copy his blow– torched crème brûlée.
Rhodes, who went on to further fame on series such as Masterchef, Hell’s Kitchen and Ready Steady Cook, was known for being as sweet-tongued as his counterpart Gordon Ramsay was foul-mouthed. But while he might have refrained from using the f-word in the kitchen, his modest manner hid a steely determination and a ferocious appetite for hard work.
Like Ramsay, Rhodes built up a substantial business empire, with cookery books, his own line of cookware, and restaurants, eponymous and otherwise, around the world.
In London, where he trained a new generation of young chefs, he won Michelin stars as head chef of the Greenhouse Restaurant in Mayfair and as patron of Rhodes Twenty Four, in the former Natwest Tower.
In 2003 he opened his first overseas restaurant, at the luxury Calabash Hotel on the West Indian island of Grenada, whose prime minister appointed him Culinary Ambassador. He expanded into Ireland, Dubai and Abu Dhabi and was a pioneer of fine dining at sea, with eponymous restaurants on the P&O liners Arcadia and Oriana, on which he frequently made personal appearances.
The second of three children, Gary Rhodes was born in south London on April 22 1960 to Gordon Rhodes, an accounts clerk in the petroleum industry, and Jean, née Ferris, a shorthand typist, and brought up in Gillingham, Kent.
When he was six, his father abandoned the family, sold the family home and disappeared from young Gary’s life. While his mother returned to work to make ends meet and later remarried, Gary would cook meals for him and his younger sister, and later took on other family responsibilities such as babysitting.
Rhodes was educated at the Howard School for Boys in Rainham, Kent. After a brief spell studying shipping management he trained as a caterer at Thanet Technical College, emerging as chef of the year.
His first job was as a commis chef at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel where, weeks into the job, he was involved in a horrific accident when, jumping out of the path of a tram, he was hit by a Transit van. It smashed the back of his head and he needed brain surgery. At one point he was in a coma.
When he eventually came round, he found that he had lost his sense of smell – a potential disaster for a chef – but he refused to give up and, though his olfactory sense continued to play weird tricks, it eventually returned and he was back at work within six months.
He then toured Europe in various jobs before becoming sous chef at the Reform Club in Pall Mall, and then at the Michelin-starred Capital Hotel in Knightsbridge. In 1986 he became head chef at the Castle Hotel in Taunton, where he retained its Michelin star at the age of 26.
In 1990 Rhodes returned to London as head chef at the
Greenhouse Restaurant in Mayfair, where he was awarded his first Michelin star in 1996. The following year he opened his first restaurant,
City Rhodes, and in 1997 Rhodes in the Square – both with the contract catering company Sodexo, a partnership which expanded into a range of brasseries.
In 2003 he opened Rhodes Twenty Four, where two years later he won a second Michelin star.
It was during Rhodes’s time in Taunton that Glynn Christian, then Tv-am’s resident chef, asked him to do a few private cookery school demonstrations. Christian videoed his performance and told him that he might have a future in television.
Out of that came an appearance on a series called Hot Chefs, which led to Rhodes Around Britain, Gary’s Perfect Christmas and other series, most of which were accompanied by spin-off books. In 2008 he competed on Strictly Come Dancing.
His commercial activities brought Rhodes some controversy and, like other celebrity chefs, he was sometimes accused of damaging his reputation through the franchising of his name to soulless corporate enterprises. In the late 1990s he was criticised for a sponsorship deal with the sugar giant Tate & Lyle and his endorsement of their sugar and treacle products in his recipes.
He also appeared in television adverts for Flora margarine, touring the country in a VW van adorned with a giant crumpet, asking shoppers whether they preferred the taste of Flora Buttery to a rival spread from Lurpak, until the Advertising Standards Authority stepped in and the ads were removed for misleading the public.
Though charming to meet, and popular with his fellow chefs,
Rhodes could dish out the brickbats with the best of them, suggesting that fans of Nigella Lawson preferred her “sexiness’’ to her cooking, and complaining that Delia Smith’s most celebrated recipe (for a boiled egg) insulted her readers’ intelligence.
In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph’s Seven magazine in 2011, Rhodes listed his “loves” as Ferraris (“The noise, the smell: everything about them is so unbelievably sexy”); Champagne (“the one kind of alcohol that doesn’t give me a headache the next day”); real pizza from Naples; Manchester United; and cookery books (“I’ve got about 2,500 of them. It drives my wife insane”).
His hates included chewing gum (“I wish I could ban the stuff ”); bendy buses (“I’m naming no names, but what idiot thought they were a good idea in London?); golf (“those stupid shoes, the ridiculous Burberry trousers”) and gardening (“I hate it because I’m so hopeless at it”).
Rhodes was appointed OBE in 2006, and in 2011 he moved to Dubai, where he ran two restaurants – Rhodes W1 and Rhodes Twenty10 – and where he died. A production company working with him on a new television series said he was suddenly taken ill during a break in filming.
In 1989 he married Jennie Adkins, whom he had met at catering college. She survives him with their two sons.
Gary Rhodes, born April 22 1960, died November 26 2019