‘Ex-mistress’ scoffs at wedding guru Gordon
‘Old flames’ make Ramsay, Harry and Otis’s ears burn!
AS A celebrated chef known as much for his foul-mouthed outbursts in the kitchen as his cooking, Gordon Ramsay hardly springs to mind as the romantic sort.
Yet it seems that the Kitchen Nightmares star is setting himself up as a wedding planner – much to the amusement of the woman who claims to have been his mistress.
In a dramatic change of direction, his company – called Weddings, Gordon Ramsay – will look after every aspect of a couple’s big day, from the food to the venue, invitations, decor and even entertainment. But someone who has scoffed at the very idea of the married father of four injecting romance into a happy couple’s big day is Sarah Symonds, who describes herself as a ‘professional mistress’.
‘When I first heard Gordon had branched out into the wedding business I laughed out,’ the 46-year-old author of Having An Affair? A Handbook For The Other Woman tells me. ‘He would be the last person I’d take marriage advice from.
‘But on reflection, it does make sense. After all, he has successfully repaired his marriage – after a very public affair with me – and he has the perfect ready-made assistant in his wife Tana, who has the experience necessary to make marriages work. Whatever his future potential clients do pay for their nuptials, they can at least be assured that they will be guaranteed some good food. Mind you, will the next news be that Johnstone-born Gordon is being is ordained to carry out the weddings personally?’ Gordon and Tana, his wife of 21 years, will no doubt plough on with their plans and dismiss Sarah’s comments, as they did back in 2008 when she initially claimed to have bedded Gordon. At the time the chef denied everything and labelled Sarah a ‘slapper’. The 50-year-old owns 14 restaurants and last week collected a second Michelin star for his Bordeaux restaurant Le Pressoir d’Argent – the first British chef to do so in France. He applied to trademark the name Weddings, Gordon Ramsay with the Intellectual Property Office last month. Ramsay, who also owns his own television production company, will even help with wedding videos. If something goes wrong, I wonder if he’ll censor the F-word?