I laughed at ‘mad’ Ramsay, admits top chef
HE’S the celebrity chef known for his foul mouth and short temper, but one of his former protégées has told how she used to “just laugh” at Gordon Ramsay while working in his kitchen because she “couldn’t take him seriously”.
Angela Hartnett, the television chef and restaurateur, told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs that it was important to keep things in perspective, admitting “it is just food”.
Launching her culinary career at Aubergine in 1994 under the watchful eye of Ramsay, she said: “He was like my older brother. And when he used to do mad things I would just laugh, I just couldn’t take him seriously.
“I think you do sort of have to think ‘it is just food, let’s be honest it’s a plate of carrots. Let’s keep things in perspective here’.”
The renowned chef grew up in Kent and Essex, cooking with her mother and grandmother, who had moved to the UK from Bardi in Emilia-Romagna, northern Italy.
Hartnett, 50, launched her own restaurant, Murano, in 2008 which was awarded one Michelin star, but looking back spoke about how children had been sacrificed for the sake of her work. She said: “I never consciously said ‘I’m not having children’, and then when I wanted to have children it was too late and realised that I couldn’t if I’m absolutely honest, cards on the table.
“By then I’d got to my mid-40s and it was like well actually you can’t and if you want to try it’s going to be really difficult.”
Hartnett, who is due to marry fellow chef, Neil Borthwick, this year, said: “We did try, we did all the IVF and everything and it just didn’t work. And if I’d realised that early on it probably would have happened, but I was working and working and working”, she said.
“So that’s one regret unfortunately, but other than that I think I’m very happy with what’s gone on.”
The chef also revealed that her fiancé’s proposal was not exactly by the book, admitting he popped the question “in his underpants, in our bedroom”, without the “nonsense” of a Michelin-starred restaurant.