Recipe for rivalry
As Jamie Oliver buys a £6 million mansion to trump Gordon Ramsay’s country homes — and with Gordon expecting a fifth child to match Jamie’s brood — how the two chefs have cooked up a very rich . . .
COOKING UP A FORTUNE
JAMIE has netted £240 million during the 20 years he’s been in the public eye. He has built his vast fortune on TV and publishing deals, restaurant chains and product endorsement — both in the UK and Australia, where he fronts nutrition adverts for a supermarket.
According to Companies House, Jamie Oliver Holdings Ltd — the umbrella company under which he runs his myriad businesses — turned over £32 million last year. That’s a staggering £87,670 a day.
With a mere £120 million to his name, Gordon can’t keep up — despite a raft of restaurants, book deals and a lucrative TV career that’s made him a superstar in America. His company, Gordon Ramsay Holdings Ltd, turned over £7.9 million — or £21,650 a day — last year, a quarter of Jamie’s turnover. WINNER: JAMIE
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
GORDON was born in Scotland but grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon, the second child of Helen, a nurse, and Gordon Sr, who worked as a welder and shopkeeper.
His childhood was tough, marred by years of abuse by his father, a violent alcoholic, who died in 1998. Helen recalled how Gordon Sr used to ‘hit Gordon with his belt or his hands’. The chef, who describes his father as a ‘harddrinking womaniser’, says he didn’t approve of his son’s passion for cooking and taught him to swim by holding his head underwater.
Gordon has two sisters and a brother, Ronnie, who was imprisoned for heroin possession as a teenager. Aged 16, Gordon moved out of the family home and into a flat in Oxfordshire, where injury put paid to a promising football career. So he got a job as a hotel chef.
While Jamie has spoken about his rags-to-riches upbringing — ‘I was skint one minute and I became very wealthy the next’ — his was the more privileged childhood.
Born to pub owners Trevor and Sally Oliver in Clavering, Essex, he practised cooking in the kitchen with his parents and sister. A severe dyslexic, he left school at 16 with two GCSEs.
Jamie went on to attend Westminster Technical College, earning a qualification in home economics, before getting a job as a pastry chef at the London restaurant of Italian cook Antonio Carluccio. WINNER: GORDON
FINANCIAL WOES
THEY may earn more in a year than most of us in a lifetime, but that doesn’t mean it’s been smooth sailing for the millionaire chefs. Reports released last year showed Jamie’s businesses lost £20 million in 2017, forcing him to shut 18 of his Italian restaurants — leading to the loss of 600 jobs.
This followed the closure of his Union Jacks pizza restaurant, and his admission that he used £12.7 million of his personal savings — as well as a £37 million bank loan — to save his upmarket restaurant chain Barbecoa just hours before it went bust.
He blamed a ‘perfect storm’ of factors, saying the firm had ‘simply run out of cash’.
Last year, Gordon’s restaurant group was hit by a £3.8 million loss and he announced the closure of maze, his most high- profile London eatery, due to shut its doors this year. His £200a-night hotel, the York & Albany, has also struggled with financial losses and poor reviews, with guests rating it ‘under-achieving’ and ‘unbelievably bad’. WINNER: JAMIE
CELEBRITY PALS
GORDON and Tana are good pals with the Beckhams and the famous families often share lavish
holidays, birthday parties and cosy weekends in the country.
The Beckham children are close in age to the Ramsay kids, with Brooklyn, 19, and Jack often spotted at the cinema or gym near their neighbouring homes in LA.
In 2013, David and Gordon were reportedly on the verge of opening a London restaurant together, but three weeks before it launched Becks pulled out.
Other friends of the family include Simon Cowell, Michael Bublé and Stevie Wonder, who lives in the mansion next-door.
Jamie’s life is no less A-list, with dinner party guests over the years including Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston and Gwyneth Paltrow.
The Olivers are also pals with actress Sienna Miller, Rihanna, Taylor Swift and Usain Bolt, all of whom have appeared on his cookery shows. However, of late the family has scaled back their celebrity schmoozing. ‘Jools just found it all a bit too much,’ Jamie admitted. WINNER: GORDON
FITNESS & WEIGHT
ALL that time in the kitchen can make for a fluctuating waistline, and both men have worked hard to slim down and shape up.
Jamie revealed last year that he’d lost 3st by eating seaweed, cutting out alcohol on weekdays and replacing meat with nuts in his meals. The busy chef — who once survived on three-and-a-half hours’ sleep — said he’d also increased his time spent in bed.
His beauty secret is slathering olive oil all over his body. ‘Why spend a fortune on creams when extra virgin olive oil is the purest thing?’ he said recently. ‘My legs are all lovely softness.’
Gordon, meanwhile, has shunned natural remedies to grant him eternal youth, resorting to cosmetic chin fillers in 2009 and a £30,000 hair transplant in 2010.
Since then he’s sworn off surgery and turned to exercise. He’s a regular ironman triathlete (an extreme endurance race comprising a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride and 26.2-mile marathon) and during training gets up at 4am to complete an eight-hour workout.
He credits his 3½st weight loss with portion control and says he prefers to ‘graze’ throughout the day rather than eat meals. WINNER: GORDON
THE BIGGEST MOUTH
WHILE Gordon has a reputation for being foul-mouthed and quicktempered, both have rubbed people up the wrong way.
Among those Jamie has angered include animal rights group Peta (for slaughtering a live lamb on TV in 2005), chef Marco Pierre White (for criticising his swearing in a 2010 interview) and Adele (for appearing to pressurise new mothers to breastfeed in 2016).
His food has also attracted criticism: a ‘paella’ dish enraged Spanish fans in 2016 and, more recently, his ‘jerk rice’ was blasted for culturally appropriating the Jamaican dish.
Gordon has built a career on his expletive-loving kitchen persona, which critics have labelled ‘aggressive’, ‘violent’ and ‘ bullying’. Twice, he’s admitted to secretly feeding meat to vegetarians, he described an overweight contestant on his Hell’s Kitchen show as a ‘chunky monkey’ (in 2007), and in 2009 he defended selling preprepared food — marked up by 586 per cent — to patrons at a London restaurant. WINNER: GORDON
IN-LAW TROUBLES
JAMIE hired his brother-in-law, Paul Hunt, married to his sister Anna-Marie, to run Jamie Oliver Ltd in 2014 — and last year Hunt assumed responsibility for the restaurants, too.
But some of his methods — such as making staff redundant over Christmas and cutting ties with Jamie’s friends and culinary mentors — have led to a reputation for ruthlessness.
Last year, an anonymous insider described him as an ‘arrogant, incompetent failure’ who was ‘running the business into the ground’.
Jamie rebutted the claims, saying the story was ‘nonsense’ and that Paul was ‘a loyal brother-inlaw and loving father as well as a strong and capable CeO’.
Gordon’s strife has been with his father-in-law, Chris Hutcheson, who was CeO of Gordon Ramsay Holdings Ltd until 2010.
Shortly after his departure, Gordon revealed an extraordinary web of deceit, brought to light via a private detective, which showed Hutcheson had borrowed £1.5 million from the company and conspired — along with his two sons — to hack the chef’s emails. He was jailed for six months, but Tana insists the family has put the incident behind them. WINNER: GORDON
SOCIAL MEDIA
JAMIE is well ahead with 6.7 million Instagram followers to Gordon’s 5.5 million.
Jools, meanwhile, boasts 547,000 followers to Tana’s 146,000 — but if you take into account the Ramsay children (Tilly has 347,000, Jack 224,000, Holly 196,000 and Megan 143,000), that’s a whopping 6.5 million fans hanging on the Ramsays’s every word.
Neither chef misses an opportunity to post soppy messages to their other halves, odes to their children’s achievements —and, of course, food they’ve cooked.
Tana and Gordon announced her pregnancy on Instagram, involving all six family members in an emotional New Year’s eve video. Underneath, Jools wrote: ‘Wohooo happy happiest news ever, congratulations . . . Big hugs from all of us.’ Jamie hasn’t yet ‘liked’ the post. WINNER: JAMIE
SHOWS & BOOKS
JAMIE got his first TV show, The Naked Chef, in 1999 — and has since fronted 34 series and seasonal specials, averaging three a year. He has also appeared on Top Gear, Oprah and performed several live shows in Australia. Gordon’s first series, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, aired on C4 from 2004 to 2009, and since then he’s had 18 more TV triumphs, including Hell’s Kitchen, which has been on U.S. screens continuously since 2005. In the publishing stakes, Gordon has the upper hand, publishing 25 cookery books to Jamie’s 23. WINNER: A DRAW And the overall winner in the battle of the chefs is . . . GORDON RAMSAY