Who could get away with teasing Gordon Ramsay about his prowess in the kitchen and not risk being showered with a fusillade of f-words?
His youngest child Tilly, that’s who. ‘What’s it like being the daughter of the best chef in the world?’ Gordon asks her.
‘Jamie Oliver’s not my Dad!’ comes the quick-fire riposte. Tilly shrieks with laughter. There’s a great deal more dad/daughter banter in this vein during the morning I spend at the Ramsay home in Los Angeles.
‘I love teasing Dad,’ says Tilly, 14. ‘I tell him I prefer Mum’s cooking to his, just to wind him up. But actually I really do like her Bolognese sauce best. Dad’s is just too fancy. Dad’s taught me about posh food but Mum teaches me the ordinary stuff like baking.
‘Who’s the best cook? Definitely me!’ she teases. ‘Dad’s the sous chef, I’m the head chef. He likes to steal my recipes, too, so I don’t tell him what my secret ingredients are.’
Gordon the Dad, in the company of his youngest child, is a different man entirely from the explosive Mr Sweary of the TV shows that made him a household name. He’s fond, indulgent; a bit of a soft touch, in fact. In shows such as Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares and Hell’s Kitchen the ranting tirades were integral to his TV persona. But away from the cameras and his obsessive pursuit of culinary perfection, Gordon turns out to be the sort of dad who’s magnanimous enough to enjoy jokes at his own expense.
‘I need a reason to swear, a proper reason to get upset, and if people are being lazy or indifferent or just plain daft in the kitchen do you expect me to say, “Now be a good chap and don’t do that?” No! I get straight to the point. I’m brutally honest. In the heat of the action these words come out. You can’t pussyfoot around saying please and thank you.’
Today it’s just Gordon and Tilly at their Californian home in Bel-Air. Its vast, pristine kitchen/living area opens out onto a terrace with views over a canyon to the sea. Everything is relaxed and jolly. It’s plain that Tilly and her dad share a genuine affinity. ‘I’m definitely a Daddy’s girl,’ she says.
Gordon and Tilly flew out to the US together for a dad-and-daughter break, while Mum Tana is at the main family home in Wandsworth, south London, with the three other children – twins Jack and Holly, 16, and Megan, 17 – supervising GCSE revision. ‘It’s tough for kids today,’ says Gordon. ‘The pressures on them are insane.
There’s such a huge weight of expectation and so many distractions. Because of where we live, I call it the Wandsworth Bubble. The kids are all at private schools and we have to take their GCSEs seriously because if they don’t get the grades they’ll be out on their ear. So Tana [who trained as a Montessori school teacher] is there keeping them at it. We feed off each other – she had a privileged upbringing; mine was rough and ready – and we meet somewhere in the middle.’
Tilly’s TV show Matilda And The Ramsay Bunch which airs on the BBC children’s channel CBBC
It seems that Tilly – actually Matilda, but she’s always known by her nickname – is likeliest to follow her dad into the kitchen: she has a deft touch, a sure palate and shares Gordon’s capacity to chat engagingly while cooking in front of the camera. For a 14-year-old it’s quite a trick.
This talent has earned her a second series for her TV show Matilda And The Ramsay Bunch which airs on the BBC children’s channel CBBC. It’s a light-hearted, fly-on-the wall peep at the gilded but refreshingly down-to-earth life of the super-rich Ramsays. We see them in California, larking by their pool, competing to take the best ‘selfie’ and rigging up a DIY home movie screen in the garden – 11-year-old Cruz Beckham pops by to help and proves to be a dab hand with a mallet. There are ’embarrassing dad’ moments in which Gordon ribs poor Tilly about non-existent boyfriends. Sewn through it all is star Tilly’s evident love of cooking.
She shows me the vast French La Cornue range in the kitchen on which she cooks: the four children’s names are inscribed discreetly onto it. On TV we see her making steak and kidney pies for family friend, British actor James Corden, who now hosts The Late Late Show in the US, while her siblings scour Hollywood for the components of a homesick food hamper for him. (‘Have you got any Scotch eggs?’ asks brother Jack at the grocery store. ‘No, only American eggs,’ replies an earnest shelf-stacker.)
Tilly cleans out a drainpipe in which she presents the family with a giant banana split. ‘Best not to use one that’s still attached to the roof,’ she jokes. It’s all good, clean knockabout stuff and the happy rapport between Tilly and her dad is evident.
There’s the sense, too, that Gordon is cherishing the last year or so before his youngest child is diverted by boyfriends. Recent reports suggest that he’s an over-protective dad who actually paid Jack to ‘spy’ on Megan and ensure she wasn’t getting up to no good with her boyfriend. Tilly laughs at the very idea.
‘It’s true that Megan has a boyfriend and Jack has a girlfriend and they’re madly in love,’ she says. ‘Jack’s girlfriend’s very nice and she makes us laugh. Megan’s boyfriend is fairly new. He’s called Byron and Dad calls him Byron Burger, because there’s a burger place called that. It’s just one of his silly jokes. But he’s not overly strict. He makes up all kinds of jokes about paying Jack to spy and putting a camera in Megan’s room but of course it’s not true. I wish it was, because if he did give us money to spy we could earn quite a bit,’ she laughs.
Gordon Ramsay’s children and a family friend at twins Jack and Holly’s 16th birthday party
Tilly says she’s not yet ready for a boyfriend, but there’s plenty of embarrassing joshing from Dad about it. When she’s out of earshot Gordon says, ‘I put my foot in it a couple of months back when Tilly had some friends round from school.
‘One guy was singled out as having the hots for Tilly and I said, “Right, young man. I want a word with you. Tilly’s a hard-working young lady and I don’t want any distractions from her homework. So I suggest you get a security guard and some protection.” It was all tongue-in-cheek but there was a lot of sniggering among the kids and then the penny dropped. I said to Tana, “Oh no! They think I mean the other sort of protection.” They’re so advanced! Only 14!’
He laughs in disbelief, adding, ‘I’ve taught them all to have a sense of humour because they’re going to have to face c**p and adversity in life and they might as well learn how to laugh about it.’
The Ramsay children are also learning fast that an inevitable corollary of celebrity is public scrutiny. A recent family snap of them all dressed up for a meal in honour of the twins’ 16th birthday, posted by Gordon on social media, provoked some spiteful trolling. Fresh-faced and with minimal make-up, the girls actually looked charming and much younger than most teenagers of similar ages. However a vitriolic minority accused them of dressing like ‘prostitutes’. Gordon was distressed on their behalf. ‘I looked at some of the vicious comments and said to the kids, “It’s the downside of having parents who are well known. Don’t get upset. Haters have to hate.”
‘It’s very easy to post comments about people you’ve never met. They’re under scrutiny, judged in so many ways. Tana and I were there that evening; so too were David and Victoria Beckham and it was ridiculous that people thought they had the right to tell us how to dress our children. We were told they looked tarty; that they were flaunting themselves. No they weren’t. Nowhere near!
The light-hearted, fly-on-the wall programme shows their gilded but refreshingly down-to-earth life
‘The kids got upset. Holly wants to go into fashion. Comments like that can make them obsessed about their appearance. It’s how eating disorders can start. We were almost counselling them afterwards. People shouldn’t write these vile comments. They shouldn’t be judgmental. No one was drinking alcohol. No one was misbehaving. It’s tough on them.’
The TV series, of course, places the Ramsay children further in the public gaze. Tilly, insists Gordon, is acquiring poise and self-confidence through it. ‘She sat next to J-Lo on the plane coming over. I’d have been fazed at 14 if I’d been introduced to someone of that stature, but Tilly was very accomplished at handling herself.
‘Of course,’ he concedes, ‘I’m going to worry about conflicts, bitterness, jealousy. But what do you do? Wrap them up in cotton wool? Whatever profession they choose there’s going to be some level of jealousy.’
He, Tana, and their close friends the Beckhams – whose four children, Brooklyn, 17, Romeo, 13, Cruz and four-year-old Harper, get on well with their own – share similar views on child-raising. ‘David and I bounce ideas off each other,’ he says, ‘We want our kids to be independent, but not give them too much too soon. We try to keep them normal and grounded. We know that LA and London are both as adventurous, both as dangerous. We know damn well that kids can be within an arm’s reach of drugs in ten minutes in both cities. But it’s about teaching them to resist temptation and instilling a passion. That’s why we enrol them in all kinds of sports. Tennis, hockey, rugby, swimming, riding…’
The Beckhams were also, he says, ‘brilliantly supportive’ during the Ramsays’ annus horribilis in 2010 when there was a catastrophic falling-out between Gordon, Tana and her father Chris Hutcheson. Chris left his post as CEO of the Ramsay business amid allegations of financial irregularities: accounts showed he had borrowed up to £1.5 million from the company, although he insisted that he had repaid the money.
In the acrimonious fallout, the machinations of Chris Hutcheson’s ‘complex’ private life emerged. Aside from the children he’d raised with wife Greta, Tana’s mother, he also had a secret mistress who lived in the same village – Tenterden in Kent – with whom he’d fathered two children.
Further claims and counterclaims ensued. Tana’s mother Greta told her daughter she was ‘not welcome’ at their home. Two years later, a legal settlement was reached: Gordon paid his father-in-law £2 million and severed all professional links.
‘I wanted to get into a room with Chris and say, “Cut the c**p. How much money do you want to go?” But sadly he fought through the courts to the bitter end,’ he says. ‘When the s**t hit the fan, Tana came out here to LA and Victoria opened doors in the right places and made it a lot easier for us to settle. There’s a really nice community of Brits here who supported us. It felt like a breath of fresh air.’
Gordon, whose own father had been an abusive, violent alcoholic, had regarded his father-in-law as a role model: they had been, he once said, like ‘two wings of the same plane’. ‘I trusted that man for many years,’ he says. ‘For Tilly, Grandad was a figure to look up to and it’s very hard for her to see him in a different light now… and for Tana’s parents to shut her out because we fell out. It’s been very hard for her to cope with that.
‘What would it take for me to fall out with my daughters?’ he reflects. ‘Nothing would make me do that. And when Tana’s father’s second family was detected, living in the village where she grew up, she had this incredible lie to deal with. I have complete admiration for the way she handled it.’
Despite the irreconcilable schism between himself and Chris, Gordon had not wanted Tana and her parents to end up estranged. It’s a sorrow to him that they are. ‘Men will always argue,’ he contends. ‘But the most important thing for me was getting a resolution and trying to rekindle the relationship with Tana and her dad. But it’s never happened. He tried to drive a wedge between us. I feel incredibly let down. He hacked our emails and passed on family photos to the press. But we dealt with it all. The business was saved and is prospering.
‘We had our family to protect and you become territorial. We looked after each other. And it’s actually brought us – me, Tana and the children – closer than we’ve ever been before. Our marriage is stronger as a result of it all.’
Indeed he and Tana, 41, married for 20 years this December, intended to renew their wedding vows. ‘It’s finding time, really… but yes! We will. I’ll keep you posted,’ he adds, joking. ‘Of course you’ll be the first to know.’
I wonder, meanwhile, if the children ever get to see their maternal grandparents. ‘Tana sets that out. They live in France now and the visits to the children are few and far between. But the children can make up their own minds if they want to see them. They’re old enough now.’
Privilege and wealth does not exempt any family from such upheavals. But the Ramsay children – well-adjusted, happy and confident – seem to have weathered the storm equably. Tilly is sweet-natured and charming. As we talk she wanders in and out, sitting at one point at the vast kitchen table with her feet (in woolly slippers) resting on her dad’s lap.
The house, with its many vast, airy rooms, is bandbox neat. The only evidence of Gordon’s maverick spirit is his jukebox and, in the entrance hall, a shuffleboard, a table-top air hockey game and a pinball machine. ‘Tana doesn’t know I’ve made the hall into an amusement arcade,’ he laughs.
He sips on a bottle of green gloop – the label says it contains spinach, kale and apple – and jokes, ‘I’m secretly turning vegetarian!’ He’s always been vehemently carnivorous but his attitude is softening. Actually, he says, a couple of days a week now he doesn’t eat meat.
He’s due to leave to record voice-overs for the US version of Junior MasterChef and our chat is winding down when Victoria Beckham and her three youngest children arrive for a ‘play date’. Cruz and Romeo scamper off with Tilly to play air hockey in the hall. I hear crashes and whoops of delight. Harper, dressed in mini jodhpurs and a striped top, is en route with Mum to her riding lesson. Victoria is soignée in black gym gear and day-glo orange trainers. Her smile lights up her face.
Gordon turns 50 in November; not that he’s keen to be reminded. ‘I’m miles away from 50,’ he shrieks. ‘Let me enjoy being fricking 49 before we discuss 50. And no I haven’t got plans to slow down. The kids say, “Please don’t ever retire!”‘
He’ll be celebrating with Tilly. She turns 15 on the same day. What will she do? ‘I’ll probably have a family lunch, then a meal out in the evening with my friends,’ she says. Where will she go? There’s a glint of mischief in her eye as she replies, ‘I think I’ll go to Jamie’s Italian. Actually it’s my favourite restaurant.’
