100 Quotes by Gordon Ramsay
Gordon Ramsay, a British chef and television personality, has achieved global recognition for his culinary expertise, intense passion for cooking, and charismatic television presence. Known for his exceptional culinary skills and exacting standards, Ramsay has earned multiple Michelin stars for his restaurants and has played a significant role in shaping contemporary culinary trends. Beyond his culinary achievements, he gained widespread fame through television shows like "Hell's Kitchen," where his fiery temper and no-nonsense approach to mentoring aspiring chefs became iconic. Ramsay's impact extends to his efforts in promoting culinary education and his dedication to raising awareness about food quality and sustainability. His larger-than-life persona and culinary prowess have made him a household name, inspiring countless individuals to pursue culinary excellence.
Gordon Ramsay Quotes
Cooking is about passion. (Meaning)
I am what I am. A fighter. (Quote Meaning)
Chefs are nutters. (Meaning)
When you cook under pressure you trade perfection. (Quote Meaning)
I shoot from the hip. (Meaning)
I'm actually not really a breakfast person. (Quote Meaning)
Put your head down and work hard. Never wait for things to happen, make them happen for yourself through hard graft and not giving up.
I don't like looking back. I'm always constantly looking forward. I'm not the one to sort of sit and cry over spilt milk. I'm too busy looking for the next cow.
Swearing is industry language. For as long as we're alive it's not going to change. You've got to be boisterous to get results.
Chefs are nutters. They're all self-obsessed, delicate, dainty, insecure little souls and absolute psychopaths. Every last one of them.
If you want to become a great chef, you have to work with great chefs. And that's exactly what I did.
The minute you start compromising for the sake of massaging somebody's ego, that's it, game over.
Kitchens are hard environments and they form incredibly strong characters.
There's a bond among a kitchen staff, I think. You spend more time with your chef in the kitchen than you do with your own family.
Push your limit to the absolute extreme.
Cooking is about passion, so it may look slightly temperamental in a way that it's too assertive to the naked eye.
There's no bigger pain anywhere in the world than a vegetarian.
I think every chef, not just in America, but across the world, has a double-edged sword - two jackets, one that's driven, a self-confessed perfectionist, thoroughbred, hate incompetence and switch off the stove, take off the jacket and become a family man.
However amazing a dish looks, it is always the taste that lingers in your memory. Family and friends will appreciate a meal that tastes superb-even if you've brought the pan to the table.
In order to create a little bit of confidence, start cooking with pasta. Pasta is phenomenal. Once you've cooked pasta properly for the first time it becomes second nature.
Best to start at the bottom & gradually climb up. It's much more fun, too.
Being assertive and somewhat really firm has to be backed up with being fair.
Being a chef never seems like a job, it becomes a true passion.
Stopping the junk food and Eating well is partially about cooking well and having the skills to do that.
I've had a lot of success; I've had failures, so I learn from the failure.
What's frustrating more than anything is when chefs start to cut corners and believe that they are incognito in the way they send out appetizers, entrees, and they know it's not 100 percent, but they think the customers can't spot it.
Eating out doesn't have to be a formula. Eating out is about having fun. I get really frustrated when it's badly done.
Initially let your food do the talking. You'll be surprised how far you go in a short period of time.
I train my chefs with a blindfold. I'll get my sous chef and myself to cook a dish. The young chef would have to sit down and eat it with a blindfold. If they can't identify the flavor, they shouldn't be cooking the dish.
I train my chefs completely different to anyone else. My young girls and guys, when they come to the kitchen, the first thing they get is a blindfold. They get blindfolded and they get sat down at the chef's table. Unless they can identify what they're tasting, they don't get to cook it.
As a soccer player, I wanted an FA Cup winner's medal. As an actor you want an Oscar. As a chef it's three-Michelin's stars, there's no greater than that. So pushing yourself to the extreme creates a lot of pressure and a lot of excitement, and more importantly, it shows on the plate.
Given that level of responsibility with your 25-year old or 35-year-old chef, it's just quite nice to see how they handled that exposure. Not every chef deals with it properly; they get slightly excited, a little bit overconfident and then they miss out on the most important part.
Would I swap what I have achieved as a cook if I could have been as successful as a footballer? Definitely.
I'm Gordon Ramsay, for goodness sake: people know I'm volatile.
I suppose your security is your success and your key to success is your fine palate.
The pressure on young chefs today is far greater than ever before in terms of social skills, marketing skills, cooking skills, personality and, more importantly, delivering on the plate. So you need to be strong. Physically fit. So my chefs get weighed every time they come into the kitchen.
Being a chef is the best job in the world.
You don't come into cooking to get rich.
I act on impulse and I go with my instincts.
I am well aware that a chef is only as good as his last meal.
In any situation, location is crucial.
Stop taking things personally. Throughout the time with "Kitchen Nightmares" and "Hotel Hell," when they work, you don't get any praise. When they fail, you get blamed. You're f - ed either way, but it doesn't stop me doing them, I think.
My mum doesn't enjoy sometimes listening to me tell staff off, and I say to my mum, it's a kitchen, not a hair-dressing salon.
You know, running a restaurant is something you have to be working at each and every day; it's not a foregone conclusion that you're a success.
I'm a big lover of fish. Cooking fish is so much more difficult than cooking protein meats, because there are no temperatures in the medium, rare, well done cooking a stunning sea bass or a scallop.
I cook, I create, I'm incredibly excited by what I do, I've still got a lot to achieve.
Can you imagine the headlines if I gave someone food poisoning? They'd hang me off Tower Bridge by my ballbag!
Find what's hot, find what's just opened and then look for the worst review of the week. There is so much to learn from watching a restaurant getting absolutely panned and having a bad experience. Go and see it for yourself.
Two key ingredients in any successful chef: a quick learner and someone with a sharp brain.
Focus on your customers and make that restaurant synonymous to where you are in terms of area.
Cooking a dish is fine; cooking it under pressure is a completely different ballgame.
I want my kids to see me as Dad, for God's sake, not a television personality.
When you find a guy who is powerful, a big father figure, you latch onto him immediately.
Chefs don't do ponytails and we shouldn't do them because I guarantee that whenever there's a discovery of hair in the food, it's guaranteed it's from the chef's ponytail.
I've always said that I think females make the best chefs anywhere in the world.
Long Island for me, it's producing more chefs coming out of there than Paris.
I think when we opened in 2001, it was holy ground. There was nothing here. Back then, being on the Dubai Creek was an amazing position, and I would come one or two times a year, max. Now it's so different. The travel dilemma has disappeared and it is so easy to get to Dubai. What is it, seven hours from London? It's pretty easy.
Rude staff, bad lighting, and dirty bathrooms are all signs of a bad restaurant and a good reason to leave a restaurant!
I think pressure's healthy, and very few can handle it.
If my last supper was ever going to be cooked by a chef, it would have to be Thomas Keller.
I swim like a fish and I have an amazing kick.
It goes back to the early days in the kitchen where you would be tasting dishes all night long, so the last thing I want to do in the morning is eat. Chefs generally tend to be grazers.
Running started as a way of relaxing. It's the only time I have to myself. No phones or e-mails or faxes.
I've never been a hands-on dad. I'm not ashamed to admit it, but you can't run a restaurant and be home for tea at 4:30 and bath and change nappies.
I'm not critic-proof, and I still take it personally, but I take it less personally now.
The secret is to make sure the business is running to perfection, with or without me.
Certainly in business terms, considering how thriving the market is. Understanding what people want is essential. We have a team on the ground whose job it is to keep tabs on what's good, whether it's a tapas bar in Barcelona, or an amazing fish and chip shop in Yorkshire.
There is a level of snobbery and fickleness in L.A.
When you're a chef, you graze. You never get a chance to sit down and eat. They don't actually sit down and eat before you cook. So when I finish work, the first thing I'll do, and especially when I'm in New York, I'll go for a run. And I'll run 10 or 15k on my - and I run to gain my appetite.
It's quite weird knocking that out of them and telling them to forget cooking for chefs; forget what chefs say about your food.
My father was a swim teacher. We used to swim before school, swim after school.
I am a chef who happens to appear on the telly, that's it.
My wife, a schoolteacher, very disciplined. If you think I'm tough, trust me, and wait till you see when the children are on the naughty step. It's hilarious. So we decided that I'm going to work like a donkey and provide amazing support for the family.
Bake some bread. Make a focaccia bread or bake a whole mill loaf. Do something creative, and then put the labor of love into it in the beginning. When you take that bread out of the oven and you eat it an hour- and- a- half, two- hours later, you start to appreciate it more and then you eat less because you worked so hard to make it, you appreciate it in a much better way.
First of all, for me the secret is in the ingredients. You don't need to start spending fortunes on organic foods and start becoming way over budget. The better the ingredient, the littler that needs doing to it.
Cooking today is far greater than it ever was, and more importantly, a chef's role today has changed dramatically over the last decade.
You can't depend on the exposure of a TV screen to keep your feet on the ground and your food tasting delicious. You've got to push yourself.
Making pasta, cooking pasta and baking bread are two essential ideas to create a little bit of excitement, and you learn the basic, and then evolve it. Flavor the bread, flavor the pasta, go to a fish, go to a meat sauce and take it to another level.
[Long Island] is buoyant, it's on the outskirts of Manhattan, and so they have access to phenomenal restaurants.
How many chefs do we know that prefer cooking for chefs than they do customers, yet customers are returning repeatedly and it's the level of support that determines the level of success that restaurant will have.
If you become a chef because you're obsessed by becoming a celebrity, getting my ass kicked and working my nuts off the way I did in France and getting pushed around those kitchens wasn't about becoming famous.
Bread Street Kitchen is a big operation, a unique beast, and it needs bedding in.
Cooking today is a young man's game, I don't give a bollocks what anyone says.
The parents are the issue, because it's not the kids' fault. They're the ones on the playground getting the s - and the jokes and the bullying, because of their size and they're obese. It's not the kids, it's the f - ing parents.
I'm quite a chauvinistic person.
I am the most unselfish chef in Britain today.
We are about creating a new wave of talent. We are the Manchester United of kitchens now. Am I playing full-time in the kitchen? I am a player-coach.
I have to say, opening up in New York taught me a lot about that level of attention to detail. London's a tough market, Paris is a tough market, but New York, well, that's extraordinary.
Why can't it be a curriculum? Why can't it be a life skill that they learn just to look after themselves in terms of a healthy way of eating? I think we need to shake up that whole curriculum and give them a little bit more of a lifestyle early on, before they leave school at 18.
Pressure's healthy. It becomes stressful when you can't handle that. I mean, if you don't want to become pressurized in this environment, then don't be a chef.
The level of jealousy and insecurity in this industry [restaurant] is far greater than ever before.
I cook for a living; I'm not a scheduler.
From 16 to 26, no one really knows what they want to do for the rest of their life at that age. Latin's not f - ing one of them.
Jack, my 16 year old, was in knots a couple of months back, studying for Latin. I said, "Mate, you've got no interest in Latin. You don't want to go into it after, so drop it." He said, "No, I can't. I'm going to get bullied at school because all my mates are in there." There's a prime example of why no one cooks at school. You're studying Latin, you've got no interest.
We're fragile, fragmented souls who are very sensitive to criticism.
It's amazing. Long Island, I don't know really. It's quite a fascinating area.
I think reality TV now needs a big kick up the a - to get creative and be meaningful, I think. Otherwise, people are becoming famous for having no talent, based on pure exposure. That's the grating part.
To have 95% of the ingredients sourced, food and wine, within 100 miles radius, that's a dream come true for any chef.
They say cats have nine lives. I've had 12 already and I don't know how many more I'll have.
The essence of Reality TV is all about drama. So, I think bringing pressure is healthy whether it's a professional chef or a domestic chef. Because the only way ever to really identify the true purpose of how good they are is submerging them under pressure. So I say it's no different than a live football game because it's about the intensity.
If I can give you one strong piece of advice, when you go away for that romantic weekend, whatever you do, do not accept or take the upgrade to the honeymoon suite.
How many restaurants do we know across the world that customers visit once and once only?
We launched it in the London branch - phenomenal sausages, incredible eggs, homemade baked beans, black pudding - and it's something I wanted to bring to Dubai.
You know how arrogant the French are - extraordinary.
Something you need to do three times a day, seven days a week, and something you need to stop worrying about. If [kids] don't know how to cook, they go to junk, and then the junk becomes addictive, and then all of a sudden they're left with no choice.
It's very hard when you eat out every day for a living, and a new restaurant comes along and you haven't got that same vigour that you had 10 years ago.
The thing is, I can teach. I can teach bloody well. So few chefs have that level of generosity. I demand a lot, a f***ing hell of a lot, but I give a lot back.
Another person tattooed my face on their calf. When they tense, the face moves! That is messed up.
When you have the arrogance, the confidence and you can't cook, then you're only going to look stupid.
I suppose more than anything, chefs have gotten better, which is great news, which makes my life a lot easier. I can be a lot more creative in terms of the menu.
Everything has to be done for a reason, and everything has to be done to make sense in terms of running a proper business today, and it's not just about the food.
Being on a soccer pitch is not the same as being in a kitchen when things are going wrong.
Videoing, lifting it, prodding it, and five minutes later they might even eat it! That first approach to the naked eye is crucial, so when you see pictures coming through on your social media, it does push you to be a little more creative and raise the bar a little bit higher.
The amount of customers who take pictures before they eat is insane.
I hate it when people just downright copy. I hate it.
We outsmarted ourselves and raised the bar even higher, I think.
Here, in L.A., trust me, there will be fireworks from the canapés right through to the desserts.
One thing I can't afford to get sucked up in is the trend formation of restaurants here. I've invested heavily. We have a ten-year lease. More importantly, the style, the feel and the décor of the dining room is vibrant.
It's learning your craft and understanding what it takes to survive in this industry. On the back of exposure from TV to books to Rachel Ray to Martha Stewart, the customer's integrity is far greater than every before. As a nation, just like the U.K., we don't complain enough. The more we complain in this country the better our restaurants will be.
I've been in New York for 15 months. Winning two stars in the Zagat number one best newcomer within ten months of opening in New York has taught me a big lesson.
If you think customers are impatient in New York, wait to you see how impatient they are here in L.A.
Very few restaurants do five services a day - breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, cocktail, theatre and dinner - and because of that we can offer something for everyone.
Stay with what's happening locally. It's really important.
I can't say, maybe it's something in the ingredients, but again, we have a couple of contestants from Long Island and a phenomenal array of chefs.
If everyone could just cook properly I wouldn't have a problem.
Having worked my a - off over here for the last 10 years really hard, really f - ing hard, to see that unfolding every Tuesday and then watching the interviews, and the Megyn Kelly ... It's just extraordinary. It's quite a horrible situation because something needs to happen to stop this thing [Donald Trump] from becoming one of the most embarrassing scenarios ever in the history of politics.
Growing up in Britain, we didn't have much, worked for everything. To leave food on the plate, Mom classed it as being rude and so we ate because we were hungry, not ate because we had a choice in the fridge.
If you want to think about cooking, and it's a high-five, laid back motion, then flip burgers and dress Caesar salad, don't try to pitch in the premier league of restaurant. Build up to it, by all means.
― Gordon Ramsay Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
