13/02/2007

Humble Pie – Gordon Ramsay (Harper Collins, £18.99)

Gordon Ramsay….bless him. After wading through Humble Pie you just want to give him a big hug and tell him it’s all going to be all right.

It has been a hard life for the most famous chef who almost played professionally for Rangers – and it’s hard to resent a man who has clearly pulled himself up by his bootstraps and worked f**king hard, as he’ll tell you on just about every f**king page, to make a success of himself.

But Gordon doesn’t make it easy for the reader to like and respect him, despite his hard upbringing and self-generated success. There's no doubt that the title of this autobiography is ironic.

On the page, Ramsay certainly can’t be accused of modesty. It might be a sign of his hard upbringing and a irrational need to please a now dead and unloving father, but Ramsay seems to judge everything and everybody in stark terms. His peers are valued on the Michelin stars they have won and the restaurants they have run – there’s little here about the esoteric achievement of being a well-rounded, happy human being, for Ramsay or his contemporaries.

And he won’t win over any fans in Scotland. On Amaryllis: “It was…the best in Scotland by a million miles…but I am not sure now, that Scotland was quite ready for food cooked to that standard”. And, on the chance of Amaryllis winning one of those Michelin stars which Ramsay so admires: “I’d be lying if I said there was much competition for this accolade in the land of the deep-fried Mars Bar…”

But Ramsay is nothing but honest and this book is honestly written – from his struggle through the early years to coping with his drug addict brother – and Ramsay wouldn’t be Ramsay if this wasn’t so.