The Taming of the Chef.(Gordon Ramsay)

Gordon Ramsay, the only chef in London honored with three stars by the Guide Michelin, is not a monster. Ramsay, who is also the host of three uniquely adversarial in-your-face television shows ("Hell's Kitchen" in the United States; "The F Word" and "Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares" in the United Kingdom), is not the most abusive person running a restaurant. And although a British undercover documentary once captured him in mid-torrent, profanities flowing in a diatribe directed at a young intern, earning Ramsay the title of one of the country's "most unbearable bosses," the people who work for him show a tenacious, irrational-seeming loyalty verging on love. But he does get angry, helplessly and uncontrollably angry--not an earthly anger but something darker--and has trouble knowing how to stop.

I'd been with Ramsay in his new restaurant in New York since he arrived, on November 14th. The weekend before, he had been celebrating his fortieth birthday, in the Banqueting House at Whitehall ("Where the Queen had her eightieth"): two hundred and eighty guests, standup comics, a rock-and-roll stripper, a performance by the cast of "Chicago," a midnight disco, magnums of wine from the birth year, fifty chefs, plus "a very English sweetshop" and "a good British breakfast" at midnight. That afternoon, he received copies of the American edition of his autobiography, his second book that year, and embarked on the making of a documentary for Britain's Channel 4. The shooting began at New Jersey's Teterboro Airport, the film crew meeting Ramsay's plane (a Gulfstream that he was hoping to fly between England and New York every week), and continued at the midtown Manhattan hotel where the new restaurant was housed, formerly the Rihga Royal, now renamed the London. (The documentary's ending, the director told me, would be the publication, next fall, of the new Guide Michelin, the film informed by "Gordon's quest for another three stars.") That evening, hundreds were expected for an opening party, and the hotel was full of workmen finishing the refurbishments--a coat-check room, a fake fireplace--the lobby crowded with photographers, architects, executives from Gordon Ramsay Holdings, a soundman with a long mike crashing into many of them, determined to remain in range of his subject.

"I do television so I can do New York," Ramsay explained. He was alluding to "Hell's Kitchen," the cook-off reality show produced by Fox that introduced Ramsay to an American audience two years ago, but he could have been describing an over-all strategy. "Basically, I'm a prostitute. I prostitute myself so I can have a restaurant here. But I don't fully take off my knickers."

The restaurant included a fine-dining room with only twelve tables, a bar area that could accommodate seventy for dinner, and three flamboyantly large banquet rooms. If everything went well, the start-up would cost eight million dollars, which was being met entirely by Ramsay, in cash. He was clearly experienced at this sort of thing--the restaurant, his twelfth, would be called Gordon Ramsay at the London, and it would be the fourth business Ramsay had named after himself, joining a Ramsay in Tokyo and two Ramsays in London. But this was his first restaurant in America. It was also a first for Americans: an English cook had come to this country to serve, in effect, English food, for two centuries the most mocked cuisine in the world.

I followed Ramsay into the kitchen, normally the domain of the head chef, Neil Ferguson, a Ramsay lieutenant for ten years, but Ramsay's place when he was in it, often rushing through in a sprint-walk, as he was now, disturbing everyone, cooking a dish himself, cutting up a piece of meat, tasting a sauce ("Whoa! We're not going with that tonight--a bottle of water for every section, now! You're all dehydrated, your palates are fucked"), wilting an endive ("No, this is how you do it--you start with a really hot pan, right?"). Ramsay is six feet two, light on his feet, once a teen-age recruit for the Glasgow Rangers, the legendary Protestant soccer club of his birthplace (though he grew up in England), bionic to the touch (especially his calves, which he invited me to feel and described as "loaves of foie gras"--inaccurately, since foie gras is squishy whereas these mutant monstrosities were like oversized bowling pins). He has a military bearing, erect but tilted slightly forward, and wears a tight-fitting chef's jacket made in France of a lightweight cotton, his own design, snug at the chest, tapered around the waist, with unconventionally high short sleeves. The look says speed.

That afternoon, Ramsay tasted the restaurant's dishes and changed most of them. He revised more the next day. He was still revising as the first lunch service began, eliminating items already printed on the menu: an oxtail that was too fancy ("It's too arty--I just can't identify what I'm eating"), an eggplant that was too tough ("Will someone give me a pneumatic drill so I can get through the fucker?"), a phallic pigeon leg ("No woman is going to put that bone in her mouth--that's disgusting"). He spotted a waiter without a waistcoat. He stopped another with a tie broadly knotted around his collar.

"Young man, what's your name?"