Masterchef & The Myth Of The Celebrity Chef

(Pic: Celeb Dirty Laundry)

If you want to see how ridiculous the whole celebrity chef phenomenon has become, then look at the mansion Gordon Ramsay has just picked up the keys to in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles.

Ramsay has suffered a year of woes in the UK, was forced to close several restaurants in his crumbling empire, and proved that he is one of the world’s worst actors when he appeared in a dreadful flop about a chef who moves to the country and finds love.

But his TV career in the States has gone from strength to strength, with Masterchef returning for a third series and a new show Hotel Hell launching on Fox in March.

And the celebrity chef clearly plans to spend a lot more time there after forking out a staggering £4.3m for the five-bedroom family home, near his friends David and Victoria Beckham.

Four million big ones! It just goes to show the ludicrous gulf between a celebrity chef and someone who actually cooks for a living.

I’ve written a lot about the number of young cooks going into the trade because they can’t be footballers or rock stars, and they think cheffing is the next best thing to be famous in.

A whole generation of ultimately-disappointed hopefuls convinced you can just learn the trade and be the next Ramsay or Jamie Oliver. Programmes like Masterchef do nothing to dispel the myth.

As I wrote in my book...

“The whole show was a farce. The prize was a job as a trainee chef at a top London restaurant. They didn’t say how much you’d get, or what the hours were, or what to do when you’re thrown out on the street because you can’t pay the rent.

“Maybe the prize didn’t exist at all. I mean, who the hell would take them up on it? The whole thing was about getting on the telly, and society’s mushrooming obsession with fame. I couldn’t see any of the contestants swapping their cushy jobs for 16 hours a day of back-breaking toil on a wage just enough to keep them alive. Not if there weren’t any cameras about anyway."

Forget Beverly Hills, it’s more likely to be Butlin’s. If you want the reality, then look at the pay packet of a chef in the UK. A lowly commis chef gets about £13,000, whereas an experienced sous chef trousers as much as £28,000 a year - about the average salary in the trade.

It would take the average chef exactly 204 years to save up enough cash to buy Ramsay’s LA mansion - and that’s assuming he never went out, lived on bread and water, and slept in a cardboard box.

Just remember next time you’re watching Masterchef, cooking doesn’t get tougher than this...

My new book on training to be a chef, including stints at Rick Stein's and the Fat Duck, is available on Amazon CLICK HERE

"Reading this book is a serious test for any food writer. Not only has Alex Watts done what all of us say we would like to do, tested his mettle in a professional kitchen, he also writes about his experiences so well that you spend as much time being jealous of his writing skills as you do of his experiences. It's an annoyingly enjoyable read." - Simon Majumdar

Chef Dies After Working 100-Hour Weeks

I’ve blogged a lot about how hard cheffing is and how much respect I’ve got for the poor souls who beaver away doing 18-hour days in Michelin restaurants, often without complaint.

During my stint as a chef, I met a lot of them. Some were so tired at the end of their shift, that not wanting to waste valuable sleeping time getting a night bus home in the six hours they had before the next gruelling shift, they would sometimes bed down on the dry store floor - and then get up with frozen joints and a cricked neck to do it all again.

But if you want an example of the dangers of working these sort of hours, then look no further than the tragic case of Nathan Laity (above), a young man from Cornwall who moved up to London to pursue his dream of making it as a top chef.

Nathan, 23, became so exhausted after working 100 hours a week as sous chef at the Tate Modern, he died after contracting tonsillitis, his distraught family said.

He came down with a sore throat but continued to work 14 hours a day - 98 hours a week - for 27 straight days without any time off, it has emerged.

He died in his sleep, and doctors say his immune system had simply shut down.

His mother Tracey, who discovered he was dead on Mother's Day, told her local paper, The Cornishman: “His body just switched off. He just went to sleep and never woke up.

“He was a lovely boy and just one trip to the doctors would have saved him. But he was ambitious.

“Nathan loved his job. He just kept going and he was working very hard. He was very stubborn about it.

“He was very talented. The head chef at the Tate said Nathan would have gone to the top.”

During his short career, Nathan worked at top restaurants in Portugal and cooked for celebrities including DJ Chris Evans and footballer Alan Shearer, joining the Tate Modern in 2008.

Nathan was buried today. The poor bugger.

:: My book on life as a chef, Down And Out In Padstow And London, is available here on Amazon...

Bullying In Kitchens

"It's not so much the assaults and hurled pans, it's the bullying I can't stand," a tearful chef once told me. And it's true - it happens a lot in professional kitchens. It's the continuing circle of revenge. Cooks get bullied, then they get their own back on those below them.

One commis was called in on his day off by an irate sous chef, travelled across London on a succession of buses and tubes, and when he got into the kitchen was bollocked for not cling-filming something in his fridge properly. They made him recover it and sent him home. All that way for something that would have taken them a few seconds to put right. He left when they set fire to his pony-tail.

It was the same at the Gull. Ironically, Jules' sister, who ran a bistro nearby, had sent Jim the potwash to our kitchen because she was worried he would get bullied anywhere else. But after a couple of months, the protection wore off, and the other chefs got irritated by his slowness...

Jules had given me a set of keys to the kitchen. He told me he was sick of seeing my veg supplies piled up outside the door, and it was my job to open up. That meant getting up half an hour earlier. Jim was usually already there. He’d be standing at the top of the stairs, sucking on a cigarette, and in no hurry to get out of his biker gear. He only drove a moped but from the bright yellow and black leathers he wore you’d think it was a Hornet.

“Hello there!” he would say each morning. He could never remember my name, but was always pleased to see me.

Jim lived with his sister a few miles up the road, and was probably the worst plongeur in Cornwall. If you asked him to peel some spuds, you'd be lucky to get 40 by lunchtime. I never said anything - I always felt sorry for him - but sometimes Graham would pick up a potato and mock him, and challenge him to a race. Graham could peel a spud in under four seconds.

Jim's pace didn't quicken during the heat and stress of service either. He'd lumber past like a zombie with outstretched pans, chanting his favourite catchphrase, “Coming through! Mind your arses!”

"Coming OUT, mind your arses, more like," someone would shout.

Jim wore the same T-shirt every day - with 'It’s not a bald patch – it’s a solar sex panel' emblazoned across it. He couldn't read or write, and had no idea what it said. We even had to fill in his timesheets for him.

He joined on the same day I did, and after a few weeks had come out of his shell, and that’s when the bullying started. It seemed fairly mild to start with, nothing like I was getting anyway, but I felt sorry for him all the same, and guilty about not doing more to stop it. I still feel guilty about it now; sometimes I lie in bed and think about it, and wish I'd made a stand.

It was Jim's job to make the tea, but he never remembered, and this was a favourite for those dreadful fuckers Graham and Jules.

“Jim,” Jules would begin. “Jim! Jim!”

Eventually he’d look round, blinking through steamed-up glasses. “Hello there,” he’d say, drying a plate in slow motion.

“Do you play golf, Jim?”

“I have done, yeah.”

“You know when you start a game, Jim, what are those plastic things you use?”

He thought for a minute and dried half a plate. Then Graham would join in. “You know those plastic things you stick in the ground at the start of each hole.”

“Haven’t got a clue. Do you know Jules?”

Stewie would wander over and whisper something in his ear, and he'd shout “tee!” and then there'd be a chorus of “thanks very much Jim, I’ll have two sugars!”

Most times, Graham would start it off.

“What rhymes with toffee, Jim?”

“Don’t know…”

At some stage, a plastic yellow duck appeared in the kitchen. It squeaked when you squeezed it, which terrified Jim for some reason. When no-one was looking, he’d throw it in the bins at the top of the car park, but the duck always found its way back. Some days it hung from the hose by his sink, and he’d have to spend the day with its angry, cartoon face boring into his bottle-end glasses.

One morning, Jim was reaching for the huge tub of Nescafe above the sink when he shrieked. A yellow face was peering out of the coffee powder.

“That fucking duck,” he squealed. “He gets everywhere!”

It returned a few days later, frozen in a bucket of water that Jim was asked to retrieve from the freezer in the haunted dry store across the road. Its angry eyes looked up at him through the ice...

Graham switched the lights off and locked the door. He made terrible quacking noises, and threatened to throw him in the pond, and Jim wept like a child. His sister had to come and get him. I know the hairy-arsed pros among you will think this fairly mild compared to some of the stories you hear in kitchens, but I'll never forget the sound of that noise Jim made. It was the sound of a pig in a barn fire.

:: This blog eventually became a bestselling book, called Down And Out In Padstow And London by Alex Watts, about my disastrous attempt to train as a chef, including stints at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck and Rick Stein's kitchens in Padstow. You might like it if you're a foodie or have ever entertained the ridiculous idea of entering the padded asylum of professional cooking. It's here on Amazon as a paperback or Kindle book if you want a read...