As you’d expect from a multi-Michelin-starred chef, the celebratory dinner hosted by Gordon Ramsay this week was a masterclass in fine dining. The occasion marked the investiture of Ramsay’s close friend David Beckham – now Sir David following his knighthood at Windsor Castle earlier that day – and the 58-year-old chef pulled out all the stops for the intimate meal on Tuesday evening at his eponymous restaurant in Chelsea.
On the menu were scallops crowned with caviar and edible flowers, dishes laced with truffle oil and an immaculate beef Wellington – a notoriously demanding dish requiring precision timing and technique, and long considered one of Ramsay’s signatures.
Such fare reminded guests of the peerless talents of a man widely regarded as one of the world’s best chefs.
No surprise, then, that Ramsay was beaming in the photograph taken by the newly minted Sir David, posing proudly alongside his friend and staff as Beckham thanked them in a message posted online. ‘It was a night we’ll never forget,’ he wrote.
Ramsay had appeared in equally buoyant spirits just a month earlier after hosting another exclusive event – this time at his Lucky Cat restaurant in Bishopsgate.
That evening marked the launch of a new Apple TV documentary series, Knife Edge, for which Ramsay serves as executive producer. The show follows the trials and triumphs of chefs around the world as they pursue a coveted Michelin star.
The venue – perched on the 60th floor of a skyscraper in London’s financial district, giving it the distinction of being Europe’s highest restaurant – was packed with leading chefs including Jason Atherton, Paul Ainsworth and Marcus Wareing, men who have already achieved this culinary honour.
It came eight months after he unveiled High on the same site – an intimate 12-seat restaurant offering panoramic city views and a £250 tasting menu (with an optional £210 wine pairing), accompanied by a wine list so extravagant one reviewer quipped it contained ‘so many four-digit prices I thought they were vintages, not pounds’.
Gordon Ramsay on TV show Hell’s Kitchen, where he found global fame
Yet scratch beneath this apparently flourishing surface and a trickier picture emerges.
For alongside these successes is also a story of job cuts, losses and restaurant closures suggesting strain behind the glossy facade of the business.
It would certainly be unfair to say Ramsay’s restaurant business as a whole is on a knife-edge.
Last year, the revenues of his group Gordon Ramsay Restaurants (GRR) rose from £95.6million to £133.9million – figures that would make many restaurateurs weep into their steak frites in these tough times for hospitality.
There are more ventures in the pipeline, too. Next year brings a new Netflix fly-on-the-wall series, filmed over nine months as Ramsay launched High and assorted other projects. A Hell’s Kitchen restaurant – named after the series that made him a household name – will open at a central London hotel. There are already seven such restaurants in the US.
On a personal level, this week it emerged that his daughter Holly – one of Ramsay’s six children with wife Tana – has booked Bath Abbey for her wedding to Olympian Adam Peaty next summer.
So there is a great deal to celebrate, then.
Yet his latest accounts are giving off stress signals. The most recent figures for Gordon Ramsay Restaurants Limited, the parent company for many of his firms, cover the 70 weeks to the end of 2024. Ramsay is merging his UK and international businesses as part of a growth plan and therefore needed to align their accounting year-ends, making direct comparisons difficult with the previous 52-week period.
Even so, to put it in layman’s terms, the results are not as appetising as Ramsay – who learned his craft under Marco Pierre White before founding his own empire in 1998 – might like.
Despite that headline-grabbing £133.9million sales figure, GRR made a loss before tax of £12.6million – more than triple the previous £3.4million.
Much of that loss stems not from poor trading but from the multi-million-pound spend on new restaurant launches.
Gordon Ramsay with his wife Tana, with whom he has six children
Nonetheless, the figure was recently described as ‘shocking’ by one industry source familiar with Ramsay’s business, who said that even given today’s harsh conditions, it hinted at deeper issues. Does it suggest that Ramsay has bitten off more than he can chew in a bid for global success?
GRR now spans 90 venues worldwide, including more than 30 in the UK and others across the United States, South Korea, Thailand and China.
‘While it’s true the hospitality sector is struggling, the scale of these setbacks points to more than just market conditions,’ the insider said.
It also emerged last week Ramsay’s empire had axed nearly 200 jobs, employing 1,168 staff in 2024 compared with 1,344 the previous year – the biggest reduction since the pandemic. Most of the shrinkage was in restaurants rather than management.
And his businesses have a sizeable serving of debt on the menu: accounts show net debt of £47million, including a £6.8million loan and a £21.75million credit facility both from Barclays bank.
Ramsay has given personal guarantees of £3.75million against the lending and also personally loaned the company £11.3million. This earned him £1.2million in interest over the year, though it is unclear whether he was actually paid the sum.
Humble Pie Productions Limited – his TV company now owned by US broadcasting giant Fox and which reported a turnover of £60million last year – provided an interest-free loan of nearly £7million to the restaurant arm.
Many in the trade may be feeling a frisson of sympathy given the undeniably brutal climate blanketing a hospitality industry already battered by the pandemic and now facing further unprecedented pressures.
The cost of living crisis, which has curbed dining out, was compounded by Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ last Budget, which raised employers’ National Insurance contributions and the minimum wage. Industry body UK Hospitality estimates those measures alone added £3.4billion of extra costs across venues.
‘The leisure sector has barely had chance to recover from lockdown and now has to contend with a cost of living crisis and a Labour chancellor,’ a City expert told the Daily Mail.
‘Restaurants are having an incredibly hard time, and that even includes someone as well-known as Gordon Ramsay.’
Ramsay himself has spoken candidly about the challenges, describing rising running costs as ‘tough’ – and tougher still after last year’s Labour budget
Certainly, Ramsay is far from the only one with challenges when it comes to the world of celebrity chefs: Jamie Oliver’s empire collapsed in 2019 with the closure of 22 sites and the loss of 1,000 jobs, while Italian chef Gino D’Acampo’s restaurant business went into administration in May. Heston Blumenthal and Rick Stein have also reported mounting losses and falling revenues.
Ramsay himself has spoken candidly about the challenges, describing rising running costs as ‘tough’ – and tougher still after last year’s Labour budget. ‘We have to raise our game and be smarter,’ he said earlier this year.
Intriguingly, he also spoke subsequently of his belief that changing social mores have piled the pressure on.
‘The generation now don’t want to talk and order,’ he observed this summer, referring to the shift toward online menus and ordering reducing the need for front-of-house staff in his less prestigious venues. Ramsay’s empire seems to be facing particular strain at the casual dining end.
Several of his Street Burger outlets have closed despite having prime London locations, while a branch in Reading is listed as ‘temporarily closed’.
His Street Pizza chain, offering bottomless sourdough pizza at a fixed price, has also shut in Edinburgh, and a planned opening in Greenwich has yet to materialise.
Ramsay’s personal fortune certainly remains robust. His net worth is estimated at £167million, boosted by over £3million in 2022 after selling one of his Cornwall homes for £7.5million
In his more upmarket range, Bread Street Kitchen & Bar – which offers all-day ‘premium casual’ dining – also saw its Ealing branch close in 2023.
Despite these gloomy circumstances, however, Ramsay remains determinedly upbeat, perhaps in part because he has faced real financial disaster in the past, only to conquer and emerge stronger.
In 2008, six newly opened Ramsay outlets – including his first Parisian venture, Versailles, part of an ambitious overseas expansion – all went into the red soon after launch, amassing combined losses of £4.3million.
Ramsay and his then business partner and father-in-law, Chris Hutcheson, were forced to inject a whopping £5million of their own money to keep the business afloat.
It clearly caused huge strain: two years later, in October 2010, Ramsay fired Hutcheson as CEO, sparking a bitter public feud in which Ramsay claimed his father-in-law had hacked into company accounts and siphoned money from the business.
A decade later, in June 2017, Hutcheson was jailed for six months for conspiring to hack systems linked to Ramsay’s enterprises. The two have since reconciled, with Ramsay saying Hutcheson had ‘accepted his mistakes and apologised to all of us’.
Yet against that backdrop Ramsay continued to expand, extending his restaurant chain internationally and, latterly moving into casual dining. Ramsay’s personal fortune certainly remains robust. His net worth is estimated at £167million, boosted by over £3million in 2022 after selling one of his Cornwall homes for £7.5million – believed to be the most expensive residential sale ever recorded in the county. He had bought it for £4.4million.
Gordon Ramsay’s Street Burger restaurant in London
Ramsay’s bank balance has also been sweetened this year by a reported six-figure sum for fronting an advertising campaign for High Street burger chain Burger King – the first time he has endorsed a brand outside his own.
In the commercial, Ramsay appears at a drive-through selling the chain’s new Wagyu beef burger, before attempting to help bemused staff – who repeatedly get his name wrong – make it.
Happy to poke fun at himself, the ad nonetheless raised eyebrows in the restaurant world. ‘Gordon Ramsay advertising a Burger King burger is like Joe Wicks becoming the face of Ozempic,’ one health and fitness commentator grumbled online.
Meanwhile, profits at Humble Pie remain strong. It made pre-tax profits of £7.1million last year, up from £5.6million in the previous 18 months. The firm holds about £9million in cash at Coutts, the late Queen’s bank, and carries no loans, mortgages or overdrafts.
Cannily, Ramsay also subjected his restaurant business to a severe ‘stress test’ before signing off on his last accounts, simulating a 20 per cent fall in trade over a prolonged period. The conclusion: the restaurants could withstand even a brutal downturn.
Perhaps this emboldened him. Either way, far from being daunted by Britain’s belt-tightening climate, Ramsay is pushing ahead with plans to expand.
Earlier this year he merged his UK and US operations with backing from private equity firm Lion Capital, which previously invested $100million into his business in 2019 and is understood to have provided further undisclosed funding to help roll out franchises such as Gordon Ramsay Fish & Chips and Gordon Ramsay Street Pizza across America. There are also plans to expand into Spain, Saudi Arabia and India.
In other words, Ramsay remains as bullish as ever. Even so, friends of the chef will be hoping he doesn’t give himself financial indigestion.
