How restaurant PR made Gordon Ramsay world famous

How Sauce Communications made Gordon Ramsay and his protégés famous

Gordon Ramsay (Credit: gordonramsaysubmissions/flickr.com Image licence)

Jo Barnes founded Sauce Communications with Nicky Hancock in 2000 and helped usher in a new era of restaurant PR for the 21st century. One of their first clients was Gordon Ramsay. Barnes tells the story of how she helped him become the most famous chef on the planet (with contributions from Hélène Cuff who worked for Sauce at the time) which begins in 1999 while working as head of PR and marketing for Quadrille books, which at the time was run by Allison Casey.

Jo Barnes: Gordon was vaguely on my radar because of the Boiling Point TV documentary which I'd watched with horror and fascination. So I had a bit of trepidation. Allison took me to Royal Hospital Road, and I can only describe it as an epiphany moment. It was so serene and exquisite and then out of the kitchen bounded the Tigger-ish Gordon. He was just instantly so charismatic and I thought, I've reached the ultimate chef here, and I set about making his book A Chef for all Seasons into a real success. He'd sold about 5,000 in hard print at his previous publishing house. Through a really good PR campaign, we increased sales by tenfold and took them to 50,000. I think he had a moment of awakening as well; PR really is, when done well, incredibly useful.

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