How restaurant PR made Gordon Ramsay world famous
How Sauce Communications made Gordon Ramsay and his protégés famous
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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When we set Sauce up, I was 28, and Nicky was 27. We didn't have any clients. We had a crappy old PC, a Rolodex two mobile phones and a whole lot of self-confidence. Within six months Quadrille came to me as a freelance client and I got to do the entire Quadrille autumn list which then got me back working with Gordon again because he had another book out.
He said, ‘I'm opening a restaurant at Claridge's. Do you want to help us with the PR?’, and that was our first really big project. At this point, Nicky and I were operating out of a tiny office, which belonged to her uncle above an old print factory in Arsenal. Gordon kept threatening he was going to come and visit us. We were like, ‘No need, no need, we'll come see you.’
We set the blueprint for how we would do restaurant launches from that moment. You've got your pre-launch buildup, getting the word out there, building up the excitement, building up the hype of which we were really, really good at. We generated so much hype by the time the doors opened with pre-opening interviews and coming-soon mentions and everyone talking about it. Then the party gets another huge burst of awareness and then there's the launch phase.
We had a launch party and Gordon arrived by Horse and Carriage and that was it.
It was back in the day when every single critic - Jonathan Meads, Adrian Gill, Fay Mashler, Jan Moir - would be in the room at the same time. It was a huge event, Gordon taking over Claridges. It was a must-attend moment and the critics all had to be there. It was a terrifying experience, but he got a full set of five-star reviews, even from Adrian Gill. We had a launch party and Gordon arrived by Horse and Carriage and that was it.
Hélène Cuff: Wth Ramsay, it was suddenly escalating. A lot of it was almost PA/PR - organizing his diary, fielding genuine calls and not so interesting calls, you'd do publishing tours for his cookbook, arranging regular commissions , for example, recipe features with The Times. Because he was so big and so there was so much to do, it was almost like managing it. We didn't have to pick up the phones and say, ‘Would you like to review Ramsay?’ because it was constant. Sometimes he'd call you twice a day. It was really quite nerve-racking because he was just so high energy, you couldn’t be boring, you had to think of really interesting things that were going on every single day. You had to be super organised.
Jo Barnes: When we did the big Gordon launch, I would sit down and work out where all my cover features are going to be. We'll have the cover of ES magazine, Observer Food Monthly, we'll have a Square Meal, The Caterer. That was what we were aiming for, we were so ambitious. It felt like anything was possible in those early days.
Hélène Cuff: With a high profile person, you are very much managing and you can really properly strategize. If everyone wants a piece of you, you can make sure it's timed for when you want things to run and work best in order to increase sales, whether it's maximizing on Christmas bookings or book sales.
But it wasn’t all plain sailing with the notoriously hot-headed Ramsay, with unexpected outbursts causing chaos around the globe.
Jo Barnes: But there were many crazy moments for Gordon because he was just wild with the press in the early days and that's why people loved him. He was unfiltered and he just had fun with the media. He went to Australia and basically got cancelled in the course of his two week book tour because he insulted a national TV treasure comparing her to a female pig. That pissed off everyone. Literally overnight he went from hero to zero. Even the prime minister of Australia got involved to vilify him at that moment. I'm sure it’s all water under the bridge now, but at the time it felt like a huge disaster.
The people behind Taste of London did Gordon Ramsay's Taste of Christmas and the top line sponsor was Volvo. It was a big deal, they paid a lot of money. Gordon arrived in one of their cars, got out and said, ‘Fucking hell, normally I wouldn't be seen dead in a Volvo’ in front of all the top people from the company. Of course they weren’t happy and they withdrew their sponsorship. There were just so many moments like that, I can't tell you.
But actually he’s a very clever man. Jan Moir wrote a terrible review of Royal Hospital Road. I remember the headline, it was like being peas in a processing plant. It was all about feeling like you're being processed and you're being moved along and the tables are being turned too quickly. Gordan just sat down with the whole brigade, went through it line by line and said, ‘She's right about this. You've got to be better about that’ and separated the stuff that wasn't relevant and that he couldn't action and actually made some really sensible improvements.
Ramsay’s star power was so strong that it rubbed off on the brigade of chefs started out with him and went on to help him build his first restaurant empire.
Jo Barnes: We worked together for nearly 11 years, seeing the growth from just Royal Hospital Road when we started right up until the global empire. Working with Gordon was fantastic, but then getting to work with and put on the map all his protégés - Marcus Waring, Angela Hartnett, Jason Atherton, Mark Sargeant- they were all unknowns when I started. I remember Gordon saying, ‘Marcus, he's really keen that he gets a bit of attention’ and then kind of sitting around and thinking, Right, how are we going to get Marcus famous? It didn't just happen. That was a lot of very good PR.
I had not one but two documentaries lined up about Angela opening Menu at The Connaught. Trouble at the Top on BBC, I arranged that and then there was a BBC news program as well. We had two camera crews following her in the run-up. Nicola Gill commissioned a huge diary of Angela opening the restaurant for the OFM.
We had a photographer following her for the whole week. I think it drove her mad. She was like, ‘Fucking hell Barnsey, what have you done to me?’ Suddenly she had multiple media outlets following her around and she just wasn't used to it.
Hélène Cuff: Angela just did not get PR at all and she was quite vocal about that. But because she was so black and white, I didn't take it personally. I kind of got it and she wasn't rude about it, she just thought, ‘what a load of rubbish’. It was quite nice convincing her actually I did need to entertain the food editor of Hello Magazine. Angela was precisely that kind of person that would ask, really is PR necessary? Hopefully she thinks it probably is and that it’s done a lot.
I don't think there'll ever be anyone quite like Gordon. I think he broke the mould.
Jo Barnes: We're only as good as the people that we work with. They're all household names now. I feel real pride and I love them all. All of us that worked together in those days, there's a real bond. It's not one individual moment. There were so many crazy times, so many highs, but I think that's the legacy that I'm most proud of.
I don't think there'll ever be anyone quite like Gordon. I think he broke the mould. What's amazing about him is that he just keeps on getting bigger and bigger and more and more famous and that’s not what should have happened. All those big eighties and nineties chefs had their moment and then they gradually faded. That's never going to happen for Gordon.
Click here to read part 1 of The Dark Art of Restaurant PR. Part 2 is here.
Great read!