Gordon Ramsay: Kitchen devil

With the exposure he is currently enjoying, it should be the case that the more you see of Gordon Ramsay, the more you know. But with each explosion of bullying temper, every utterance of his second favourite word "arse", the more baffling the behaviour of London's most famous chef becomes.

A man as successful as this must have more to him than he allows to appear, but why all the shouting? The sheer volume of small screen exposure has not so much brought Ramsay into our homes as moved him in permanently. First, in a four-week series of 50-minute programmes on Channel 4, Ramsay bollocked his way round the bad restaurants of the shires. Last week, in the series Hell's Kitchen, he has been showering D-list celebs with asterisks because they can't cook either - unsurprising given that many have spent their adult lives eating out of soap-set catering vans. Their inability invites compassion, not disbelief and frustration. But looking closer at Ramsay's background, there are intriguing explanations for the Molotov cocktail personality.

Ramsay did televised fury way back in the 1998 documentary series Boiling Point - taking an early lesson in the positive marketing point of controversy. It was five years after he opened Aubergine, the restaurant where he made his name. Aubergine gave way to his signature restaurant in the Royal Hospital Road, and there followed a string of partnerships with other chefs plus high profile and sometimes controversial openings in the Savoy, Claridge's and the Connaught. Now 37, Ramsay has five books and several awards to his name, plus a ton of press clippings; few chefs are more aware of the power of tabloid appearances to fill a restaurant.

Ramsay's utterances have a common theme: they are the big assured opinions of a real man, the kind you'd never dare call a poof. But Ramsay was called exactly that by his father when he abandoned his football career with Glasgow Rangers in 1985 after a knee injury and joined catering college - on his mother's advice. "His father thought he'd taken up a poncy profession," says a colleague, "and since then he's had to measure up in a manly way."

The tragedy remains that Ramsay's father died - of alcoholism - before he could witness his son's success by eating in one of his restaurants. The anger making itself felt nightly on TV screens last week can't just be blamed on frustration at incompetence. A proportion must be the well known resentment felt by adult children of alcoholics at their parent's abdication of responsibility. With the ultimate desertion in death, in many cases the anger remains.

He has, though, found personal happiness. Eight years ago he married Tana Hutcheson, a trained Montessori teacher and former manager of Terence Conran's Pont de la Tour restaurant. The couple live in south London and have four children, three girls and a boy. Ramsay is a proud father who famously banned his own children from his restaurants because they were too young to experience what he naffly dubs "fine dining". He happily chats about their achievements and inherited assertiveness, and values his time at home where he cooks in a £500,000 kitchen. Yummy daddy he is not, though: he flatly refused to witness the birth of any of his children. "It's like being in a room with a thousand skinned rabbits," was his confident prediction.

"The man is blokey but the food certainly isn't," remarked one chef for whom flavour rather than technique is most important. "The anomaly with Gordon is that while he's totally macho, he cooks the poofiest food - veritable Ascot hats of wafer-thin caramelised apples balancing on things. It's really extraordinary." There's a direct relationship between the skill needed to make Ramsay's food and the boot camp training dished out in his kitchen. "Bollocking worked with me," he said in a recent interview. "I've been slapped and kicked and punched. And when the chef shouted at me I listened, took it in and said, 'Oui, chef'.

"I don't just yell for effect. It isn't to sound like a hard man. When I was training in Harvey's or Le Gavroche, a bollocking made me try harder." So Gordon Ramsay learned from that other kitchen bully, Marco Pierre White, who previously learned from his oppressors at places of training. Ramsay's staff are known to stay with him for years, however. It is well worth it from their point of view: 10 years of survival in one of Ramsay's restaurants will guarantee a well paid head chef's job elsewhere. But aggressive behaviour in the name of perfection is endemic in kitchens that pursue big accolades. Multiple Michelin stars are awarded for the amazing techniques taught to big brigades of chefs. But highly regarded, peaceful kitchens exist too, particularly those run by women. You won't hear Rose Gray threatening to kick her sous chef up the "arse" or Sally Clarke let rip with a flying grill pan followed by a humiliating barrage of expletives.

Hell's Kitchen will have a negative impact on the temples of gastronomy themselves. Eating in a triple Michelin-starred restaurant now feels a bit like watching the Kirov Ballet in the communist era: exquisite beauty with the uneasy suspicion that Maestro had the ballerina across his knee during rehearsal. These days the steer providing the fillet steak probably has a better life than the commis chef in Ramsay's kitchen. Who knows, maybe menus will soon feature statements to placate horrified viewers: "Our chickens are prepared without cruelty to people," or perhaps a Beef without Bollocking logo.

The risky nature of the restaurant trade is part of Ramsay's drive. He can be seen whizzing around London in his new £110,000 Bentley Continental checking each restaurant - one supposes happily berating women drivers while venting ire on traffic wardens and taxi drivers. He is balancing a lot of plates. It's high-stress management in a competitive business. "He feels he has to grasp his business with both hands, trading on his name as hard as he can while he's flavour of the month," says Philip Beresford, author of the Sunday Times Rich List. Ramsay does not operate one long-standing company with a visible track record but several different ones that do not reveal profit and loss accounts. "His wealth is estimated on the brand value of his name; there do not seem to be huge assets to fall back on," says Beresford. Ramsay himself recently fell victim to the precariousness of the trade, closing his Glasgow restaurant Amaryllis shortly before his Channel 4 troubleshooting series, Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, was shown.

Dominating primetime will go a long way to keeping his remaining restaurants busy, but TV is a ruthless mistress. Once it has created a personality, the star is stuck with it. Ramsay wants it both ways, arguing that he is not the raging monster he appears on the box. Reacting to criticism that he humiliated a chef on Kitchen Nightmares, he argues that the guy would have made a "fucking twat" of himself unassisted, and that he [Ramsay] was frustrated and depressed.

He may have to go the way of Jamie Oliver whose cheeky chappie persona became so irritating to viewers that he was forced to reinvent himself as a philanthropist. The new incarnation has been successful, and Ramsay, feeling misunderstood, may go in for a similar makeover one day. Will we see an all-girls kitchen with Ramsay as the kitchen porter, perhaps recruiting traffic wardens to work front of house? Or maybe a stint as a midwife? No. A glimpse instead of this clearly sensitive individual's inner child would be a welcome change. Much better than another helping of spleen.