"Gordon Ramsay has a reputation for being a chef who does not suffer fools lightly. His dedication to perfect service with sumptuous fare and unvarnished straightforwardness led to Ramsay being a pop culture icon in the food and entertainment industry. It has not been all five-star glitz and red-carpet glamor for Ramsay, however. His early life was a hard one. His father was a violent alcoholic who could not hold a job for long. He has said that his kind and patient mother was the only good thing in his young life. The family was poor, and he grew up eating a lot of ham hock soup, bread and butter pudding, homemade chips (aka fries by Americans), beans, and fish fingers (aka fish sticks). Ramsay overcame all of it, putting himself through culinary school at nineteen years old and moving to London and Paris in his twenties to train under some of Europe's finest chefs. He also worked on a private yacht in Italy before returning to London in 1993. By then, twenty-six-year-old Ramsay had built his reputation enough to earn a job offer to replace the head chef at a Michelin-starred restaurant. This was his first ascent into the heady atmosphere of haute cuisine, but Ramsey was not intimidated. Instead, he ran with the opportunity, using it as a springboard to become one of the most successful chefs of all time"--
