He's the foul-mouthed ogre of the kitchen who
cooks up as much controversy with his expletive-laden television rants
as he does Michelin-starred food . Gordon Ramsay's love affair with
cooking may, however, be going off the boil.

Ramsay, whose global food empire nearly went bust this year with £17m debts, has said that he "wants a life out of the kitchen".

His
business partner and father-in-law, Chris Hutcheson, added: "I can run
the business in Gordon's name. TV is his forte – that's what he likes
doing."

"It's a long-term ambition of his [to leave the
kitchen behind]," Ramsay's publicist Phil Hall confirmed yesterday.
"It's something he talks about, that he'd like to move away from the
business at some stage, but he's talking about a few years down the
line. He doesn't want to spend his life connected to the business. He
wants to do other things – although he's not saying what they are."

Ramsay
is a star on both sides of the Atlantic for programmes such as Kitchen
Nightmares in which he tries to fix other people's failing restaurants,
as well as The F Word and Hell's Kitchen.

His
television fees – thought to be about £2m a year in the UK and £5m in
America – cookware endorsement, cookbooks and gin sponsorship have
given him a personal fortune of about £50m.

But
he nearly lost everything earlier this year when he had his own very
public kitchen meltdown. A rapid expansion of his restaurant empire –
he had opened restaurants in many of the world's major cities including
Dubai, New York, Paris, Prague and Tokyo – had not worked out. The
overseas restaurants were losing money and the Royal Bank of Scotland,
which had extended a £10m loan and overdraft facility, sent in the
auditors. They recommended bankruptcy and the closure of his best
restaurants. To make matters worse, the chef's company also owed about
£7.2m in UK taxes.

His rotten year was
compounded in April with newspaper claims that he was serving frozen
food in four of his London restaurants. His company maintained the food
was still freshly prepared in a central kitchen before being delivered
to the restaurants. The episode, however, did nothing for the chef's
reputation, for whom bankruptcy would have been a disaster.

"It's
not great if you're making a show called Kitchen Nightmares and
advising people on how to fix their businesses for you to go bankrupt,"
said the programme's producer, Pat Llewellyn.

Ramsay
himself added: "Everything was on the line. December, January, February
and March were the most highly pressurised, shittiest, most awful four
months I've ever had in business. There was no fucking way [bankruptcy]
was ever going to happen. That was never even an option."

Ramsay
had overstretched. His television commitments meant he couldn't devote
the time to all the kitchens under the umbrella of Gordon Ramsay
Holdings. "We were clumsy," Mr Hutcheson said. "We'd put too many risks
in front of us with too much confidence that nothing would fail."

Richard
Harden, co-founder of the Harden's London Restaurants guidebook, added:
"Many of his restaurants have lost their way. If you've got so many
interests that are so geographically diverse you can't give them all
proper attention."

Staff cuts, restaurant
closures and an injection of £9m from Ramsay and Hutcheson's own
fortunes have put the company back on track, but it's no wonder Ramsay
seems to have decided to put all his eggs back in one basket.

A
clue may be in Ramsay's attitude to diversifying into TV, a move which
made him a star but almost ruined him. "You tell me a chef anywhere in
the world that's prepared to turn down quarter of a million dollars for
an hour's work on TV, and they're the biggest lying bastard that ever
put on a chef's jacket," he said.

By Andrew Johnson