The Good Food Guide recently awarded his flagship restaurant on Royal Hospital Road nine out of 10 - a point less than it had ever been awarded."It was weird, very weird, to get nine out of 10," Ramsay says, chain-quaffing lattes in the boathouse "I said to the staff, 'Don't change. But I protect that restaurant."Like all great chefs, Ramsay has self-confidence to burn But he needs his plaudits too. He says he is frustrated at being judged by people who know less about food than he does He says it is easier to criticise something than to do it. I'm confident we'll win 10 next year.' And I think it's a very arrogant statement for the Good Food Guide to say that no restaurant in Britain is worth 10 out of 10, which is what they've done Bullshit I could tell you 10 restaurants who deserve it. And there have been suggestions in the press that he might have been letting standards slip. He's run six London marathons and the Comrades super-marathon in South Africa. The first time he ran the Comrades, he returned in a wheelchair.So he likes a challenge.
But being involved with the Volvo Ocean Race - acknowledged as the toughest fully-crewed race in the world - is, for Ramsay, more about being seen than participating. How much nutritional advice can he offer when all the teams are going to eat is freeze-dried? And one suspects that crews about to brave the Southern Ocean are already pretty motivated.At home, the Ramsay restaurant machine grinds on. He was, famously, signed by Rangers as a teenager before giving up owing to a dodgy knee. He used to enjoy it when a force 10 blew in: "A boat is a pretty intense place to be in a big breeze," he recalls.Ramsay fancies himself as a sportsman. "It was extraordinary," he says, after the event. Despite having to follow orders rather than hand them out, being involved in this is a natural role for Ramsay. Before he started his first restaurant, Aubergine, he spent a year on a yacht that crossed the Atlantic and circumnavigated the Caribbean. Someone foolish has even let him compete in the first inshore leg of the race, during which he uncharacteristically buttons his lip and does what the skipper asks.
Gordon Ramsay and I have been flown out to this outpost by ABN Amro, whose two yachts are competing in this year's Volvo Ocean Race. Ramsay's job is to offer nutritional and motivational advice to the crew. As the first president to have joined the party after the 1949 Communist takeover, Hu would be different from the aged men who sent tanks into Tiananmen Square in 1989 to crush pro-democracy demonstrators. Three years on, dreams of a more democratic China have been dashed by the enigmatic and withdrawn Hu. Dissidents have been rounded up and the media and internet subject to ever-increasing restrictions, while the 69 million CCP members have been ordered to brush up on their Marxism-Leninism and the thought of Mao Zedong..