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10 Things You Didn’t Know About GORDON RAMSAY

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Gordon Ramsay traded a soccer pitch for a stove, and the switch turned into a multi-million dollar empire.

Long before he was screaming at line cooks on “Hell’s Kitchen,” Gordon Ramsay was chasing a very different dream on a soccer pitch in Scotland. The chef behind “MasterChef,” “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares” and a restaurant group that has racked up as many as 16 Michelin stars almost never picked up a knife for a living. Here’s what actually happened between the injury that ended his athletic career and the empire that replaced it.

• Ramsay trained with Glasgow Rangers as a teenager before a severe knee injury at age 15 ended his soccer ambitions.
• Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in Chelsea, opened in 1998, earned three Michelin stars by 2001; his broader portfolio has held up to 16 stars.
• Ramsay finished the 2013 Ironman World Championship in 14 hours, 4 minutes and 48 seconds, and landed at No. 34 on Forbes’ 2016 celebrity earnings list with $54 million.

From Pitch to Pass

Gordon James Ramsay was born November 8, 1966, in Johnstone, Scotland, and moved to Stratford-upon-Avon in England at age five. Soccer, not food, was the original plan — he played for youth clubs and trained with Glasgow Rangers, one of the biggest names in the Scottish Premier League, before a knee injury at 15 wiped out that path entirely.

Hospitality became the backup plan and then the whole career. Ramsay earned a diploma in hotel management from North Oxfordshire Technical College in the late 1980s, then went through the kind of apprenticeship most chefs only read about, training under Marco Pierre White, Joël Robuchon and Guy Savoy — three names that still carry serious weight in celebrity kitchen circles.

Building a Michelin Empire

In 1998, Ramsay opened his flagship, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, in Chelsea, London. It picked up three Michelin stars by 2001, and his wider restaurant group has since accumulated as many as 16 stars worldwide — a number that puts him among the most decorated chefs on the planet. Despite that classical pedigree, he runs a hard line in his own kitchens: no microwaves, full stop.

Sixteen Michelin stars, zero microwaves — that’s the standard in a Gordon Ramsay kitchen.

That old-school discipline is exactly the persona viewers know from his TV work on “Hell’s Kitchen” and “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares,” where he’s built a reputation for tearing apart failing restaurants on camera.

The In-N-Out Habit

For a chef with 16 Michelin stars to his name, Ramsay’s actual guilty pleasure is refreshingly unglamorous: In-N-Out Burger. He’s admitted to smuggling Double-Doubles into airport lounges, a habit that doesn’t exactly match the three-star fine-dining standard he holds his own restaurants to.

Black Belt and Ironman Finisher

Ramsay’s competitive streak didn’t disappear when the soccer dream did — it just moved. He holds a black belt in karate and has become a serious endurance athlete, completing the 2013 Ironman World Championship triathlon in 14 hours, 4 minutes and 48 seconds, a grueling combination of a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride and a full marathon.

He also softens considerably off-camera in one specific setting: providing culinary tutorials for the young contestants before filming “MasterChef Junior,” a notable contrast to the persona that made him famous on “Hell’s Kitchen.”

The Empire’s Current Global Standing

By 2016, the restaurants, the cookbooks and the TV deals combined to place Ramsay at No. 34 on Forbes’ list of the world’s highest-paid celebrities, with $54 million in annual earnings. That figure puts a number on just how far the operation has grown since a knee injury on a Scottish soccer pitch redirected a teenager toward the kitchen instead.