Gordon Ramsay’s escape to India — with a TV crew

That is why, in the midst of a difficult year, Ramsay disappeared to India. “I just had to get away,” he says. “It was me and a rucksack and a month of being on the road going back to what I love doing best — cooking.” He asked his wife, Tana, if he could go and, just as his business empire was teetering on the brink in mid-2009, boarded a plane and flew to Delhi to film Gordon’s Great Escape.

“It was humbling,” he says. “One minute I was all over the newspapers, the next I was on a continent where no one really knew who I was. I’d had enough, really. I thought it was a good idea to escape and I’ve been fascinated by Indian cookery ever since my mum took me for a curry when I was a child. It wasn’t running away. I could see the way everything was going. It was about getting back to something that excited me.”

In Gordon’s Great Escape, Ramsay travels across India, eating and cooking, and embracing vegetarianism on an ashram. “I loved it,” he says. “I now apologise to all vegetarians for being rude about them. I love them. I loved being on an ashram. I thought I would hate it, but I could’ve stayed there for a long time.”

The programme could also go some way to rehabilitating Ramsay as a chef and a person rather than the slightly comical reality TV character that he was in danger of becoming. He cooks vegetable curry almost continuously on a long train journey. He sweats profusely as he digs a vast hole in the desert to roast a goat for a feast. He makes kebabs for the most discerning set of wedding guests that he has probably ever encountered. It’s a one-man show about him meeting people, charming people and getting back to his cooking — someone who can seriously cook rather than just shout.

“I learnt so much,” he says. “I haven’t sweated that much in years. I felt like Shrek most of the time, constantly putting my foot in it and getting things slightly wrong. I cooked street food in Calcutta. It’s hard to beat the food that is already on offer. You can get anything there. It’s simple and fresh and the street is packed, but I tried bringing some different flavours into my food and we sold out. I can’t tell you how good that felt.”

It certainly does seem more of a personal journey than merely a commercial idea (although it isn’t always easy to separate the two: Ramsay has recently taken to leaving his home prominently displaying a copy of Ramsay’s Great Escape when he thinks he might be papped). “Yeah, it was just me getting back to what I am good at doing,” he says. “It was like learning again; it was a very simple way of being, and it made me realise how superficial life can be.

“Many successful chefs forget what it’s all about. They cook for other chefs, not their customers. It gets to be very superficial and we forget what reality is. They have nothing in India. They are so poor, but they produce this fantastic fresh food. They are a nation of chefs. One man asked me how much I earned back home and I didn’t know what to say. In the end, I said between £1,000 a week and £10,000, and his eyes stood out on stalks. He couldn’t believe it.”

The programme shows him learning cooking techniques from other people, something that hasn’t happened in a long time. “I did a biryani with a man who was so old that no one knew his age, but he was amazing.”

Ramsay does many strange and wonderful things — he hunts boar with a remote tribe, cooks goats in the ground, and gets pulled around a paddy-field by two crazed bullocks. “I went round the whole course. The producers nearly shit themselves. I thought, Jamie [Oliver] didn’t even get on that bucking bronco in the States and I thought he really had balls, so ... who’s got the balls now then?” He sits back and looks really pleased.

This is typical Ramsay — ebullient and bullish, even though last year he had to give up control of his restaurants in New York, Paris and Los Angeles and close the one in Prague. He now owns or has consultancies at 27 restaurants. “We opened too many too quickly,” he says. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like that, but some got delayed, then others opened on time and suddenly we had ten restaurants opening in a short period and we were overstretched.”

In the end, Ramsay and his father-in-law, Chris Hutcheson, who is also his business partner, ploughed millions of their own back into the business. “I put more than £5 million back in, but you’ve got to do that,” he says. “What else could I do? I’m not going to leave my chefs in the lurch.”

Ramsay is loyal to his multitalented chefs, such as Angela Hartnett (Murano) and Jason Atherton (Maze). He used to be loyal to Marcus Wareing, too. But that changed when Wareing left and set up on his own, citing Ramsay as the reason in an interview that appeared in a food magazine. Ramsay sighs when I ask him about this: “He [Wareing] spent over a decade being upset because he wasn’t being praised enough for his food. In his mystical little mind we had a fight, but there was no fight.”

Ramsay is about to open his own Petrus restaurant just down the road from Wareing’s Berkeley. Is he doing this to spite Wareing? “No,” he says, then laughs. “Heston [Blumenthal] is about to open at Hyde Park. There’s room enough for us all. It will be fine.”

He does appear surprisingly relaxed. But at the age of 43 and having been the driving force behind several Michelin-starred restaurants, he has probably earned the right to take a break occasionally.

However, it’s not really Ramsay’s food that is in the spotlight at the moment. It’s his television shows — Hell’s Kitchen, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares and, most recently, The F Word — and that he has rarely been out of the news. At the end of 2008 there were allegations of a seven-year affair with the author Sarah Symonds. Ramsay has always denied the claims. In fact, he talks about his wife constantly. Tana is currently appearing in the reality show Dancing on Ice. She has also carved out a niche career for herself writing family cookbooks.

“I’m very proud of her,” he says. “She’s been practising since September. She got an injury and has been on crutches, but she’s doing really well.”

Then there was the “boil-in-the-bag” fiasco, when it was revealed that one of Ramsay’s restaurants, Foxtrot Oscar, in Chelsea, West London, used preprepared food that was heated and sold with mark-ups of up to 586 per cent. Ramsay tells me that there was pressure on him to apologise publicly. “Apologise for what?” he says, almost spluttering with indignation. “When I was working at the Gavroche all those years ago, the duck terrine wasn’t made there. It was made outside, then brought to the restaurant wrapped in plastic. This is standard practice. What on earth was the fuss about? That doesn’t make the food bad. We were doing wonderful navarins. It really annoyed me.”

There was also the “Bill Turnbull” affair, when the presenter of BBC One’s breakfast show asked him if he cooked at any of his restaurants any more. “What a stupid question to ask,” Ramsay says. “Of course, I bloody don’t. I’ve been a chef for more than 20 years. I’ve slaved over a bloody stove and run kitchens and ... does a designer make every dress? Of course not. I am the most unselfish chef you’ll meet. I don’t put my name above every restaurant. I’m very clear about that. If you eat at Murano, you’ll eat a plate of food cooked by Angela. If you go to Maze, it’s Jason. I encourage people to find their own way and make their own successes.”

So, what does he do? “I went to India,” he replies. “I realised that I had to go back to what inspired me and that was cooking. Do you know, I was happiest when I was just starting out and learning how to cook. I was working in France and getting my arse kicked. If someone does that to me, it makes me want to work harder.

“It’s about discovering things, pushing myself, and I did that in India. It taught me a lot — that restaurants need to concentrate more on cooking for the customer, that simplicity is a good thing, that tastes and flavour are everything. I’m tweaking menus. I’m making our restaurants relaxed places to eat, with locally sourced food as much as possible. I want to see pollack and hake back on the menus.”

Then he sits back. “You know what?” he says, “I won’t be doing this when I’m 70. I’ll have fought my fires and retired. There will come a time when it will all be finished and that’ll be it for me.”

Gordon’s Great Escape, Channel 4, 9pm, Mon-Wed

All recipes extracted from Gordon Ramsay’s Great Escape, published by HarperCollins. Text © Gordon Ramsay 2010. Photography © Emma Lee 2010. To buy the book for £18.75 (RRP £25), free p&p, call 0845 2712134 or go to timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst