Sunday, 16 November 2008

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Gordon Ramsay: Don't call me a celebrity

Chef wants to be taken seriously

Gordon Ramsay would like to be the food world's Simon Cowell

Gordon Ramsay may be Britain's best known – and highest paid – chef but he hates the fame label.

The F Word star claims he wants to be seen as a serious chef, not a television personality.

‘Don’t call me a celebrity,’ he says. ‘I am a chef who happens to appear on telly.

‘Someone comes out of Big Brother, they get a page in a celebrity magazine, they are famous. So why compare me to them?

‘Being called a celebrity makes a mockery of how hard I have worked.’

Gordon, 41, recently revealed that with Tante Marie, the cookery school he's recently bought, he'd like to create a food version of the X Factor, cherry picking the best students to work in his restaurants.

‘I'm not copying Simon Cowell but it's clever what he's done,’ he tells the Telegraph Magazine. 'It's clever to search for talents and then sign them up.

‘If he can do that for music, why can’t I do that for food?’

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Bronwen Roberts