Gordon Ramsay says he and his wife, Tana, built a habit early in their relationship that never really went away: going out to restaurants and collecting menus. The chef said the practice started when they were still unknown, long before the global restaurant empire and television fame that followed.
“Ever since I started dating [my wife Tana], we used to go out to restaurants early on [in our relationship], and we’d collect menus,” Ramsay said, adding, “We always ask for a menu.” He said Tana would sometimes suggest getting the chef to sign it, but he would refuse because, as he put it, “back in those days, no one knew who we were.”
The collection has grown over the years to more than about 750 menus, Ramsay said, along with wine lists that he has kept from meals out. Some of those wine lists were presented so ceremonially that he said he has occasionally been charged for taking them home. “It’s a very shabby thing to do, but I have some of the most extraordinary ones,” he said.
Ramsay said the habit is still alive today. He and Tana recently visited a little place called Mijanès at the end of the ski season in March, and he said they have been there two or three times now. “We still collect them now when we go out,” he said, adding that they still look back at the old menus.
The menu habit sits alongside a more practical quirk from his restaurants: customers also take souvenir-style items. Ramsay said Lucky Cat chopsticks holders disappear by the thousands, with about two and a half thousand taken every week. That kind of take-home impulse has become part of the backdrop to a restaurant business that now includes a 100th location, Bread Street Kitchen at 22 Bishopsgate, while the keepsake collection at home keeps growing one menu at a time.
