24 Hours to Hell and Back and Hell’s Kitchen star Gordon Ramsay may be insanely intense and downright terrifying in front of the cameras. But with his wife, Tana Ramsay, and five children — Megan, 22, Jack, 20, Holly, 20, Matilda, 18, and baby Oscar — he is a completely different person.
“Gordon just loves winding people up. Absolutely loves it,” Tana told The Telegraph. “You have to understand him to know what he’s like, and I understand him absolutely.”
Long before she “understood” him really well, the two met back in 1992 — when Tana was 18 and Gordon was 26. Bustle reports that Tana was dating a different British chef at the time. To make matters more complicated, that “different chef,” apparently, was Gordon’s friend Tim. Gordon really liked Tana when he first saw her, but, given the tricky situation, waited to ask her out.
Though, when fate finally brought them together (a.k.a. Tana became single), things weren’t easy. Working as a chef, Gordon would endure 16-hour days in the kitchen. This made it really hard for the couple to find time to be together.
“I would work, come home, sleep, and wake up again when Gordon finished work,” Tana previously told The Sun. “We’d meet up in the small hours. That was the only way we could be together, and we really wanted to be together.”
Their efforts to see each other paid off. Four years later, in 1996, Tana and Gordon got married in London’s Chelsea neighborhood.
Right off the bat, their marriage was tested as the couple had trouble conceiving. Adding even more stress, Gordon was having problems with the restaurant group that owned his Michelin-starred restaurant, Aubergine, at the time, as well.
Things turned around, though, when Tana and Gordon explored IVF. The treatment ended up working, and Tana gave birth to their first daughter, Megan, in 1998. About 11 months later, Tana got pregnant via IVF with twins — Jack and Holly. Then, in 2001, Tana and Gordon welcomed Matilda into the world without treatment.
While raising four young kids in the mid-2000s, the couple again encountered some hurdles. Reports surfaced in 2008 that Gordon had allegedly been involved in a seven-year affair with author of Having an Affair? A Handbook for the Other Woman Sarah Symonds and was seen leaving a hotel with her. While Gordon allegedly denied the claims, he also apologized to his wife for all the accusations.
Around the same time, Gordon and Tana got into a mess with Tana’s father, Chris Hutcheson. While Chris helped get Gordon’s first restaurant off the ground, the TV chef accused his father-in-law of embezzling more than 1.5 million pounds (roughly $2 million) and hacking into the company’s computers. Gordon’s father-in-law ended up in jail for six months.
According to Gordon, getting through this hard time in their marriage only made the pair even stronger.
“We had our family to protect and you become territorial. We looked after each other,” he said to The Daily Mail in 2016. “And it’s actually brought us — me, Tana, and the children — closer than we’ve ever been before.”
In 2016, the couple endured even more hard times. In May 2016, Gordon announced on The Late, Late Show With James Corden that he and Tana were expecting their fifth child together. At five months, though, Tana had a miscarriage.
Despite their utter devastation, Gordon said that the tragedy brought their “family unit even tighter.”
“We were devastated, but thankfully we’re through the worst now. It could happen at any time to anyone. It has brought us all so much closer,” he said at the time.
In recent years, their luck has turned around. In early April 2019, the couple welcomed their fifth child, Oscar, into the world. When announcing the news on Instagram, Gordon shared a photo of the pair looking as happy as ever.
