INTERVIEW:Working for the famously foul-mouthed Gordon Ramsay must be difficult enough, but when you'e a young woman in a male-dominated kitchen, it can be a lot tougher. But that hasn't stopped Irish chef Clare Smyth from rising to the top, as Louise Eastdiscovers.

WHEN CLARE SMYTH was just 26, Gordon Ramsay took her to one side and told her she should model herself on the one person least likely to appeal to a young girl from Co Antrim: Margaret Thatcher.

“Which is a terrible thing to tell someone,” says Smyth, with a roll of the eyes and almost maternal affection. “But I see what he meant. It was a wake-up call to stop being this little girl. I had the skills, but I needed to be able to command a team.”

Five years on and Clare Smyth, now 31, is the head chef at Gordon Ramsay’s eponymous restaurant in Chelsea, generally regarded as the lode-star in the Gordon Ramsay firmament. When Ramsay puts his name to a line of saucepans, or a glitzy eaterie in Dubai, he does so as a man whose London restaurant is the city’s sole possessor of three Michelin stars (Britain’s only other three-wheelers are the Fat Duck and the Waterside Inn, both in Berkshire).

It’s a position of awesome responsibility, even without factoring in a boss whose capacity for wrath is so gargantuan entire television formats have been built around it, yet Smyth does a damned good job of making it all seem rather effortless. She’s blonde and tall and has the potential to be about as cuddly as an ice pick, but is, in fact, friendly and chatty, albeit with one-and-a-half heaped tablespoons of composure thrown in.

The latter is a quality she has needed in industrial quantities. When Ramsay announced, in 2007, that his new head chef at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay was a woman of 29, the press started circling. If the restaurant lost a star, it seemed a distinct possibility that Smyth’s head (severed and resting on a bed of ire) would follow shortly thereafter.

Behind the double doors, the atmosphere in the kitchen was little better: “I felt that if I lost a star my life would be over,” Smyth says matter-of-factly. “I was so over-the-top about making sure everything was absolutely perfect. I was really hard on the team until I got myself settled.”

Some might call that payback. When Smyth first walked into the Gordon Ramsay kitchen back in 2002, the other chefs told her, to her face, that she, a woman, did not belong there and should leave. Ramsay reckoned she’d last a week. Instead, Smyth put her head down and got to work, turning up at 5.15am to get her station ready, and never, ever going home early, even when Gordon told her to. “That’s the one sure way to lose all respect from everyone. It’s the worst thing you could do.”

Traditionally, Michelin-starred kitchens are bastions of the kind of unreconstructed sexism hard to find outside of the set of Top Gear, and Smyth is only too aware that any small failure would be ascribed not to inexperience or ineptitude but to her gender.

“I’ve been really conscious of that my whole life. I’ve never been able to say I’m tired or I’ve cut myself, because the only reason is ‘Well, you’re a girl.’ But guys, you know, they say they’re tired or they’ve cut themselves all the time. They’re the biggest bunch of babies.”

She laughs, then turns serious. “It’s the same even now. If anything happened here, it’d be ‘Oh, she’s a woman, she’s not strong enough.’ I think you carry that with you your whole life.”

Two years after she took the helm, all stars are still present and correct, but the kitchen is somewhat changed. “It’s very different because I’m in charge – and it is different having a woman in charge. The guys are really nice and polite with each other and there’s real camaraderie in there.”

Smyth looks charmingly smug as she recounts how a young recruit from France recently had his flat robbed and without prompting, the rest of the staff had a whip-round. “I just thought, God, it wouldn’t have happened a few years ago. It has all gone a bit soft in there.” Smyth beams.

The journey from a farm outside Bushmills to the top of the culinary ladder has been astonishingly quick, not because it has been easy, but because Smyth appears to have the focus of the Hubble telescope and the energy of the Hadron Collider. Hers was an agricultural upbringing. Her dad had a dairy herd and trained horses, her aunt grew potatoes, her uncle dealt in fertiliser. Only recently has she realised what a good training this was for a nascent chef; not only did she have a head-start on her contemporaries when it came to butchery and knowledge of the growing seasons, but the hours of a farmer and a Michelin-starred chef are remarkably similar: up at 6am and rarely a day off.

As a 15-year-old though, Smyth dreamt only of escape. “From a very young age, I had my sights set on getting to the top of the industry,” Smyth says. “I’m a very competitive person. My father got us into show-jumping, and I always had to win,” she says matter-of-factly. Were she not a chef, she reckons she’d probably be a show-jumper now. “But I don’t ride any more. If I do something, I need to do it 100 per cent.”

Telling her parents she was heading to England on a two-week holiday, she enrolled in catering college and found a job at Grayshott Hall, an exclusive health farm in Surrey. Once there, she broke it to her mum and dad that she wasn’t coming home. She was just 16.

“It was really, really hard,” she says quietly of her two years working and studying full-time. “If I think about it now . . . If that was my child . . . My mum came and tried to take me home, but I wouldn’t go. I was so determined, so headstrong. I knew what I wanted to do.”

Luckily, it paid off. At 18, she headed to London and a job at Bibendum and shortly after that, took her first head chef role at a boutique hotel opened by friends in Cornwall. Even then, she spent her holidays working for chefs such as Heston Blumenthal, Michael Caines and the Roux brothers, until, at 24, she converted a similar stage with Gordon Ramsay into a full-time position.

One last dream remained – to work for Alain Ducasse, the unchallenged emperor of the Michelin dynasty. Ramsay agreed to release her on sabbatical and after a lot of chutzpah, and a four-week intensive French course, Smyth convinced Ducasse to take her on at Louis XV in Monaco.

Ducasse’s kitchen was an even tougher nut to crack than Ramsay’s. There, Smyth was not only young and female, but also, he declared, English. “It took him about a year before he said to me, ‘But you’re Irish!’ I said yeah, and he said, ‘Well, that’s okay then.’ ” Smyth still describes the restaurant Louis XV as “a second home” but after 18 months there, her relationship with Ducasse threatened to collapse, soufflé-like, when Ramsay offered her the head chef position at Chelsea at the same time as Ducasse suggested she open his new restaurant at the Dorchester hotel as executive sous-chef.

“No one says no to Alain Ducasse,” Smyth says, looking, even now, faintly nauseous at the thought. “He was so angry with me. He said I was the last English person he’d have at Louis XV.” She sat on the wall outside the restaurant in a frenzy of despair (“I just kept thinking, what have I done, what have I done? All I did was work really hard my whole life. I didn’t want to upset the biggest chef in the world, and my idol”), until a couple of her fellow chefs pointed out that she had just got job offers from two of the world’s best chefs.

Smyth chose Ramsay and London, and two years on and a few friendly dinners with Ducasse under her belt, she’s philosophical: “You know, he would have done the same.”

She is similarly sanguine about Restaurant Gordon Ramsay’s prospects during the financial storm. Ramsay himself is not immune – according to recent reports, profit at Gordon Ramsay Holdings has plummeted by 90 per cent, causing the chef to plough millions of his own money into the company – but the place Smyth calls “a little gastronomic box on a busy road in Chelsea” is still booked out, weeks in advance.

“I say to the guys in the kitchen, you have to think about how lucky you are. Yesterday, I bought a thousand pounds worth of white truffles. You’re not going to see that in many restaurants.” For Smyth, it’s this purchasing power, and the 18 chefs available to transform it, that makes working for Ramsay a no-brainer. If she has plans to set up on her own, she’s not sharing them, nor is she planning to take a step back from the coal-face for personal reasons, any time soon. “I do want to have a family. I give myself another five years at the top, and then I’ll have to think about stepping back and having a family. It is different for a woman. If you want a family, you can’t continue doing 17-, 18-hour days, and of course, it plays havoc with your relationships.”

Only one question I ask Smyth seems to rattle her, and that is when I question how she’s perceived within the industry. After circling round it a couple of times, she volunteers the information that her toughness in the kitchen is so legendary, that a friend heard tales of it in the kitchens of Paris.

“I worry about being considered too tough. As a woman, it’s not a good thing. You still want to be feminine, but where do you draw the line? I’ve struggled with that. How do you remain feminine, and a young woman, and command a team of 16 to 18 young men? You don’t want to behave like a guy, but at the same time, you have to command a brigade.

“I have got a reputation for being a bit harsh, but yeah, you have to be. I have a big problem with justice, you know? If someone overcooks something, it’s a mistake. If someone’s been careless or they’re not thinking about what they’re doing because they’re having a laugh, that’s another issue for me.

“That’s when I think, ‘No, I can’t stand here and let it go.’ It’s disrespectful to the produce, to the guests and to the restaurant. People wait six months for a table here. It’s their birthday, their anniversary, they’ve come from wherever in the world to eat here. They’ve trusted us.

“As long as they walk out the door and they’re happy, that’s the most important thing to me. I would be the biggest idiot in the world, to work an 18-hour day only for someone to be disappointed.”

It’s not quite Margaret Thatcher, but Ramsay’s advice to his protege has clearly paid off. Her kitchen’s happy, Gordon’s happy, the Michelin inspectors are happy, and most importantly of all, Clare Smyth is happy: “It doesn’t matter how tired I am, I just love being here. I love cooking, I love touching things. When I’m in the kitchen, I’m at peace.”

Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, 68 Royal Hospital Road, London, SW3 4HP, tel: 00-44-207352-4441, www.gordonramsay.com

Clare Smyth's food philosophy

"I'm very seasonal, very natural. I don't think many chefs really cook with vegetables, but it's something I really enjoy doing. Vegetables are like a vase of flowers – you've got so many different flavours and textures.

On the menu at the moment, I've got a whole, braised English cèpe en cocottebecause the cèpesI got were just so perfect, I couldn't cut them. So I decided to braise them whole with Bayonne ham and all sorts of autumn fruit and vegetables: little apples from the orchard, celery, chestnuts, Swiss chard, all braised in a cocotte so all the juices are in there. The jusis just taken at the end and finished with a dash of olive oil and vinegar, and that to me is the essence of cooking.

It's not necessarily based around the protein, the meat or the fish, it's based around the cèpe because that's the most amazing thing. That's my kind of dish."