(Bloomberg) — On a grey morning in October, Gordon Ramsay bursts into the kitchen of his south London house, pop music blaring from the radio.

At the heart of the room stands a $109,000 French cooking range that weighs 2.5 tons and had to be lowered by crane into the celebrity chef's home.

Ramsay, who is six feet, two inches tall and weighs 215 pounds, is wearing jeans, a tight black T-shirt that accentuates his muscles and a Bell & Ross watch — a Swiss brand marketed to soldiers, bomb-disposal experts and other "men facing extreme situations."

The 43-year-old Scot pours himself a juice, sits at the kitchen table and looks back on his own extreme situation: a year in which his global restaurant empire almost went bankrupt.

In the fall of 2008, his London-based Gordon Ramsay Holdings Ltd. breached the covenants on a 10.5 million-pound loan and overdraft facility from Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc.

The bank hired KPMG to perform an independent review of the firm, 69 percent of which is owned by Ramsay and 31 percent by his father-in-law, Chris Hutcheson.

In December 2008, Ramsay says, KPMG recommended that the company declare bankruptcy, fire hundreds and close all but its best-performing restaurants.

"Everything was on the line," he says. "December, January, February and March were the most highly pressurised, s- —tiest, most awful four months I've ever had in business."

Ramsay was in Hollywood for most of the first 12 weeks of 2009 shooting the US version of Hell's Kitchen, the reality show he fronts for the Fox network.

After a day of filming, he'd often be on the phone for hours at night, battling to save the business.

The stress was so intense, he says, that he'd go for runs in Malibu at 4.30 a.m., wearing a black vest loaded with 50 pounds of weights.

For Ramsay, bankruptcy was unthinkable even if it made financial sense.

"There was no f***ing way that was ever going to happen," he says. "That was never even an option."

It would have been the most public of failures for a famously combative chef with 12 Michelin stars, surpassed only by Frenchmen Joel Robuchon and Alain Ducasse.

Ramsay's breakthrough came in 2001, when private-equity firm Blackstone Group LP asked him to run the restaurant at Claridge's, a landmark hotel it had bought in London.

"I thought it would be clever to have a bad boy there, and Gordon was the baddest," says John Ceriale, Blackstone's senior adviser for the lodging industry.

By 2006, Ramsay had nine restaurants in London. Ceriale then asked him to create restaurants in Blackstone's overseas hotels, too.

Ramsay opened in New York that year; Prague and Boca Raton, Florida, in 2007; and Hollywood and Paris in 2008.

He rented the properties from Blackstone and used his non- restaurant earnings to equip the kitchens — deploying income that would have been taxed at 40 percent in the U.K.

Every one of these overseas ventures has lost money. In New York, where he opened two restaurants in Blackstone's London NYC hotel, Ramsay says losses reached $4 million a year, with a unionised staff costing 80 percent of revenue.

Hutcheson says they didn't think locally. For example, they neglected to take into account how little alcohol New Yorkers would order at lunch.

Ramsay's foray into Prague failed in early 2009.

He also tripped up in France where he opened at the Trianon Palace Versailles, on the outskirts of Paris.

Hutcheson says they lost as much as $300,000 a month there in 2008, with wages consuming 90 percent of revenue.

To avert bankruptcy, Ramsay and Hutcheson poured nearly $15 million of their personal savings into Gordon Ramsay Holdings in 2009, 69 percent of it from Ramsay.

They worked out an extension of tax payments with the British Government and cut the staff at their London headquarters to 58 from 86.

After weeks of negotiation, Blackstone agreed to assume ownership of the restaurants in Hollywood and Versailles, paying Ramsay a consulting fee to run them.

The restaurant in Prague was closed in February. In November, Blackstone also took control of Ramsay's restaurants in New York and Florida, paying him a percentage of revenue to act as a consultant.

"Financially, we weren't going to come out with much," Hutcheson says. "But you just want to stop these apparently endless losses."

In Ramsay's remaining restaurants, everything now is about cost control. In London, his bistro Foxtrot Oscar has closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.

Stuart Gillies, his head chef at Boxwood Cafe, has saved 1,500 pounds a month by no longer ordering flowers, and he now uses cheaper cuts of meat, such as beef shoulder, that he says require more skill to prepare.

Ramsay is moving ahead with two new projects in 2010: Petrus will relocate in London's Belgravia neighbourhood in January, and the Savoy Grill will reopen after a renovation.

Still, Ramsay will focus as much as ever on TV. "I want a life out of my kitchen," he says.

In the future, Hutcheson says restaurants may become even less of a priority for Ramsay. "I can run the business in Gordon's name," he says. "TV is his forte. That's what he likes doing."