Gordon Ramsay's recipe for a happy family... while the Beckham kids seem to relish the limelight, the celebrity chef and his wife Tana were determined their children should forge their own career paths

Daily Mail​

3 days ago

Sunning themselves aboard a £16 million superyacht off the south of France earlier this month, David Beckham and Gordon Ramsay had plenty to catch up on.
Though somewhat unlikely friends, the two men have known each other for almost 20 years – and have been holidaying together since their children were young.
As they sailed around the aquamarine waters of the Bay of Cannes talk will, inevitably, have turned to one another's families.
But Gordon need not – perhaps dared not – have asked his old friend David: 'How are the kids?' For the feud running deep within the Beckham camp has been making headlines for months now, with each week bringing more damning reports of the worsening rift between Brooklyn, 26, his American heiress wife Nicola Peltz, 30, and his bereft family.
While the two younger Beckham boys – Romeo, 22, and Cruz, 20 – along with their sister Harper, 14, were aboard the yacht, Brooklyn was notably absent.
And more poignantly, on Saturday August 2, as his father was in deep conversation with his old friend, he and Nicola were secretly renewing their marriage vows, three years after their first wedding on the Peltz family's private estate outside New York – without inviting, or apparently even notifying, a single member of the Beckham family. Sources branded it 'the final kick in the teeth for David and Victoria'.
'David needs his friends more than ever,' a source close to the Beckhams told the Mail this week. 'Gordon has known him for such a long time and he's no doubt offering his counsel.
'He will be lending a listening ear and giving advice where he can. All of this is happening on such a public scale, so it's very upsetting for David and Victoria. They'll want to surround themselves with people who really know them and their family.'
While the two younger Beckham boys – Romeo, 22, and Cruz, 20 – along with their sister Harper, 14, were aboard the yacht, Brooklyn was notably absent
And there are few families who know the Beckhams better than the Ramsays. Over the years, they have holidayed together and marked birthdays and Christmases in each other's homes.
They first met when Gordon, now 58, was hired to cater for David's World Cup party in 2006 and their friendship blossomed when both families relocated to Los Angeles – David to play for LA Galaxy in 2007, and Gordon to run his own restaurant in 2011.
Their wives bonded and remain close today, with Tana, 50, still referring to Victoria, 51, as her 'bestie'.
The older Ramsay children are around the same age as the Beckham boys – Gordon and Tana are parents to Megan, 27, twins Jack and Holly, 25, Tilly, 23, and also to Oscar, six and baby Jesse, one.
When the families moved back to London, they settled within half an hour of each other: the Ramsays in a £7.5 million pad in Wandsworth, south-west London; the Beckhams in their £31 million Holland Park townhouse. For a time, it seemed these two A-list clans were destined to lead picture perfect, parallel lives. Yet today, their family dynamics could not be more different.
Last weekend Tana, Tilly and Holly's fiancé, Olympic swimming champion Adam Peaty, took part in a gruelling triathlon together in London, involving a 2km swim, 80km bike ride and 18km run.
Dubbing themselves 'Team Ramsay', the elated trio made the pages and websites of numerous media outlets, high on emotion and utterly exhausted at the end of the challenge.
Gordon was photographed proudly embracing his future son-in-law, Adam, 30, at the finish line – the ultimate symbol of family unity, from a man known for his fiery temper.
David, who is said to have found out about Brooklyn's vow renewal ceremony from an online news report, no doubt saw these pictures. And while he will be happy for his old friend, they may well have sparked other emotions – a pang, perhaps, of sadness.
For, family fall-outs aside, the Ramsay children have been on a different track to the Beckhams for quite some time now. 'They're a lot more normal than the Beckhams,' a source explains.
'There's none of the glitz and glamour in their everyday lives, they are not on yachts every day or at celebrity parties every night. They're down-to-earth and don't lean in to the A-list lifestyle.'
Gordon has been open about the fact he does not want to raise 'nepo babies', reportedly refusing to take his kids to expensive restaurants, booking them economy seats on planes – and insisting they won't inherit his £11 million property empire.
The same cannot be said for the younger Beckham boys, pictured earlier this week, happily holidaying aboard their parents' lavish yacht, Seven (Harper's middle name and also David's iconic Manchester United shirt number).
With no apparent income streams of their own it can only be assumed that model Romeo, and Cruz, a budding musician, are living off the family's £500 million fortune.
Not so the Ramsay children. Indeed, Megan, the eldest of the Ramsay brood, set the tone for a more everyday career path.
Having graduated from Oxford Brookes University with a degree in psychology in 2019, she now works as a police officer.
She is, her mum revealed in a recent interview, living back at the family home, and though she once had an Instagram account, now avoids social media entirely.
The same is true of her younger brother, Jack, who joined the military after graduating from the University of Exeter in 2000 and passed the demanding entry requirements to join the Royal Marines. 'He didn't ask to be born into a sort-of famous family, and he's doing as I did – he's grafting, fending for himself, becoming independent and not relying on his parents,' Gordon said in an interview in May.
'I think the beginning salary for a Royal Marine Commando today is around £17,549 – and the course is brutal, but his passing out parade and the Green Beret mean something to him.'
Jack and Brooklyn were, once upon a time, great friends, pictured at the gym and on nights out together when their families lived in Los Angeles. But they have now reportedly drifted apart.
Though David and Victoria tried to ground him by giving him a humble start in life – Brooklyn famously worked as a barista in a London coffee shop, earning £2.68 an hour, back in 2014 – his career path has veered away from convention towards a more A-list life.
Part-model, part-chef, part-photographer, part-businessman (he founded Cloud23, a hot sauce brand, last year), Brooklyn's 9-to-5 is anything but run-of-the-mill, giving him less and less in common with his childhood pal.
Holly Ramsay, Jack's twin, was the first in the family to court fame – but to a far lesser degree. Calling herself a 'digital creator' on Instagram, where she boasts 394,000 followers, Holly makes YouTube videos and, in 2021, launched a successful podcast called 21 & Over, devoted to destigmatising mental health issues for young adults.
Holly, who studied fashion at Ravensbourne University London, revealed she had been diagnosed with PTSD, anxiety and depression after being sexually assaulted as a teenager. She is also sober, having given up alcohol in 2020, and got engaged to Peaty, who has battled alcoholism himself, last autumn.
Writing on Instagram, Gordon said he was 'so happy' for his daughter, adding: 'Adam is a very lucky man! Welcome to the family.'
The way he has been embraced by the Ramsays could not be more different to the distance between Nicola Peltz and the Beckhams.
While there were once gushing posts about Brooklyn and Nicola, an actress and daughter of the billionaire businessman, Nelson Peltz, on David and Victoria's social media accounts, these have all but disappeared. The most recent family portrait featuring them both dates back to December.
And while the Ramsays attended Brooklyn's £3 million wedding in Florida en masse in April 2022, relations seemed to have cooled with him and his bride since.
And the families' divergences continue. At 23, Tilly Ramsay is just a year older than Romeo Beckham. Both have shown signs of following in their famous fathers' footsteps: she as a chef; he as a footballer. But while Romeo's football dreams have come to an end – he was previously signed to Inter Miami II and Brentford B, but left to pursue a career as a model – Tilly is moving up in the food world. Having graduated from the University of Nottingham with a degree in psychology last summer, she moved to Ireland to complete a course at the prestigious Ballymaloe Cookery School.
'She paid for herself – worked, saved the money, and has gone off to culinary school,' Gordon said earlier this year.
'It just goes to show how unspoilt my kids are. They're individually following their own path and aren't dependent on their parents.'
Tilly, who has published a cookbook and appeared on TV countless times alongside her father, had a brush with real fame, when she appeared on the 19th series of Strictly Come Dancing in 2021.
It could have kick-started her celebrity career, but friends say that's not something she ever wanted. 'She's very shy, polite and not as confident as you'd imagine,' one says. 'You can't get more showbiz than Strictly, and that definitely thrust her into the spotlight, but she's just not into it.
'When it was over, she wanted to go back to normal life.'
As for the younger children in both clans, again the parenting differences are stark. While shielded from the spotlight to some extent, Harper Beckham made her public speaking debut last November, aged 13, at the Harper's Bazaar Women of the Year awards.
She previously attended the £10,500-per-term Glendower Preparatory School in west London and, though she has no social media of her own, regularly features on her parents' pages enjoying an idyllic upbringing at their country mansion in the Cotswolds.
Meanwhile, locals in Wandsworth are used to seeing Tana out with the boys – Oscar and baby Jesse – and say there are no airs and graces about them. Jesse is signed up for the local nursery, and Oscar takes swimming classes at a nearby council leisure centre. While Oscar does have an Instagram account – with 287,000 followers, and featuring joyful photographs of him eating ice cream, playing on Cornish beaches and posing for silly pictures with his parents – it's run by Holly and Tilly.
'With the Ramsays, what you see on social media is very genuine,' a source tells the Mail. 'The big shows of emotion, the loving messages – it's all real.'
Tana's Instagram, certainly, is undeniably wholesome, full of bathtimes, muddy walks and throwback pictures from when the children were tiny. Her friend Victoria's, by contrast, though peppered with loving tributes to her husband and children, is much slicker. She boasts 33 million followers to Tana's 355,000, after all, and has a multi-million-pound fashion and beauty empire to run, while Tana – a former teacher – sold her beauty salon in 2023 and is currently on maternity leave with Jesse.
A source tells the Mail the two women are quite different in their parenting styles. 'Victoria is a bit of an alpha mother, and there seems to be a lot of female rivalry in her relationship with Nicola.
'Tana comes across as much more mumsy. She's very open about being a mother, and the challenges of it, whereas Victoria would never speak about things like that. Perhaps she should – it might soften her image.'
That they are chalk and cheese is a reality not lost on the two women. 'I feel strange when I am invited to one of her fashion shows and see her in that mode; that's like a different person to me,' Tana said of her friend in an interview last year.
'To me, she's a girlfriend. I will pick up the phone when everything's going wrong, and it's just someone who knows me inside out.' Victoria, one hopes, feels the same way. Just as David has Gordon, she has a shoulder to cry on in Tana – with her down-to-earth approach to motherhood and her brood of successful, level-headed, financially independent children.
Indeed, some advice she gave on a recent podcast seems particularly poignant. 'I think the most important thing is for people to be honest and talk to each other, because we can all learn from that,' Tana said.
'I'm never, never afraid to be honest and tell people when I've messed up or think that I should have done something differently.
'There is no perfect... and who would want to be perfect?'