They have always loved Brits on Broadway. Mamma Mia and Eric Idle’s Spamalot are playing in New York’s theatreland, while Paul McCartney’s Behold My Heart, a work for chorus and orchestra, is about to open at Carnegie Hall.

But this autumn the hottest British act in Manhattan is a couple of blocks off Broadway on West 54th Street. He is already a television star, thanks to the American version of his hit programme Hell’s Kitchen. Now his own live show is about to open.

“I’m f****** shitting myself,” said Gordon Ramsay, as he stood in the kitchen of his new restaurant, Gordon Ramsay at the London (NYC) hotel. Next week’s New York opening is the biggest gamble since he started his first eponymous restaurant in Chelsea eight years ago.

He is the first British chef with three Michelin stars to open a restaurant in the most demanding market in the world.

New York has already cost Ramsay’s firm, Gordon Ramsay Holdings, run by Ramsay and his father-in-law Chris Hutcheson, more than £3m to set up.

Two other new American ventures — Cielo in Boca Raton, Florida, and Gordon Ramsay at the London (LA) hotel which will open next year — will double that figure.

“We’ve been paying out huge sums, including salaries for people who have not even served a single table for us yet. It’s a hairy business,” said Ramsay.

The chef hopes that Gordon Ramsay at the London (NYC) will join the three New York restaurants that have a “perfect” Michelin three-star score. If all his new American ventures are successful, they could generate £30m of business a year for the next 10 years.

Ramsay could not have picked a tougher time to move into Manhattan. The world’s most celebrated chefs have beaten him to it and are already dressing their Maine peeky-toe crabs and layering foie gras parfait.

Established masters such as Nobu Matsuhisa have increased the number of restaurants they run in Manhattan. There are now three Nobus — more than in any other city.

Thomas Keller, America’s most-celebrated chef with two Michelin three-star restaurants, including the French Laundry in California, has opened Per Se in the Time Warner Centre on Columbus Circle.

Alain Ducasse, who operates more Michelin-starred restaurants than any other chef, has moved into Essex House hotel, just off Central Park, and is about open another in the refurbished, five-star St Regis Hotel.

Joel Robuchon, whose L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon has just opened in London, has launched his first American L’Atelier in the Four Seasons Hotel.

And, if all that wasn’t enough, Ramsay’s London rival, Alan Yau, who has proved that Chinese food can be as modern as Japanese with his Michelin one-star Hakkasan and Yauatcha restaurants in Soho, is teaming up with the best-known hotelier in New York, Ian Schrager, to create the Park Chinois restaurant in Schrager’s latest hotel, the Gramercy Park.

Ramsay may be late to the table but he is determined to make up for lost time. He is raising his profile in the only way he knows — by starting a fight. Ramsay sparked a 10-course slanging match with his rivals last week by declaring that London, not New York, is now the world’s food capital.

“I know I have to be in New York, but the quality is much higher in London,” he told The Sunday Times.

The former Glasgow Rangers footballer, who turns 40 this week, lambasted his competitors in familiar style. “We are the only people who are coming over and financing our own restaurant,” he said. “For the rest — take Joel Robuchon — it’s just about the name. Joel goes out there, like 10 minutes before it opens, and then he pisses off somewhere else.”

He dismissed Keller’s Per Se as “too big, with the kind of clinical atmosphere that you get when you decide to open in a shopping mall”.

Ramsay’s rivals took the bait — and suddenly all Manhattan was talking about the gobby Briton’s restaurant.

Keller dismissed his criticisms as old hat. “The shopping mall comment has been made before,” he said. “I’ve got over it because we, as restaurateurs — Gordon Ramsay included — can only control the interior space.”

He rejected Ramsay’s accusation that his restaurant is clinical. “We have a natural-wood fireplace, wood and leather,” he said.

Ramsay’s claim that Robuchon merely lends his name to each L’Atelier, provoked a sharp-clawed response from a man who likes to balance langoustines on the heads of bolshie sous-chefs.

“His views are completely fake,” Robuchon said. “Let Gordon Ramsay know that I spent 76 days in America this past year, 12 hours a day in the restaurant.”

From his lofty perch at the Gramercy Park hotel in downtown Manhattan, Yau, the Hong Kong-born, London-based restaurateur, dismissed Ramsay, Ducasse and Robuchon as dated. “There is an over-consumption of French cuisine. We will stand out more than just A-N-other French restaurant,” he said.

Laurent Plantier, who runs Ducasse’s global business empire, leapt to the defence of Gallic gastronomy. “It is a cliche to say it’s dated,” he said. “There are plenty of modern French restaurants opening in New York, thanks to Alain, Joel and Gordon. There are a lot of clichés about Chinese restaurants, too, you know — that the kitchens are dirty, for example.”

The New York private-equity firm Blackstone is backing Ramsay by investing almost £30m in the London (NYC) and as the temperature in New York’s kitchens reaches boiling point, what diners and investors are asking is: Who will win the food fight? Unsurprisingly, Ramsay insists he will eat the Big Apple. “We are offering something unique,” he announced. “We do a bar and a casual-dining restaurant, with a menu similar to our French Asian tapas at Maze in London. We do fine dining with a menu similar to Royal Hospital Road in London.

“But, unlike anyone else, we are doing the full food and beverage for the hotel. So, if you come for supper you can stay over and enjoy a Gordon Ramsay room-service breakfast. It will be the best room service in the world.”

Ramsay describes the bar, designed by David Collins, the man behind the Blue Bar in the Berkeley Hotel in Knightsbridge — a favourite haunt of Madonna — as “very modern New York”.

He added: “Even our banqueting will be the best, with real silver and fine bone china.”

Ramsay claims that he is receiving more than 1,500 reservation enquiries a day. He is even trying to put one over the opposition by stealing their best staff. When Hutcheson ate at the Ducasse restaurant in Essex House a few weeks ago, he handed out business cards to key staff to lure them to Ramsay.

But Ramsay’s London rival, Yau, refuses to be outdone. He insists that his marriage of modern Chinese interior design and modern Chinese food at the Gramercy Park is more in tune with modern tastes.

“There is a culinary shift towards Asian cuisine in general,” he said. “The rise of China and Chinese food now mirrors the rise of Japan and Japanese food in the late 1980s. This is China’s moment.”

The proof of the pudding — and the business — will be in the eating, especially that done by the men and women who produce the Michelin food guide.

The latest American guide has just been published. Only three New York restaurants have a maximum three stars — Keller’s Per Se, Jean Georges and Le Bernardin.

Next year Ramsay and all his competitors are desperate to be named the fourth.

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