My scallops are being served with awesome precision. The dish is immaculate, the service terrific. I glance at the waiter but he is carrying out his task with so much concentration that he cannot be distracted.
The reason for this is the identity of my guest, who is watching the serving of the scallops with such brooding intensity that I feel I have strayed into an Aztec ceremony.
This is Marco Pierre White, the best-known, most lauded of all English chefs — still only 32, born in Leeds, half-Italian, beefy, tousle-haired, charismatic and tempestuous: able to pass, in an eye-blink, from cherubic to volcanic. Or so the folklore says. By accident or design, my guest has attracted some of the most enviable publicity in the history of cooking.
The words used to describe him pop up all the time. Volatile. Flamboyant. Firebrand. Enfant terrible. Profane genius. Wild man. Wild child. Sulphurous. Rudest chef in London. The Apollo of the Aga. There have been wives, mistresses, children, dust-ups and bust-ups.
Over the years, the image that has been created is one of danger, decadence and theatricality. That is not bad going for a celebrity chef, though the decadence has been exaggerated. White says he has never tasted alcohol or tried narcotics, and that two years ago he gave up “smoking, gambling and marriage”.
There are those who must imagine that to enter one of Marco White’s restaurants is to stand a good chance of being grabbed by the chef-proprietor and flung into the street for some imagined slight or lapse in table manners. But when I asked him how many customers he had expelled from his restaurants in the whole of his career, the answer was only two.
We are sitting in one of White’s two restaurants, The Canteen at London’s Chelsea Harbour, which has its own chef and one Michelin star. White owns a one-third stake. Another co-owner is actor Michael Caine. White’s other establishment is The Restaurant at the Forte-managed Hyde Park Hotel, Knightsbridge, London, where he has two Michelin stars. He won his first Michelin star at the age of 25, his second at 27 — the youngest British two-star chef.
Our lunch was going well. No one had been assassinated, apart from (absent) rivals. There had been comedy to start with. Neither of us realised that the other had arrived. White had gone to the bar, I to the table. At 1.40pm the manager asked if I would like a newspaper to read, to help pass the time. Three minutes later the mistake was realised, and White and I shook hands.
He looked concussed with anger. But no one was to blame, and he was soon transferring food from his plate to mine. A large part of White’s charm derives from his candour. His working-class Yorkshire childhood lurks just beneath the surface. I asked him where his extreme physicality and pugnacity came from.
He said: “I have to break everything I touch. It’s just something I’ve always done. Maybe it’s a positive or maybe it’s a negative, or maybe it’s related to my need to progress professionally. Originally my aggression could be attributed to a lack of social skills — and shyness.
“Am I an arsehole? Some people say so. Some people rubbish me and my work, but who are these people? You don’t get two Michelin stars if you are only an arsehole. There is more to it than that. Here is an example. One of the things I believe in, in my restaurants, is value for money — affordable, Michelin-class food. Here in The Canteen, all starters are £6.50 and all mains £10.50. People can afford that. That’s why The Canteen turns over £70,000 a week.
“I want to achieve that sort of value for money at The Restaurant. It’s too easy to rip the customers off. A lot of that goes on. The way I’ll make my money is in the long run. The last thing I’m ever going to do is jeopardise what I’ve got already.”
White trained with the best chefs in Britain — above all, with Albert Roux, former mastermind at Le Gavroche, the first London restaurant to win three Michelin stars. “I am an offspring of all the great (English-based) chefs,” says White, naming others who guided him.
“I was lucky. I appeared at the right time. I worked long hours, won my first Michelin star, attracted a few tarts — suddenly I became Marco Pierre White. But as a cook gets older his cooking gets simpler, and as I get older I have become more of a recluse. I spend a lot more time in my restaurants than I used to. I don’t remember the last time I went to a nightclub, a dinner party or an event. I only deal now with a few old friends in the profession. I have my girlfriend, my two children — and fishing.”
Fishing looms large in a conversation with White. He hunts down macho fish: pike, barbel, grayling, tench and trout. He says his best pike weighed 32lb. A monster. Did he cook it? Not for the first time, a guileless little question produced contradictory answers from the master-chef. “Nah,” he said. “I never kill the fish. I couldn’t kill anything. I love nature too much — birdwatching, everything.”
Later, however, he said he liked shooting. “The sort of customers I get, some of them invite me to shoot. I love it. I used to be a poacher. That was my first job. I went shooting on a private estate not long ago and this huge cock pheasant came strutting along the ground. It would not get up. It would not fly. So I blasted it on the ground.”
One of White’s attractions is his hatred of taxi-drivers. I told him that I shared it. “They’re fascists,” I said, “completely rotten people, the same the world over.”
“Yah,” agreed the chef. “You’ve got it: fascists. I don’t own a flashy car. Don’t actually own a car ’cause I don’t even drive. But my girlfriend’s got an off-roader, the biggest you can buy, which I’m fitting out with bumper-guards and really major spotlights in case any taxi-drivers want to take us on.”
During lunch, White showed a flicker of temperament on only three occasions. He was irritated that the butter on our table was softer than it should have been, but said nothing. However, he told a waiter to go and tell someone in the kitchen to stop banging — “I did not come here today to listen to his noise” — and remonstrated with another waiter for serving me cold milk with my coffee.
“He asked for black coffee,” White told the waiter, “but if you’re going to give him milk, make sure it’s hot. Cold milk kills the flavour.” The waiter rushed away. White said to me: “Now he’s going frantic. Bet he thinks I’m an arsehole.”
On the strength of a single lunch, I formed the impression that White is a lot cleverer than widely realised. I suspect that people see his Italian side, the charisma and machismo, and forget the Yorkshire half — gall, grit, gumption.
At 3.30pm, I said I would pay the bill, giving him a chance to read the six-page fax that a waiter had handed him.
“Nah,” said White. “Forget it.”
“I’m supposed to pay,” I said. “That’s the idea. We choose the guest. The guest chooses the restaurant. We pay the bill.”
“Nah,” growled White.
“OK,” I said. “The food was great. No doubt I’ll return in my own capacity. Then I can pay for myself.”
“Yeah,” said the big man. “In your own capacity. That’s the bill you slip through the FT.”
The thought had never occurred to me.
“There you go,” he said, laughing loudly. “You’ve found the real Marco White.”
This piece was originally published on April 23 1994. Its author, Michael Thompson-Noel, held posts at the FT including travel editor, features editor and columnist. According to a colleague, he sought to make the paper “funnier, less stuffy, wilder, a little weirder”. He died in 2016
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