Marco Pierre White, the original bad-boy chef, is back. After eight years away
from cooking, he’s the new star of Hell’s Kitchen – the
ITV show originally imprinted on the national psyche by his former protegé
Gordon Ramsay.
At 33, White was the youngest chef ever to be awarded three Michelin stars,
the first British-born chef to achieve this, and he later made history by
giving them back. His unpredictable rages, his Byronic curls and his hectic
love life were equally legendary.
He ejected diners for doing little more than asking to choose their own cheese
and feuded bitterly with friends and business associates, from Ramsay to
Damien Hirst to Michael Winner. At times, his behaviour to staff who failed
to meet his impossibly high standards sounded almost cruel: he threw soup at
one employee, chucked a kitchen porter with a sore throat out into the cold
and even slashed an underling’s clothes with a carving knife for complaining
about the heat.
Rumours of a cocaine habit were inevitable, particularly when White ended up
in hospital after a panic attack. But he insists he has never taken illegal
drugs and, in 2000, won an historic libel case against The New York
Times and the International Herald Tribune for saying he had
had a “well-publicised bout with drugs and alcohol”. In fact, until the age
of 38, White had barely touched booze because he’d been put off by his
father’s heavy drinking. He still doesn’t drink much – after a couple of
glasses he gets bored. And he hates getting tipsy.
The adverts for Hell’s Kitchen make you do a bit of a
double-take. Can this heavy middle-aged man really be the same lanky hunk
who single-handedly reinvented the chef as sex-god? His brooding good looks
then were legendary: women sent him knickers in the post and he even kissed
one customer while her husband waited for the next course. He dated a string
of glamorous women and married three times: his showbizy second marriage, to
the model Lisa Butcher, didn’t last all that much longer than the honeymoon.
His tempestuous third marriage, now in its final throes, has been
characterised by fiery rows both in private and in public. In their 14 years
together, it has been reported that his Spanish wife Mati has accused him of
affairs in front of diners, thrown wine and a lamp at him. At one stage, he
even spent 14 hours in the local police station after a row at home,
although he has always maintained that he has never been violent. Now,
although their divorce is nearly final, White is still hoping for a
reconciliation, not least for the sake of their three children.
He’s put the tantrums behind him
In person, it’s clear that the Hell’s Kitchen ads don’t
do White justice. Certainly the once-hollow cheeks have filled and 20-plus
years of heavy smoking, high stress and adrenalin have taken their toll.
But, at 45, he still cuts a fine figure with his collar-length ringlets,
white T-shirt and checked Van sneakers. At 6ft 3in (1.9m), with massive
hands and an intense stare, White must have been a truly terrifying prospect
wielding a carving knife.
But all that is in the past. He claims to have mellowed in middle age and has
put all the bad language and temper tantrums behind him. He says: “Before I
could ever consider doing Hell’s Kitchen, I had to be at one
with myself. I couldn’t expose myself to it unless I felt confident within
myself that I could deal with it without making myself look stupid.”
White seems guru-like as he holds court in the sunny courtyard of the Chiswick
branch of Frankie’s, part of the family restaurant chain he founded with the
jockey Frankie Dettori. His two sons, Luciano, 13, and Marco, 12, hang about
in the background, bored and restless, but he has to ask them to be quiet
only once. He and Mati also have a daughter, Mirabelle, 6, and he has a
daughter Leticia Rosa, 17, from his first marriage to Alex McArthur.
White’s new self-knowledge has been achieved through fishing, hunting and
stalking deer. Long spells in the countryside have helped him to deal with
the emotional insecurity that was the legacy of a tragic childhood, and to
leave behind the panic attacks and depression that came with his success,
and the fulfilment of a dream he had pursued since the age of 17.“Maybe it’s
like someone who has just run a marathon; they’re exhausted, the race is
over and they’ve achieved everything they set out to achieve, but the day
after I was awarded three Michelin stars I went into depression.”
He carried on cooking for five more years, but the thrill of chasing his dream
had gone; and he could no longer bear seeing his children only when they
were asleep. His momentous decision to give back the Michelin stars
inevitably had unforeseen repercussions. “When I retired from cooking, I
felt as if something had been taken from me. So I did exactly what I did
when my mother died: I put myself in the woods, into the streams and fields.
I like to put myself in environments which are much bigger than me. I gave
myself a five-year period to discover myself.
“It wasn’t premeditated, but I slowly started to question things and
understand myself as a person. I’d never given myself time to do this
before. All my energies had gone into my food and my restaurants and not
into me as a person. I was obsessed by what I did, fuelled by insecurities,
chasing something I never wanted. That’s why I could give it away so
easily.”
A tragic loss in childhood
He’s not religious, although he goes to church twice a year, to light a candle
on his mother’s birthday and on the anniversary of her death. She died
tragically when he was 6 years old of a brain haemhorrage. Four years later,
his father was told he had lung cancer, though he lived on into his
seventies. White’s own health has not been robust. At the height of his
career as a chef, White suffered from panic attacks in his sleep. He even
ended up in hospital with chest pains, convinced he had swallowed his keys.
The panic attacks were linked to high blood pressure caused by stress and
monstrous working hours and stopped when he retired from cooking. Giving up
fizzy drinks and coffee probably helped: they were forbidden when he
developed a stomach ulcer in his late thirties.
He’s healthier these days, although he never goes to the gym and has smoked
for years. But he insists his smoking is under control: he never smokes at
home and only lights up when he gets in the car in the morning. He doesn’t
drive, he has a chauffeur, having never taken a test. Journeys, he says, are
a good time to work. There’s not one minute of dead time in White’s
schedule. He may get less stressed these days but he admits he’ll always be
obsessive and still thrives on hard work.
He points out that he can get away with being a bit overweight because he’s so
tall. He loves food and his own tastes are simple. “Eating is one of the
most important aspects of living. I like indulging. I like to eat one food
at a time, to savour each individual thing.”
A self-confessed romantic in all areas of his life, he has a particular
nostalgia for the traditional English comfort food of his childhood: steak
and kidney pie, dumplings, and rhubarb from the garden. He grew up in Leeds
but he spent many happy hours as a child roaming the Yorkshire countryside,
learning to love nature and even occasionally doing a little poaching.
His love of homely food means that he believes passionately that when it comes
to cooking there is no need to gild the lily. “Mother Nature is the true
artist. The most poisonous sauce in any kitchen is the chef’s ego. We’re not
that clever: just cook food perfectly and allow her to show herself off.” So
it’s surprising to hear that he’s partial to the occasional McDonald’s,
particularly after a morning’s deer stalking, praises Knorr stock cubes and
questions the obsession with organic food. “It’s fine if you can afford it.
But not everyone can. I think the provenance of food is more important,
getting your meat from the local butcher rather than the supermarket.”
He is equally critical of Jamie Oliver’s campaign to improve school food. He
says: “It’s all going pear-shaped. How do you change habits? Just by
changing the menu? No. By actually getting in there, rolling up your sleeves
and sacrificing a year of your life to do it. Invest your time in one
school. Don’t use it as some cynical vehicle to get column inches.” School
wasn’t much fun for White, partly because he is dyslexic. It’s something he
became aware of only recently because his son had dyslexia diagnosed. After
doing “really badly” at school, White found an environment where he felt as
comfortable as he did in the countryside. In the kitchen he was able to
express himself nonverbally, through food and hard work.
Working hard came naturally, thanks to his father, also a chef, who, White
says, “programmed” his son to be like him. “I did everything he told me to.
He was very strong, but he lacked patience.” After White senior remarried
father and son lost contact for over ten years. Looking back, White says: “I
didn’t go home for a few weeks because I was doing other things, and then it
became embarrassing and I was too scared to go home, because I felt I’d let
him down. And then I just stayed away for ten years.”
“My father had controlled me all my life”
White finally rang his dad on the day he became a father himself for the first
time, although it was another two years before they actually met. “In a
strange way it was right that I didn’t see him for all those years because
it allowed me to be me. He had suppressed me and controlled me all my life.
When we did meet again I had a certain amount of success and I was starting
to accept myself. The day I no longer feared my father was the day I could
enjoy him as a person. It was as simple as that.” He is determined to behave
differently with his own sons. “I let my boys have lots of room. As long as
they are respectful and they stay within the boundaries, that’s fine. I
allow them to be them.”
Before he gathers the boys up and prepares to drive off into his beloved
countryside, White signs my copy of his autobiography, The Devil in the
Kitchen, which is full of moody photos of himself at the peak of his
success as a chef. It’s disappointing that there are so few recent pictures,
but his mysterious message is totally what you’d expect from the new Marco
Pierre White: “Life throws many things at us,” he writes, but “very few
friends.”
Hell’s Kitchen begins on Monday, 9pm, ITV1. The book accompanying
the series, Marco Pierre White in Hell’s Kitchen , is
published by Ebury Press, £14.99
