Looking back it seems crazy that I even considered reconciliation. I’m sure I knew by then that Lisa and I were not suited and that our marriage had been a mistake. Meanwhile, Mati and I hadn’t done anything more intimate than the occasional kiss, but there was a feeling that we were growing closer. However, for some strange reason, I found myself agreeing to Lisa’s suggestion.
Lisa and I spent Christmas together at the Manor House Hotel, in Wiltshire. Surrounded by a few hundred acres of parkland, the setting was romantic enough, but our attempted reunion was disastrous. It just didn’t work, put it that way. I was reminded of all the reasons we’d broken up, one of the major ones being that we had nothing in common. I just didn’t know her and she certainly didn’t know me.
It’s never going to happen between us, I thought, so I said to Lisa, “I have to get back to London.” We cut short our stay and a friend of mine, Gary Bentley, came and collected us and drove us back to London. He dropped Lisa at her flat and me at mine. That’s it, I thought. I’ve got my freedom now. I had promised to spend New Year’s Eve with Lisa and it was a promise I kept, but before she turned up at the flat, I spoke to Mati on the phone.
“What are you up to tonight?” she asked.
“I’m spending the evening with Lisa,” I told her.
“That’s nice,” said Mati sweetly. “You’re going to try and make it work again, then?”
I said, “Well, I’m not in love with her. I’m in love with somebody else.”
“Who?” asked Mati.
I didn’t tell her and she later said she didn’t think I was referring to her. I ended the conversation by telling Mati, “I’m very fond of you.”
The dillydallying with Mati couldn’t go on forever, though. My uncertainty, indecision and hesitation were proving too frustrating for her. Our relationship was cemented in early January 1993, when we sat alone in the Canteen in the early hours of the morning. The customers had long since paid up and gone and the staff had cleared up and headed off. It was just the two of us together in this massive restaurant at a table at the end of the bar. We were talking about this or that when Mati suddenly stood up, climbed over the table and kissed me. We spent the night together and then I gave her the keys to my flat again; this time she held on to them.
Michael Caine kept his nose out of it. I can’t recall him expressing an opinion about me breaking my never-date-the-staff rule. He had never been enthusiastic about my marriage to Lisa, although he’d never said, “You’re making a mistake.” Michael was too polite to say something like that. But then again, when I told him I was going to marry Lisa, he hadn’t said, “Great stuff, Marco,” either.
When word leaked out that Mati and I were seeing each other, newspapers dispatched their hacks and hackettes to trail us. One of the most persistent reporters was Deborah Sherwood of the Sunday Express. She was on my case morning, noon and night and arrived with a photographer at the Canteen one evening asking if she could speak to me. Deborah was thinking to herself, It could go one of two ways: Marco might want to have a drink with us or he might tell us to get lost. When she saw me walking in her direction with a glass in my hand, she thought, he’s obviously decided he wants to have a drink with us. I was not in that sort of mood. Instead, I removed the photographer’s camera from his hands and smashed it into tiny bits by hammering it hard on the Canteen’s tiled floor. They got the message and left the building, but not before Deborah, ever persistent, fired a few questions at me. I later paid for the camera. Like I said, she caught me in the wrong mood.
Mati became pregnant, and in December 1993 Luciano was born. A couple of months before he was born, Mati and I and a couple of friends went off for a break in Yorkshire. We were driving back down the A1 when I nodded off in the backseat. I must have had a nightmare and woke screaming, “Please stop the car. Get this car off the motorway.” I came to my senses and apologized for the outburst, then about fifteen seconds later we were overtaken by a lorry that pulled into our lane; the next thing we knew, our car became lodged between the lorry’s trailer and cabin. We were dragged down the road, with smoke all over the place and sparks flying, and then our car was catapulted across the road. We freed ourselves from the wreckage and wondered how the hell we’d survived, and when the police arrived at the scene, they were just as shocked that we were alive. They dropped us off at some motorway café and we called a taxi to take us back to London. When we arrived home, the house was freezing because the louvre windows had been left open. I stood on the window ledge trying to shut the window when it suddenly jolted upward and my head was crushed between the window and window frame. I was half dead. Weird that I should survive a horrific car crash then nearly kill myself trying to close a window.
NINETEEN
The Dream Becomes Reality
MY DREAM, OF course, was to win three stars from Michelin and I wouldn’t have come by the third one had it not been for Michael Caine. He was the instigator, the one who introduced me to his friend Rocco—that’s Sir Rocco—Forte, who had taken over the helm of the hotel company started by his father, the great hotelier Lord (Charles) Forte. Michael and Rocco met for lunch one day in 1993 and my name cropped up.
Rocco liked the idea of teaming up with Michelin-starred chefs. He had recently done a deal with Nico Ladenis, renting him a restaurant of the Grosvenor House Hotel, which Nico called Nico at Ninety. It went on to win three stars—so Nico had done well out of the deal. There were also benefits for Rocco, though. First, he got the glorious PR that comes with having an outstanding chef on the premises; and second, Nico’s restaurant provided an alternative for guests who didn’t want to use the main dining room of the hotel but didn’t want to travel too far to eat. Rocco is blessed with vision, and I think he was the pioneer of this clever idea of renting hotel space to chefs. So the deal with Nico had worked very well and having sorted out the Grosvenor House, Rocco had turned his attentions to the Hyde Park. The old grill was on its last legs, perhaps because the punters were dying off. Nothing lasts forever.
Michael brought together me and Rocco for a meeting. Rocco was a real gentleman, very charming and courteous, and he asked me, “How do you fancy taking your two stars from Harveys to the Hyde Park?” Transferring Michelin stars was possible. Others had done it, including Raymond Blanc, who had transferred his two stars from his city-center restaurant to Le Manoir. I would need approval from Michelin, but it was certainly doable. What’s more, I liked the prospect because I had outgrown Harveys and Wandsworth. With its forty-four covers, Harveys had brought me two stars, but it was too small to win me another. I had started to see it as little more than a shop front with fifteen tables. The Canteen, meanwhile, was not set up to be a three-star venture. The restaurant at the Hyde Park Hotel, on the other hand, was the big stage. It was Forte’s flagship hotel, a magnificent Victorian building that sits imposingly on that stretch from Knightsbridge to Hyde Park Corner. At the back, the hotel overlooks the park and across from the front entrance you’ll find Harvey Nichols and Harrods. It was the platform that would enable me to win three stars in the Michelin Guide. It was the place where my dream could—and indeed would— come true.
I visited the site with Rocco, did the deal and it all came together pretty quickly. In July 1993 I left Harveys, and two months later we opened Restaurant Marco Pierre White at the Hyde Park Hotel. At Harveys there had rarely been more than eight in the brigade, but at the Hyde Park I had sixteen, sometimes eighteen cooks. My team included five chefs who had been with me in the final days of Harveys: Robbie McRae and the aptly named Donovan Cooke, both of whom had worked at Michel Roux’s Waterside Inn before joining Harveys; Mikey Lambert, who had also worked at the Waterside and L’Ortolan before Harveys; Roger Pizey, who had won the Pastry Chef of the Year award while at Harveys; Lee Bunting, who had joined me at Harveys when he was a kid of sixteen or seventeen, after an unsuccessful and brief career as a waiter. Donovan and Mikey, by the way, later moved to Australia, where they have been voted the
country’s best chefs.
Others in the Hyde Park brigade included Robert Reid, who had just left Robuchon in Paris; Spencer Patrick, who’d come from Hambleton Hall; Richard Stewart and Robert Weston. Thierry Busset had worked at Gavroche and came in to join Roger on Pastry, while Charlie Rushton, who’d done time at Harveys, was brought back into the fold. The average age of the chefs was twenty-five. They weren’t kids. They were strong people whose heads were full of experience and culinary knowledge and whose bodies could stand the pace and physical demands of working sixteen or seventeen hours a day in a kitchen. I also introduced the sort of classical hierarchy I’d seen at Gavroche. There was me, my head chef, four or five sous chefs, three on Fish, three on Meat, three on Pastry and four on Larder. There were the chefs de partie, the premier commis chefs and the commis chefs. Each of them was a head chef in his own right.
This kitchen was big. The one at Harveys was so small that we had to store the vegetables in a shed in the courtyard. The size of the kitchen at Wandsworth prevented me from winning three stars because I was unable to show off different cooking techniques. You need to have the right number of staff and the right amount of space to do that, and as the kitchen was so cramped, I couldn’t fit in the staff or the techniques. At the Hyde Park, however, we had braised dishes, confit dishes, dishes en cocotte, dishes en vessie—an array of dishes that we couldn’t have done at Harveys. At Harveys there had been just a few dishes on the main course, but now, on the Fish section alone, we’d have six or seven dishes and the entire menu might contain fifteen main courses.
The food stemmed from classical French but veered toward simplicity. Pigeon with Foie Gras, wrapped in cabbage and served with pommes purée and black pepper, was a favorite. Lobster was grilled and served with a little truffle butter, pig’s trotter was served with sweetbreads and sauce périgueux, while the menu also included a French fillet of steak with horseradish, and guinea fowl with risotto of white truffle.
On the top of the menu I used a Salvador Dalí quote: “At six I wanted to be a chef, at seven Napoleon and my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.” The pudding menu contained the quote from the eighteenth-century food writer Brillat-Savarin: “To know how to eat well, one must first know how to wait.” That was a message to all those customers who kicked up a fuss when their food took time to prepare.
(Later, when I had an investment in a restaurant called Sugar Reef, I put on the menu “Be blonde,” and attributed the remark to General Custer. It was made up, of course, and was really a tribute of sorts to the captain of the Titanic, who apparently shouted, “Be British,” as his ship was sinking. On the pudding menu at the same restaurant, we used the quote “Yes,” and attributed it to the man from Del Monte— orders for desserts have never been better.)
To start with, we struggled. The trouble was we weren’t used to doing big numbers at lunchtime. At Harveys we’d been busy every night, but because we were in the middle of nowhere, we only did fifteen or twenty covers for lunch on a good day. At the Hyde Park we were doing three times that amount, maybe fifty or sixty for lunch. Then just as we were recovering from that service, we had to do up to a hundred covers for dinner. Cooks who had been strong enough for Harveys were now not so strong. They couldn’t grow. They couldn’t move on and up their game. I suppose it’s like a football team that goes from second to first division. If they don’t up their game, then they’re not going to stay in the premiership.
Consistency remained a priority. Derek Brown, head inspector of Michelin UK, had visited the Canteen one day and I’d chatted to him. I had asked him why Gavroche had been demoted, going from three stars to two. “Well,” he had replied, “three of the four meals I had that year were not up to a three-star standard.” Mr. Brown did not like compromise. His remark underlined my belief that every dish heading from the kitchen to the table would have to be of a three-star standard. I said to him, “I have always dreamed of winning three stars and what I do is look at the only three-star restaurant in London, Tante Claire. If I can beat them on all levels, you cannot deny me three stars.”
“Very clever,” Mr. Brown replied.
I would visit Tante Claire and study the dishes as they appeared on the table in front of me. As far as I was concerned, if we put our mind to it, we could beat Pierre on amuse-gueules, hors d’oeuvres, fish, meat, cheese, pastry, puddings and petits fours. The one area where Tante Claire exceeded was with its bread. He served the best bread in the country and that’s because it was one of his true passions; and to have a passion for something means that you have to seek great understanding of its creation, which, in turn, gives you a very good chance of perfecting it. It wasn’t just the recipe or the environment or the flour—which he imported from God-knows-where—it was the passion that put him ahead of me. You have to have the right pair of hands making the stuff.
For a while I worried about how Pierre’s customers were being served better bread than my customers at the Hyde Park. Then I remembered what Nico Ladenis had always said: if you can find someone who makes it better than you, give it to them to make it. I had no desire to learn about bread, it just didn’t turn me on, so I found a bakery that could do the job for me and they worked from our bread recipe.
Yet even before I started to tackle the cooking side, I became obsessed with what I call the illusion of grandness. The plates and silverware had to be the finest, and the tablecloths had to be beautiful. The walls of the restaurant were lined with wonderful paintings—I treated the Hyde Park as an art gallery. Not one of these things makes the food taste any better, of course, but all of them frame the food and help to make the customer feel that he or she is sitting in a magnificent restaurant. I also wanted to take the show from the kitchen into the dining room, so that there would a lot of carving in the room. I would do dishes for two, like gigot of milk-fed lamb, and roast pineapple with vanilla, which were carried into the dining room on silver trays. The impact was greater than at Tante Claire. For instance, rather than saving cash by putting five halves of scallops on a plate—as would have been customary in those days—I’d put five medium-sized scallops on a plate, so the dish had height and presence. You smelled three stars when you walked into the room. I had put Michelin in a position where they could not deny me my third star.
The pace was relentless. We worked six days a week and had little time for life outside the kitchen. I was living in Pont Street, a ten-minute walk away, and would leave home every morning at eight forty-five. In the kitchen I might do a bit of butchery, perhaps the mise en place, and then talk to the chefs de partie about dishes that were coming up. I’d talk through dish ideas with my head chef, Robert Reid. At eleven forty-five A.M. Mati would come in with Luciano and our new baby, Marco, and she would sit them on the passe while she had a cup of coffee. I was on one side of the passe and my family was on the other. Fifteen minutes later lunch service would start and we’d finish about two thirty P.M. Then I would do whatever paperwork was required, or perhaps meet with suppliers. People came to me; I would never leave the restaurant. In the late afternoon, Mati might come back and we’d have a coffee while the boys sat on the passe, then after dinner service I’d talk through the evening with my brigade before heading home. My head would hit the pillow at about one in the morning, so it was a fifteen- or sixteen-hour day Monday to Friday. Other members of the kitchen staff would start at seven thirty or eight in the morning. On Saturday I would go in at two o’clock in the afternoon and work until midnight, then on Sundays I slept.
In terms of standard, the front-of-house team matched the kitchen brigade. I had joint managers, Pierre Bordelli and Nicolas Munier, both in their early thirties, good looking and amazingly diplomatic; they knew how to handle the customers. Then I brought in the veteran Jean Cotat. He had worked for years with the Roux brothers and was known throughout London, rightly or wrongly, as the finest maître d’ who’d ever worked at Le Gavroche. Then Jean had a job at Tante Claire, which ended in strange circumstances.
A lady customer had asked where the toilets were and he had walked her to the door and then, as she went into the ladies’, he’d said, “Making room for the next course, madame?” Lord knows what had encouraged him to say such a thing, but the long and short of it is that Nic Munier knew Jean’s son, Simon, who, in turn, phoned to find a job for Jean. I was delighted to have him on board and he would work the last ten years of his career with me.
The exhausting routine made me tetchy when food wasn’t up to the right standard. One evening a chef presented a bowl of soup on the passe, awaiting my inspection. I would always dip my little finger into the soup to test its temperature and on this occasion the chef had delivered a fish soup that was lukewarm rather than piping hot. I called him over. “What is this?” I said.
“Soupe de Poisson, boss.”
“Cold Soupe de Poisson,” I told him and then I pulled his bib apron away from his chest and emptied the contents of the bowl down his front. I picked up the croutons and chucked them in. Next, I put the bowl in between his apron and chef ’s whites. Then I sent him back to the stove. Everyone in the kitchen found this incident very amusing, except for the young chef who was a walking bowl of fish soup. Yet he knew that five minutes later he’d be sniggering when one of his colleagues got a bollocking.
Customers were also prone to get on my wick. They would arrive in the restaurant and, in a flashy way in front of their friends, tell the maître d’hotel, “Get Marco to cook it.” This annoyed me. One day a man came in and ordered a bowl of chips, or french fries, adding, “Get Marco to do them.” He thought he was being funny by ordering fries in a posh restaurant when such a dish was not on the menu. I thought, fine, you can have chips, it’s not a problem, but if you are asking me to cook them, then you will have to pay accordingly. So I charged him £25, which made him look like an idiot. When he got the bill, he was astounded and summoned the maître d’ to complain. I sent the waiter back to tell the customer, “Marco cut the potatoes, Marco blanched them and cooked them. Marco put them on a silver dish and then personally put the garnish of tomato ketchup on the side just as you requested. His hourly rate is higher than the other chefs.” I suppose that customer has been dining out on the story ever since, so he’s had his £25’s worth.
The Devil in the Kitchen Page 20