The Devil in the Kitchen

by Marco Pierre White

  Nicolas Munier, one of the restaurant managers, came into the kitchen one day to tell me there was a problem in the restaurant. A fight was about to erupt in my beloved dining room, he said. Two very camp men had been sitting in the restaurant when a trio had arrived and been seated at the table beside them. The trio consisted of a wide boy—a sort of flashy geezer, a rough ’n’ ready type—and two blonde women. They were too crude and ostentatious for the camp couple, who started to loudly make rude comments about the women. The wide boy didn’t like it and by the time I walked into the dining room he was holding the two men by their ties as they knelt on the floor in front of him. “If you don’t apologize to the ladies, I’m going to do the pair of you,” he was saying. He was pulling their ties so hard that they were being throttled and were incapable of speech, so there’s no way they could have said sorry even they’d wanted to. “Please, sir, let me deal with this,” I said to him, and when he let go, I helped the two men to their feet and took them outside.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” I told them. “The problem is, when someone books a table, we never quite know what sort of person they are. His behavior was atrocious and I cannot apologize enough, but the table may have been booked by his p.a. or someone else. What I can tell you is I certainly won’t allow him into this restaurant again.” I waived their bill and they departed into the night, shaken by the experience of being roughed up and strangled, but placated nevertheless.

  Then I returned to the dining room and went to the table where the geezer was sitting with his birds. “I am terribly sorry, sir,” I said to him. “The problem is, when someone books a table, we never quite know who’s going to come, and on this particular occasion it was those two dreadful men, wasn’t it? What I can tell you is I certainly won’t allow them into this restaurant again and your meal is on the house.”

  I was not so charming when a French couple arrived for dinner. They were in their early fifties and well-dressed and they told my manager, the impeccably mannered young Pierre Bordelli, that over the years they had dined in the finest French restaurants—Joel Robuchon, Guy Savoie—and that they were at the Hyde Park because they had heard of my reputation and were keen to taste my food. They asked Pierre to choose for them from the menu, which he agreed to do. For starters we gave them crab, which was served with tomatoes, and a mosaic of chicken, leeks and foie gras. When Pierre asked if they had enjoyed it, they said that they were “disappointed.” For their main course, they had pigeon wrapped in cabbage and served with foie gras, and cod cooked with a green herb crust. Again, Pierre asked them what they thought of the food, and they said it was equally unimpressive. He relayed their remarks to me. “Ask them to leave,” I said. Pierre approached their table and said, “I am sorry, but Mr. White does not want you in the restaurant. In fact, he would like you to leave now and please don’t worry about the bill. Your meal is on the house.” He pulled the table toward him slightly, a gesture designed to tell them that their time was up. The couple sat there, astonished. “For the past thirty years I have been dining in the finest restaurants in the world and I have never been asked to leave,” the man said.

  Pierre tugged the table a little closer to him and said with utter charm, “There is always a first time for everything, sir.”

  I tried to be as calm as possible when I ventured front of house. Although at about seven one evening I was strolling through the dining room, on my way to look at the reservations book, when I walked past a table of six Americans who were having an early dinner. They were chatting away happily, and as I got closer to them, I heard one man say, “The chef here is crazy. I mean, he is kerrrr-razy.” I carried on walking, but as I looked at the book, his words came back to me. I thought, hang on a second, he was talking about me. When I walked back through the dining room, I stopped at the table and said to the customer, “I might be many things but I am not crazy, do you understand?” He sat there petrified, not knowing what to say. I had to fill the silence. “So now you can do one of two things,” I continued. “Stay here and have a nice dinner, or leave now.” He shuffled uncomfortably and then asked meekly, “Would you mind if we stayed and had our dinner?” The following day I got a graceful letter from him, apologizing for his comments and saying that he had enjoyed the best meal of his life.

  There was one man, however, who didn’t have the best meal of his life. Tom Jaine, editor of the Good Food Guide, came into the restaurant looking so scruffy that one of the other customers commented on his appearance. He also brought his bicycle clips to the table, which I must say was a first. When I asked him to leave, he looked shocked. Then he stood to his feet and marched out of the dining room, waving his bike clips above his head and in my direction, yelling, “May curses rain down on this man!” This was nicely offset by Nicholas Soames, the politician and grandson of Winston Churchill, who had been having lunch with the food critic A. A. Gill. When Nicholas finished his meal, he walked from the table to the cloakroom, stopping in the middle of the dining room and shouting, “This is the benchmark to all restaurants!”

  MENTALLY, I WAS all over the place in January 1995. The Michelin Guide was due out on Monday, and by the Thursday before, the waiting game to find out whether I had won three stars was intolerable. In fact, I was so preoccupied that one day I couldn’t cope with the pressure any longer and had to go off fishing with a couple of friends, Tim Steel, my oldest mate, whom I have known since childhood, and Edgar Barman. At about eleven A.M. I got a call to say that Mr. Brown and Mr. Bulmer had dropped into the Hyde Park to see me. They said they would nip back at two thirty P.M.

  I hurriedly packed away my fishing gear, loaded it in the car and we drove back into town. By then I had sussed that I’d won three stars. Why else would they want to see me? But I would have to wait a little longer to find out for sure. Bang at two thirty they arrived back at the Hyde Park. “Have you got anywhere private?” asked Mr. Brown. We went into my office, where some coffee arrived, and then Mr. Brown said, “In the 1995 Michelin Guide, Restaurant Marco Pierre White will have three stars.” Three stars. Two words that established me in the history of British gastronomy as the first British chef to win three stars. At the age of thirty-three, I had become the youngest ever chef to achieve such an award (a record I still hold, incidentally). My old friend Nico Ladenis also won three stars that year. This meant that Rocco had a pair of three-star chefs in his hotels.

  I can’t really tell you what went through my mind. I was confident that I had done enough to win them, but it was still a bit of a shock. I felt as though I’d finished my race. Boxers win Heavyweight Champion of the World and lose the hunger, so to speak. Why should chefs be any different? I can understand why chefs get to the top and then go off and do other things. The simple reason is probably that they become bored in the kitchen.

  Shortly before Mr. Brown retired from Michelin UK, I got a call from Derek Bulmer, who would be his successor. He said, “I am taking Mr. Brown for a farewell meal and have asked him where he would like to go. He wants to eat at the Hyde Park.” I was touched that Mr. Brown had chosen my restaurant for his last supper. It confirmed my feelings that we had won the award for all the right reasons. After dinner I walked Mr. Brown from his table down the hotel steps. I wanted to say good-bye and thank you. It was late at night, and as we stood on the pavement, a doorman hailed a taxi. The Michelin man shook my hand and said, “Never forget what made you great.” Great might be an overstatement, but the theme of his remark was that my success was down to the time I’d spent in the kitchen and what I put on the plate. His message: stay behind the stove.

  THINGS WENT WRONG at the Canteen in the summer of 1995. There was a disagreement of sorts and Michael and I decided to go our separate ways. A legal battle erupted and the consequences resulted in a settlement that prevents me discussing the reasons behind our fallout. What I can tell you is that Michael and I did not have an argument— there was no screaming match—and the end of the partnership had nothing to do with Michael wa
nting to put fish and chips on the menu, as is widely believed.

  Michael and I have only seen each other once since then. It was a few years ago when I was invited to Liz Taylor’s birthday party at the Café Royal. I walked into the room and saw Michael sitting at a table with Harvey Weinstein, the man behind Miramax. I thought, this is ridiculous; I’ve got to say hello. So I went over to the pair of them and said, “Good evening, gentlemen.”

  Harvey shook my hand and, clearly unaware of the difficulties Michael and I had been through, pointed at Michael and said to me, “This guy here is the toughest guy you’ll ever meet.”

  Michael looked at his moviemaking friend and said, “Harvey, if you think I’m tough, try dealing with him.”

  I’d had Michael as a business partner, but Rocco had big plans. We did a deal to buy the Criterion, a massive restaurant in Piccadilly Circus. It was to be a joint venture between the two of us, but before the paperwork was to be signed, Forte became the victim of a hostile takeover by Granada. Forte’s business ground to a halt because of it. Once a hostile takeover begins, everything stops. I felt desperately sad for Rocco and thought it was wrong that he was about to lose the company. It was a particularly rough ride for him.

  There was a clause in my unsigned contract that stated that if the management of Forte changed, I would have a right to buy its 50 percent of the Criterion, and that is how I thought things would end up. When Granada took over, I was called in to see the company’s chief executive, Charles Allen. Not so much called in, actually, as we had dinner at Le Gavroche. During the meal I said to Charles, “Well, you know I’ve got my contract and it’s not signed. But the Criterion is open now and it is certainly implied in the contract that I have an option to buy you out.”

  Charles said, “We don’t want to sell. We want to do more with you.” Oh.

  I then had to go see Granada’s chairman, Gerry Robinson. He was charming and polite, and when the tea was carried into his office, he looked at me and said, “Shall I be mother?” The night before the meeting I had asked myself, why does Gerry want to see me? I reckoned he wanted to suss out my relationship with Rocco. Granada was a PLC, and the last thing they wanted was a loose cannon like Marco Pierre White running around saying all the wrong things. About eight minutes into our cup of tea, Gerry said, “What do you think of Rocco Forte?”

  “Sir Rocco Forte,” I replied, “is the only man who ever gave me everything he promised.” Despite my words of support for Rocco, my relationship with Granada continued. The deal was that I would have the lease to the restaurants in their major hotels—the Meridien, the Piccadilly, the Capitol, the Regent Palace and the Waldorf. The deal also included the Queens Hotel in Leeds, the hotel where my father had worked as young chef. Around about 1999 I traveled up to Leeds with a Granada executive and we were greeted in the foyer by a manager who said he wanted to show us around.

  How interesting, I was thinking, to be in the hotel where my old man had toiled with his friend Paul La Barbe, the cook who had trained in France and was the subject of so many of my father’s stories. I tried to visualize the grandeur of the hotel when it was in its prime, and as we walked into the bar, the manager said, “What you’re about to see is the biggest minibar in the world.” The biggest minibar in the world? What on earth did he mean? The Granada executive and I stood in silence, transfixed by the gruesome sight of a Mini car suspended from the ceiling above the bar. The manager was really proud of his “Mini bar,” but I can tell you that it was one of the naffest things I’ve ever seen, and the Granada executive wasn’t impressed either.

  In the end I didn’t do the Queens Hotel because I wanted to concentrate on the restaurants in the London hotels. I talk about some of them in forthcoming chapters, but this is a good point at which to say that the Granada relationship ended in 2002. It was my first experience of the corporate world and I thought it was horrible. You think blue-chip companies are run perfectly, but in my opinion they are worse than private companies. Board meetings are painful. We’d have an hour-long meeting about the price of coffee, with them wanting to produce coffee for five pence a cup and spending sixty minutes talking about how every penny counts. “You can get spectacular coffee for twelve pence a cup,” I’d say, and then emerge from the meeting brain dead. It was all about percentages rather than working out what’s going to make the customer happy. I handed back everything, but kept the Criterion.

  There were amusing moments while it lasted. I went to Charles Allen’s fortieth birthday at the Meridien and the cabaret was provided by a Shirley Bassey look-alike. An executive high up in Granada leaned over to me at one point and said, “That’s influence and power for you,” pointing toward the stage and the prancing drag queen.

  I said, “I’m sorry. What’s influence and power?”

  He said, “Getting Shirley Bassey to come and sing for your fortieth birthday.”

  TWENTY

  Just Another Day

  PEOPLE FOUND IT peculiar that I had won Michelin’s coveted three stars without ever setting foot on French soil. Journalists would arrive to interview me and ask me to tell them about my favorite meal in a French restaurant. “I haven’t got one,” I’d tell them. “I’ve never been to France.” Oh, they’d say, and we’d move on to the next question. The other big players—Albert, Michel, Raymond, Pierre—had all come from that side of the Channel, but there I was, serving some of the finest French food in Britain, without having visited the great Parisian restaurants whose dishes had set me on the path to Michelin stardom. I’d simply say, “Well, there you go. Proof that you don’t need to go to France to win three Michelin stars.”

  I met Jean-Christophe Novelli, or JC, back in the late eighties (he has since run restaurants that include Auberge du lac at Brocket Hall, Herefordshire). He says that he wanted a job in my kitchen and arrived at Harveys to introduce himself to me. There was a man mopping the floor who apparently told young Monsieur Novelli that Marco Pierre White was not around. JC says it was only later, when Nico introduced us, that he realized that the man mopping the floor was, in fact, me. My version is that JC came to my restaurant with his restaurant manager, Guiseppe, and then returned a short while after with Keith Floyd. JC was embarrassed because he was wearing track suit with trainers but I said, “Don’t be so silly,” and put them on table six. That’s how our great friendship started.

  On October 1, 1995, Forte was sponsoring the Arc de Triomphe race and Rocco was hosting an event at Longchamps on the final day. He had chefs on hand in Paris and a few of my boys from the Hyde Park brigade were going to be there as well, but Rocco wanted me to oversee the cuisine for him and his two hundred guests.

  I invited Jean-Christophe Novelli along, not to help, but because he has been like a brother to me and I enjoy his company. I was visiting the world’s most romantic city, so I wanted Mati to be there as well. As I have never passed a driving test—possibly because I have never taken a driving test—the two of them agreed that they would share the time behind the wheel. Things started to go terribly wrong when we got to the Eurostar terminal in Dover at about two thirty in the morning, bought our tickets and were ready to drive onto the train. JC was asked to go into an office where there were French gendarmes. He was asked for our passports, so he came back to the car, poked his head in and said, “Passports.”

  I said, “I haven’t got one.” JC looked totally confused. Was I joking? Was this one of my wind-ups? But the passport did not appear. He said, “What do you mean? If you go abroad, Marco, you need a passport.” I didn’t have one. I told him the last time I had traveled abroad was as a ten-year-old when I went to visit Uncle Gianfranco and Aunt Paola in Italy. JC was not in the mood to hear about my childhood adventures. He looked a bit nervous, went back to the office and told the gendarmes, “My friend doesn’t have a passport but he is the greatest chef the world has ever known and I am taking him to cook a banquet in Paris. Believe me, he is a very important person.”

  He was told, “I don
’t care if he’s cooking for Monsieur Mitterand.” They were convinced that JC was trying to take me into the country as an illegal immigrant and they even talked of arresting him. Then he glanced back at the car and saw me waving something that looked like a passport. He dashed back to the car, grabbed the document from my hand and hurried back to the office. “I’m sorry,” he told the gendarmes. “My friend has found his passport.” But it wasn’t my passport; I had given him my fishing license, which contained a mugshot of me on its cover. They started screaming at him, “What is this!” From the safety of the Range Rover, Mati and I could hear the word merde being used a lot. Somehow JC managed to talk us out of being questioned, but we were turned away. It was the middle of the night and at lunchtime I was due to be cooking lunch for Rocco and his two hundred guests. JC saved the day. He happened to be well connected with the ferry companies and, don’t ask me how he did it, but he drove us to the ferry port, my fishing license was produced once again and this time it did the trick.

  From Calais we motored down to Paris, and when we hit the capital, JC announced that he wanted to take us on a tour of the city. We drove to the Eiffel Tower and parked illegally, and then JC dragged Mati and me out of the car and made us stand underneath the tower because “it is so romantic.” Once that was done, we clambered back into the Range Rover and zipped through the streets, nearly killing the French actor Alain Delon along the way. Alain was crossing the road, clutching croissants and coffee, when all of a sudden he stopped— rabbit in the headlights—as JC applied the brakes and the car screeched to a halt. JC is a dead ringer for Alain, so for a few seconds the petrified actor stood at the tip of the hood, gripping his croissants and looking into the window of our car thinking, My double almost killed me.