The heir to the throne gave me a confident handshake, smiled warmly and then said, “Bonjour Monsieur White . . .” For three minutes I listened to his monologue, each and every word of it in French. I just nodded along—it would have been rude to interrupt—then when he finished, he handed me a little collection of books about Highgrove, each of them inscribed to “Monsieur Pierre White.”
I had to tell him. “I’m terribly sorry, sir,” I said, “but I’m not French. I grew up on a council estate in Leeds . . .”
He looked at his assistant, as if to say, You’ve fucking done it this time, boy. You’ve made me feel like the biggest prick in history. I had my picture taken standing beside a red-faced prince and then off I went, into the kitchen to cook.
TWENTY-ONE
Everything I’d Worked For
I HAD WON three Michelin stars but my race was not yet finished. I realized that in fact the finishing post was a little farther on. As far as stars are concerned, three is the highest you can go.
Stars are awarded for what is on the plate, but what about Michelin’s couverts? In the guides you see them as little pictures of crossed knives and forks, which is why they’re known in the restaurant profession as “knives and forks.” They are awarded for pleasantness, luxury, aesthetics and ambience. To get five of them, and five red ones rather than black ones, became my new obsession. The Oak Room in London’s Meridien Hotel would take me there. It would win not only three stars but also the five red knives and forks, which, according to the guide, made it the finest restaurant in Britain. Others had won stars, but no other restaurant before or since the Oak Room has been awarded a beautiful, complete row of red. Waterside, Gavroche and Tante Claire have only ever managed four.
The room itself has to have been one of the greatest rooms in the world. With its ballroom grandness, majestic mirrors, gentle lighting and generous space between tables, it’s like stepping into an illusion. The Oak Room was a temple of gastronomy. It was about perfection rather than creation—making the greatest Oeufs en Nage, the finest Roast Pineapple. It was perfection, from the amuse-gueules to the starter, from the main course to the pre-dessert, the cheese to the coffee and proper chocolates. It was an event. The wine list was the finest in Britain. Every available vintage of Mouton Rothschild was there for you to drink, if you had the money. Other three-star restaurants might have had two or three vintages of Pétrus. Here we had Pétrus that went back a century, seventy or eighty different vintages. The wine list included a five-page list of Château d’Yquem, taking you right back to 1850. The vintages and prices were all beautifully written in pencil so that each page was visually attractive. It used to take a wine waiter about three weeks to write out the list.
Dishes were carried from the kitchen on silver platters and the meat was carved at the table. The pigeon, for instance, would be taken out to the table, where the staff had two minutes to put it on the plate before the vegetables came out. Even if you weren’t eating pigeon, you certainly got to enjoy the show.
When a lady took her seat, a tiny table was placed beside her for her to put her handbag on so she didn’t need to put it on the floor. How many restaurants have a seat for your handbag? If a customer paid in cash, he received his change in brand-new notes and coins. We did not do crushed, creased fivers and dirty fifty-pence pieces. The notes were wrinkle-free, the coins untarnished and sparkling.
I had been inspired by great French restaurants even though I’d never been to one, and with the Oak Room I set out to re-create the sophistication I imagined Parisians experienced. It had to be the ultimate experience, and I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to pull it off. In August 1997 I transferred my three stars from the Hyde Park to the Oak Room, where I had six weeks to get the place in shape before opening.
I took the brigade from the Hyde Park, loyal boys who had given me everything and who had traveled with me all the way from Harveys. From one star to three stars and now even further. We became an even stronger team. There were probably twenty-five in the brigade, that’s twenty-five cooking for seventy customers. Robert Reid was my head chef and there were five sous chefs. If we had a table of six at the Oak Room, six cooks would do six dishes, so timing was crucial. Front of house, I had six wine waiters, four maître d’hotels and two head waiters in suits—twelve people, six of them in black.
Of the Oak Room, I have only one memory of imperfection. On a Saturday night in December 1997, a customer beckoned Pierre Bordelli, the restaurant manager. He had a complaint. The man pointed toward the ceiling above him and said, “One of the lamp bulbs in the chandelier up there has gone.” Pierre looked up and then back at the customer, who added, “It needs replacing.”
Pierre was confused. “I’m sorry, sir. Are you saying that a blown lamp bulb is ruining your evening?” The man nodded, “That’s precisely what I am saying. What’s more, you’ve got two other bulbs that need replacing in other chandeliers.”
Pierre came into the kitchen and told me the story. “Get him out,” I said. “Pull him.” The customer’s foie gras starter was just on its way to the table when Pierre approached the table, pulled it toward him and said, “Mr. White says he is terribly sorry your evening has been ruined. Please go.”
Meanwhile, the boys—my brigade—may well have worked hard, but they never lost their ability to play hard too. It was an hour before lunch and I walked into the Oak Room’s kitchen, ready for service, only to find the place was virtually empty. There were one or two cooks there from way down the hierarchy, but no sign of the others. “Where the fuck is everyone?” I said. “We’re going to have people at their tables in two seconds’ time. Where the fucking fuck is everyone?” And then they told me. It transpired that the night before, the boys had finished service and gone off for a few drinks at Break for the Border, one of those overcrowded cattlemarkets where the queue for the bar is ten-men thick and punters scream chat-up lines above the thud of the music. There had been a punch-up. One of the chefs had ended up with a broken arm and the others emerged from the scrap as bruised, bloodied, hobbling invalids. I think they were all still down at ER, being nursed, stitched up and given prescriptions for painkillers. If you were one of the customers who had to wait for your main course that day, then I’m sorry, but the blame lies with the lager at Break for the Border.
* * *
Refining, refining. At the Oak Room, I had reached a level where I would start to wonder where refinement of a dish would end. And of course the road to perfection is never ending.
For example, in the kitchen at the Oak Room, every morning we would roast thirty-six chickens just for their juices, rather than for the meat.
We’d roast the birds, take them out of the oven and put them into a colander, then press them so the juices flooded out, which were collected in a tin underneath. Then the chicken went back into the pan and the whole thing—bird and pan—was covered in plastic wrap, because the steam coming from a cooked chicken creates even more juice.
Once all the natural juices were captured, the roasting trays were deglazed, first with a drop of Madeira, which dissolves, and then a splash of water was added and the sediment dissolved into it. The juice extracted by squashing the chickens then went into the pan, together with a tiny spoonful of veal stock—not to give flavor but to add body.
The thirty-six squeezed chickens could not be served, of course, because they were too dry, so they would go in the bin or end up as staff lunches. It might seem like a waste to you, but if you were a customer, that’s what you were paying for— pure chicken juices. Thirty-six chickens provided enough juices for thirty portions of freshly cooked chicken. In other words, the customer had the juice of more than one whole chicken accompanying his dish. We’d do the same thing with lamb shoulders, roasting them slowly for sediment and then pressing them just for the juices.
It was extreme. As part of that refinement I virtually stopped using veal stock in sauces like jus blond and jus de volaille because I felt it was
too big and strong and dominated everything else.
* * *
In January 1998, little more than four months after we had opened the Oak Room, the Michelin Guide came out. We had retained three stars and been awarded five red knives and forks. That’s not all. The Oak Room received nineteen out of twenty in the influential French guide Gault Millau (no restaurant had ever scored twenty out of twenty). Egon Ronay’s guide awarded us three (out of three) stars. We got ten out of ten in the Good Food Guide, and the AA Guide declared that the restaurant was worthy of five rosettes, its highest award. There was not a single British restaurant which had ever achieved such accolades in one year, and hasn’t been since. We had won the Grand Slam in British gastronomy. I felt as if I was perched on top of the highest mountain. I could go no further.
TWENTY-TWO
Blue Skies over Leeds, Again
AMID ALL THIS, another great change came in my life. The news came by phone, a call from my brother Clive at about half past nine in the morning. “Dad’s had a stroke,” he said. The old man was dying. Mati and I put the two boys in the car and headed up the M1 to Leeds and 22 Lingfield Mount. It was Friday, September 12, 1997, a couple of weeks after the opening of the Oak Room. The sense of accomplishment that comes with launching a restaurant was suddenly drowned, of course, by the numbness that accompanies loss.
A sofa bed had been set up for Dad in the front room and he was lying there, dipping in and out of consciousness. He should probably have been in hospital, but he’d always wanted to die at home, in his small two-bed semi, and it seemed as though his wish was being granted. His wife, Hazel, was there, as well as my brothers Graham and Clive and a doctor. “He’d just had his breakfast when it happened,” said Clive.
Luciano went up to Dad, kissed him on the cheek and said, “Love you, Grandpa.” The old man had been out cold, but at this point he opened his eyes and whispered back to his three-year-old grandson, “You too.” He would live to see just another day, but those two words were the last I heard him speak. Mati, the boys and I drove into the center of Leeds and checked into the Queens Hotel, where my father had trained as a chef, starting out as a boy. It was the first time I’d ever set foot in the building (the second and final time was when Granada took me for a tour). The next morning, a Saturday, I wanted a distraction, so I took Luciano for a stroll in the city center to buy the newspapers. I stepped onto the street and looked up. The sky was crystal blue and the sun shone brightly, and I was instantly reminded of that February day—another Saturday—back in 1968 when I last saw my mother. I knew then that this would be the last day of my father’s life.
Luciano and I walked along the yellow flagstones and my mind took me back to my childhood and those Saturday mornings when Dad would take me off to Leeds market to do a bit of shopping. For lunch he would buy me pork pie and mushy peas and we’d chop off the pie’s lid, chuck in some mint sauce and put the lid back on. Occasionally on those trips we would bump into one of Dad’s friends who would hand me ten pence, and as the coin was offered, Dad would nudge me to take it, saying in his dry way, “Don’t be shy. Your mother wasn’t.”
We drove to Moor Allerton to visit Dad for what would be the last time. Others in Dad’s position might have wanted a cozy pillow or some soft music to listen to, but a dose of horse racing was the thing that brought him comfort, so the telly was switched on for that day’s big race, the St. Leger live from Doncaster. As a lad I had witnessed him crouching in front of the TV, whipping himself with a rolled-up newspaper as the horses charged to the finishing post in “the ITV Seven.” Now we all stood around Dad, stretched out on his sofa bed, as the horses galloped along on the screen. I watched him more than I watched the race and I could see life in his eyes, as if he was aware of the dramatic commentary. Come on, my son. Come on, my son. Rather fittingly, the winning horse was called Silver Patriarch.
The doctor gave the old man a final shot of morphine and then he told us, “He won’t last longer than two hours. I’m sorry.” It was time to go, time to leave Leeds. I wanted to take the boys and Mati back to London and leave my father with his wife, so she could have that last bit of time with him. I can’t do anything for the old man, I thought. We said our good-byes and when we were on the M1, driving back down to London, my mobile rang. Hazel said that my father had died. He had passed away at the age of seventy, twenty-six years after a doctor had diagnosed him with cancer and given him six months to live.
We arrived back in London and I asked Mati to drop me off at the Hyde Park Hotel to have a coffee, smoke a cigarette and think things through. As I sat there, I also recalled a night at the Hyde Park, back in January 1995. Michael Winner had come for dinner with some of his journalist friends, who included Rebekah Wade, who went on to edit the News of the World and the Sun, and Piers Morgan, who was then editor of the News of the World and fast becoming the most talked-about maverick in the newspaper industry. Piers would become a good friend and on that first meeting he asked me, “What does your father think of you winning three stars?”
“He doesn’t understand,” I said. “As far as he’s concerned, Michelin makes tires.”
When I told Piers that he was, in fact, editing my father’s favorite paper, he said he wanted to send a features writer round to interview Mati and me for an article. My dad was delighted when, come the following Sunday, he saw his son taking up the entire center spread—for the right reasons rather than the wrong ones. As far as the old man was concerned, two pages in the Screws meant a good deal more than three stars in the Michelin Guide. He must be worth something, Dad would have thought.
Our father-son relationship had always been unhinged, I suppose. After I left home and he remarried, there was a period of more than a decade when we didn’t see each other and didn’t communicate. We did a good job of patching it up after Luciano was born, and unquestionably my father was a very good grandfather.
He adored the boys—he’d send them cards and toys—and from time to time we would travel up to Leeds and take him out for a day. We might go to Bridlington, where the old man loved to walk along the harbor top, looking out at the horizon and taking in the sea air. I’d buy him kippers and fresh crab to take home as a treat, and he said to me once, “I would love to have another ten years just to see the grandchildren grow up.” After our day trips and before heading home to London, I would always wait for Hazel to go out of the room and then give the old man five hundred quid—any less than that would have seemed mean; any more would have intimidated him. The money went straight into his back pocket. He didn’t call Hazel and say, “Here, love, put that in the teapot.” He was very funny, my old man, but he didn’t know it.
Two or three days after Dad’s death I was in a betting mood. There was a horse called Frank, my Dad’s name, racing at Lingfield, the name of the road where the old man lived. I had told myself that I would only have one bet that day and I had already put my money on Cloudy Bay, which was in another race. So I never put anything on Frank, which is a great shame, not least because it would have enabled me to tell you how I won a fortune. Frank, you see, was the first to romp past the finishing post, the lucky winner and home free.
TWENTY-THREE
Rough Seas
SOME CHEFS WANT to own their own restaurant so they can escape the mayhem in the kitchen. Not me. In fact, my growing portfolio of places to oversee just added to the opportunities for good, old-fashioned fun and games. Take, for example, my new project, Quo Vadis. A lively 120-seater in Soho’s Dean Street, it was where I’d worked in the mideighties for Italian chef Signor Zucchoni, the man who couldn’t work me out because of my long hair. I was to be a partner with Jonathan Kennedy, the PR man; Matthew Freud, the PR guru; and Damien Hirst.
So that meant there was Damien, the rock star artist with a wild, rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, and me, the rock star chef known for his temper. From the outset, it had a nitroglycerine whiff about it. There was, however, a big difference between the two of us. Although I was a
n enfant terrible chef, I was driven by emotion. What I did was not to create effect; it was me being emotional and expressing myself as a person. Damien, however, the enfant terrible of the art world, did everything for effect. He’d make statements or behave in a certain way purely for the shock factor. Anyway, I think I’m correct in saying that he would only do the deal if I was involved, and so that was how it all came about. We had more in common than simply being enfants terribles, though. Damien was a few years younger than me, but he was another Leeds lad and had been to the same school as my older brothers.
We put Damien’s paintings on the walls and the restaurant became home to his trademark style of art: on show were two skinned bulls’ heads floating in formaldehyde. One day, not long after we’d opened, I got a call from Matthew Freud. He said, “Marco, we’ve got a problem. You’d better get over here.” When I arrived at the restaurant, I was greeted by two hundred animal rights activists, chanting nasty things about Damien, bulls’ heads and our restaurant. As I pushed my way through the crowd, one of the protesters screamed, “That’s Marco,” and they all started spitting at me. The thing is, the bulls were dead long before Damien did his work on them. What’s the difference between a head in a tank of formaldehyde and a piece of meat on a plate? I didn’t stop to argue this point with them, though.
Inside, Matthew and I stood with the restaurant’s staff, gazing onto the street as the activists continued chanting. I couldn’t see where it was going so I said, “Why don’t we just give them some coffee to calm them down a bit?” The show got tedious, so I headed off, past the gobbing protesters, and soon afterward they stormed the restaurant. The maître d’ was chinned, the receptionist attacked. There was a full-scale scrap going on, and among the protesters were three or four undercover policemen who then waded in, fists flying. Furniture was kicked over and telephones were ripped from their sockets. Five of the activists were carted off to Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court. Then the mother of one of the girls who’d been arrested called me to say her daughter was a depressive on tablets. Would I drop charges? I was quite happy to drop the charges but the police wouldn’t have it because they treat activists like some sort of terrorist unit. It was a right mess.
The Devil in the Kitchen Page 23