The Devil in the Kitchen

by Marco Pierre White

  Damien’s artwork caused further problems and ultimately led to the pair of us suing each other. The restaurant had a deal with Damien whereby it paid him to hang his paintings on the walls. If he wanted to take a painting down, he was obliged to replace it with another—it’s what you call rotating artwork. I didn’t like paying the rent for the paintings; it didn’t seem right. Then Damien started taking the paintings down because he wanted to put them in his house in Dublin, so he’d take out a painting that was, say, eight foot by six foot and replace it with something that was twelve inches by twelve inches. You can’t do that. The idea of rotating artwork is that you replace it with something of a similar size, otherwise it just looks stupid.

  If you’ve got a deal where you’re being paid an art rent, then you’ve got to respect that. It wasn’t in the spirit in which we’d done the deal. I don’t know whether it was Damien taking advantage of a situation or whether it was Damien being Damien, but I wasn’t going to tolerate it. I asked him to move all his stuff out and there was no fallout. We needed to replace his artwork and I thought I’d do some pictures myself. It was supposed to be a humorous battle but lawyers ended up getting involved at one stage and there were accusations of plagiarism. For me it was all done with an element of fun. I took myself off to the country and did some conceptual art, painting a canvas black, sticking some cockerel feathers to it and then giving it some weird name like Oil Slick. It’s quite time-consuming but it’s not hard.

  I got someone to prepare the canvases. Then I put a black acrylic over a big square canvas, put a glaze to it and stuck feathers on. It looked fantastic, to be honest, but creating a great meal is harder.

  I also tried doing a bit of spot painting and then I’d slash up the picture and call it Divorce. So that was me being incredibly playful. Damien had done his famous DNA model, so I made a model with bulls’ eyes and called it BSE. There was lots of publicity as the media followed my entrée into the world of conceptual art. Most people seemed to get my point, that you can scribble all over a piece of paper, frame it, put it on a wall, and now it’s art. We were like a couple of kids having a play fight when it suddenly got out of control and lawyers became involved. Terrible really, isn’t it? We were two grown men, not a couple of ten-year-olds.

  And do you know what encouraged me to try my hand at conceptual art in the first place? One day, when we were still mates, I’d been sitting with Damien and I’d said to him, “Do you remember the world we came from? There was always a fake Mona Lisa hanging over the fireplace and three ducks on the back wall, just like in Hilda Ogden’s house? I think you should make a really sophisticated version and do three ducks flying across the back wall in formaldehyde.” Three months later I picked up the Telegraph and there it was: three ducks on the back wall. That’s when I thought, it’s not that hard really.

  Having said that, he is a genius who deserves everything he’s got. And that’s how I genuinely feel about it. His butterfly paintings were genius, and his spot paintings are fantastic. So you can’t take anything away from him. Maybe he just misinterpreted my playfulness.

  What was nice about Damien was that while he had an infamous problem with drink and drugs, he managed to maintain a wonderful relationship with his lovely mother. The pair of them would come for lunch or dinner at one of my restaurants and I was always aware that his mother was very proud of her son. I used to think, Maybe he’s made his dream come true and his mother has been there to see it, but my mother hasn’t been here to see my dream come true.

  WE ALL MAKE mistakes. Failure is often the first part of success. Go to the best restaurant in the world and you might still see failure. A sommelier might accidentally knock a bottle of wine onto the table so its contents spill out and onto your partner. Your beef or lamb might be overdone or underdone but certainly not the way you ordered it. These things shouldn’t happen in top restaurants, but they do. It’s what happens next that decides whether failure is turned into success.

  If the maître d’ fails to deal with it, then failure prevails, but if the maître d’ realizes you are upset and dashes over to your table, a look of genuine concern on his face, he has recognized an inconsistency. Maybe he’ll offer you drinks on the house, or perhaps he’ll rip up the bill and give you the meal on the house. He walks you to the door and says sorry yet another time. Now, all of a sudden, you’re thinking, I’ll come back here. The place is great.

  That is just one of the ways failure can become success in the restaurant business. With that in mind, look at what happened when the New York Times published a libelous comment about me. It was just a few words but nonetheless defamatory. The paper said that I had had “a well-publicized bout of drink and drugs.” I was angry because it was untrue and I asked for an apology. They could have said sorry immediately and turned failure into success. I would have admired that. But they didn’t. Nearly two years later I was at the Royal Courts of Justice, in London, with George Carman QC representing me in a historic case of American newspapers being sued in Britain for libel.

  I’ll start from the beginning. I got a call one day from an American journalist called Florence Fabricant, who said she wanted to write a profile about me for the New York Times, a newspaper I thought of as influential and prestigious. I thought it sounded good and suggested we meet up. Then on February 13, 1998, she came for lunch at the Oak Room. She brought her husband, who enjoyed my hospitality but by dessert complained of jet lag and vanished. Florence and I stayed to have a chat and a coffee, and she asked me about my life, as you’d imagine, and I talked to her about cooking, restaurants and my personal background. At no stage did she ask me my views on drink and drugs, and if she had, I could have explained to her that I rarely touched booze and have never taken illegal drugs.

  On May 13, 1998, precisely three months after I’d done the interview, a friend phoned to say something like, “My God. Have you seen the New York Times?” When I got hold of a copy, I was horrified. Florence’s article wasn’t a fair interpretation of our conversation, put it that way, and then there was a line about me having “a well-publicized bout with drugs and alcohol.” I got on to my lawyers, Schilling & Lom & Partners. I wanted an immediate retraction and apology. A lot of my clients were American, so the piece was unarguably damaging. The New York Times didn’t respond. Then things got worse: the same untrue and highly damaging allegations were published in an identical article in the Times’ sister paper, the International Herald Tribune a couple of days later.

  Libel actions in Britain can take a while to come to court, but in the meantime the New York Times set about trying to prove its lie. They hired private detectives in an attempt to dig up some dirt, and Gordon Ramsay, by now an accomplished chef and restaurateur, got a call from someone saying she was a journalist who worked for the New York Times. The reporter asked him about the period during which he worked for me at Harveys. Did he have a wild time there? That sort of thing. When she referred to “sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll,” he ended the call. Other people I knew also got phone calls.

  A couple of weeks before the case was due to start, the two papers conceded that the allegations were false. I wasn’t in the mood for settling out of court, and as the hearing drew closer, they reassessed the grounds of their defense and decided they would argue that the piece, though inaccurate, had not affected my reputation.

  The most pleasurable part of an otherwise draining experience was meeting George Carman, my QC for the case. Knowing George was one of the greatest educations of my life; he was a huge influence and had that rare combination of intelligence and instinct. Apart from having a good brain, he had a way of speaking that left you, and the jury, mesmerized.

  We gathered at the High Court on April 3, 2000—two years after the offending article had appeared in print—and on day one I went into the box. It is customary for the claimant’s QC to question you in a relaxing manner before the defendant’s QC does a nasty cross-examination. So George was there to warm me up, make me f
eel settled.

  However, his opening questions went like this:

  CARMAN: Were you brought up on a Leeds council estate?

  ME: Yes, I was.

  CARMAN: Did you watch your mother die at the age of six?

  ME: Yes, I did.

  CARMAN: Did your father get lung cancer and was given just months to live?

  He was drawing a picture for the jury, a picture of a boy from humble beginnings who has fought for everything he’s got in life and who is a working-class hero, and then here’s the New York Times trying to run him down. But I was floored. It was harder answering George’s questions than it was being cross-examined by Geoffrey Robertson QC.

  Geoffrey Robertson was keen to tie me up in knots, but I kept saying, “I don’t understand your question,” or, “Can you please repeat that?” The jury was amused. I’d chuck in things like, “Could I have some water, please?” Then proceedings would halt while I had a sip to clear my throat.

  I’d answer the question really quietly and he’d say, “Sorry?” I was driving him mad. He said something like, “Were you once described as the ‘Jagger of the Aga.’ ”

  I said, “Aga?”

  He started telling me what an Aga was and I told him I knew what one was—I had one at home—but what did he say before Aga? Cue laughter from the judge and jury.

  There were other moments of levity. Geoffrey Robertson buttonholed me one morning to say, “I dined in your restaurant Quo Vadis last night. I had the most delicious risotto I’ve ever eaten in my life.” I didn’t know how to respond.

  George’s closing speech was everything you’d expect from a genius. His reputation was one of a master orator. George was a short man, but as his son Dominic said after George’s death in January 2001, “With his stage as a courtroom and his audience as the jury, he was a giant among men.” The court was hushed, the jury undoubtedly excited about what was to come. Sit down with the popcorn, the lights are dimming, the big movie is about to begin . . .

  Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, once upon a time there was a bad, bad boy in the kitchen and the bad, bad boy had the infernal cheek to sue two powerful international newspapers, and they were called the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. Of course, it was a claim that should never have been brought because it never was a libel, they had nothing to apologize for, they had no damages to pay and they had done him no harm. They had not hurt his feelings and they had, in fact, done him a great favor. The great favor was to employ private investigators, go round amongst his friends and acquaintances, investigate whether he had, in fact, taken any illegal drugs . . .

  Of course, this is a fairy tale. That is what no doubt the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times would like to publish about this case, as they would like to publish many things, but we can come to the real world and the real case.

  . . . I started off with a fairy tale, “the bad boy in the kitchen.” Why was that brought out by Mr. Robertson? “You’ve got a reputation as a bad, bad boy in the kitchen.” Was that intended as some kind of slur that would cause you, the jury, to award him less damages in some way? What does it mean, not just “bad” but “bad, bad boy in the kitchen”? It was repeated like you’d say to a small child, “You naughty, naughty boy” . . . It was all about him, Marco Pierre White, bawling out the staff to get the food on the table, which I am jolly sure he does. You cannot say when six people are paying a lot of money for dinner, “Would you all mind, please, just getting the plates together, to put them carefully on the table there? Would you be so kind as to attend to your duties?” Of course not. Of course he bawls out, with a few emotive words, no doubt. “Get moving. Get the stuff on the table,” or whatever phrase he uses. He would not be the great chef he has been and is if he was not able to give clear orders and get his discipline operating on his staff. There is the great discipline of the kitchens involved, kitchens in excellence.

  After an adjournment Geoffrey Robertson argued that even if the story was false, my reputation not been damaged because, as he said, “You would not dream of refusing his food or his company after reading this article. You might shrink from his bill, but not from Mr. White himself.” He wanted to give the jury an idea of the size of damages awarded in British courts:

  Of course, if Mr. White, during his conversation with Miss Fabricant, she had somehow got angry with him and cut his hand off, he would get under the current standards, about forty-five thousand pounds. Well, that is a matter that you may think would cause great anger and distress and, of course, permanent disfigurement. That is the sort of money that is the going rate. There is another personal injury matter that I imagine would be very worrying for a chef: if Miss Fabricant had wielded her knife or fork in such a way as accidentally to have stuck it in his nostrils or tongue and destroyed his taste buds so that he could never as a chef smell or taste again, that would get him, on the going rate, some nine thousand to twelve thousand pounds . . .

  The jury adjourned on Wednesday, April 5. They were not out for long before returning to announce that they had opted to send George’s suggested message across the Atlantic to the editors of the U.S. papers. They awarded me a settlement of £75,000: £15,000 from the Times and £60,000 from the Tribune. According to Mr. Robertson’s figures, that was the equivalent of Florence cutting off one of my hands and chopping off maybe a finger and thumb from the other hand. Plus, of course, costs of about half a million.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Letting Go of Status

  THIS SLAVE HAD been a slave for twenty-one years. Although I had spent a career questioning the way I cooked; I had never really questioned why I cooked; I just did it. When I finally made up my mind that I wanted freedom—wanted out—the chains were released pretty swiftly. For a while I’d been thinking about it, contemplating retirement as I continued to spend long days and nights at the stove or by the passe.

  Several factors contributed to my decision to hang up the apron. They included the realization that I had sacrificed everything in order to be in a kitchen, locked away from the outside world. Obviously, I had to give more time to Mati and the kids. Mati was the only person I talked to about retiring, and she was behind my decision, as you might expect of a wife who rarely sees her husband. In the kitchen I had three stars, but at home I had another three: Mati, Luciano and Marco. When I’d get home from work, they would be asleep: we tended to meet when Mati brought them into the kitchen and they would sit on the passe fifteen minutes before lunch service began. We hadn’t had the time to build a proper foundation to our life and relationship. Before we knew what we were doing—less than two and a half years into the relationship—we were two young people with two kids. We didn’t go off partying and having fun like most young people do. I just worked and worked and worked, and then slept when I had a day off. And Mati would pop into the restaurants. That was our existence. I didn’t question it. I was so obsessed with my work, so tunnel-visioned, that nothing else played a part, but I was beginning to accept that I would have to give something back to Mati and the kids.

  Meanwhile, ever since I had won the three stars, my relationship with Albert Roux had been a bit unstable. Dear old Albert, the Gavroche general, good friend, first boss in London, mentor and best man at my second wedding. But these days when he phoned it was usually to ask only if I had heard any trade gossip and there was something that made me question his loyalty. We had lunch one day at the Connaught and I decided to check him out. He asked me about a certain issue, which I knew all about, but rather than give him the full story, I told him a little bit of the truth and a few white lies. The following day I got a phone call from a reporter who appeared to know everything I had told Albert, including the fibs. Of course, it’s possible Albert may have told someone who, in turn, told someone else who informed the reporter. From then on I believed, rightly or wrongly, that I couldn’t trust Albert.

  He was a giant in the industry, a man who helped change gastronomy and take it forward. Albert i
s revered and his influence immense, but I was very close to him for a while and I saw another side to him.

  I used to go to his house in the countryside and one year I went to spend Christmas with him and his lovely wife, Monique. Albert and I were fishing for carp when he suddenly turned to me and announced, “Do you know, Marco, nine out of ten people in the catering industry are cunts?” I was stunned. Here was this figurehead, a man I had put on a pedestal, letting me see what lay beneath the statesmanlike exterior.

  Our friendship finally came to an end in the late nineties after Albert was invited to be a judge for the Catey Awards, the annual ceremony held by the Caterer and Hotelkeeper magazine. I was at Mirabelle when I got a call from Gordon Ramsay, who had a friend at the magazine. Gordon said, “They’re quite disgusted at the Caterer.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “They had the judging for Chef of the Year and you were going to get it, but Albert started saying, ‘We can’t give it to Marco Pierre White. It would be bad for the industry to give him Chef of the Year.’ You’re not going to get the award.”

  For years I had listened to Albert criticizing other chefs and now he was criticizing me.

  So I phoned him and said, “Albert, you were judging Chef of the Year yesterday for the Catey Awards and it has come back to me that you said it would be wrong to give Marco Pierre White Chef of the Year. And you said that Marco Pierre White is bad for the industry. Is that right, Albert?”