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“This,” he said, “is the taste America is waiting for.” He was inches from my face. “Don’t you think this is the taste America wants?” His head was tilted back, like a boxer’s, giving me his chin but protecting his nose. He had a wide, aggressive stance. The look was hard, almost sneering. He stared at me, waiting for me to agree.

“This,” I said, “is what America is waiting for.”

Satisfied, Mario took his pizzas out to his guests and went home, whereupon Memo ordered me back to the grill. “Mario is gone,” he said, “and you have to get back your touch.” It was a profoundly sympathetic act—generous, rebellious, correct—and, like that, I returned to the team.

Frankie explained. “It’s happened to all of us. It’s how you learn. It’s the reality of the kitchen. Welcome to Babbo.”

The next day, I apologized to Mario.

“You’ll never do it again,” he said. And he was right: I never did.

10

W
HAT DID
B
ATALI
learn from Marco Pierre White? And, whatever it was, was it something I should be learning, too? I remained intrigued by the time the two of them had spent together. I then discovered an extraordinary coincidence (one that Batali wouldn’t know, because he never spoke to White again): days after Batali quit, White quit, too. He walked out, locked the kitchen door, and never returned. And then, just like Batali, he embarked on a culinary education of punishing penury and duration. In effect, having become a chef, he signed up for a five-year refresher course.

For Batali, the pub had been a lark, an adventure that ended badly but one that showed him how much he had to learn. For White, the stakes were considerably higher—the pub had been his first venue, a dream, and therefore a dream that failed—but its failure was also a turning point: he, too, realized how much
he
had to learn. “There had just been the two of us, me and Mario, just little boys, serving a hundred people a night, kidding ourselves that we were doing a great fucking job. We weren’t.” In White’s view, their just getting by confirmed how much neither one of them knew, and, within twenty-four hours of his quitting, he sought out the nearest Michelin-star restaurant, La Tante Claire, then on the Royal Hospital Road, a quarter of a mile from the pub, and presented himself to the proprietor, Pierre Koffmann: Would the chef be prepared to take him on for no pay? White was there six months. (“I knew he’d stay only long enough to steal my recipes,” Koffmann said.) Not satisfied, White sought out the nearest two-star restaurant, then Le Manoir aux Quatr’ Saisons in Oxfordshire, run by Raymond Blanc, where once again White presented himself to the chef and where he would remain for most of the next two years. White was about to move to Paris and work at a three-star restaurant, the next logical step, when fate intervened and he found himself with a venue once again—Harvey’s, in South London.

But it was the coincidence that I found so compelling, and once I’d discovered it I couldn’t stop myself from musing on just how bad life in the pub’s dinky kitchen must have been: that no pay would have been more attractive—that
anything
would have been more attractive—than these two outsized, alpha males’ being cooped up in that hellhole together. The coincidence was also instructive. This, it told me, is what you have to do to learn this craft: you keep having to be a slave—to not one master but several, one after another, until you arrive at a proficiency (whatever that might be) or your own style (however long it takes) or else conclude that, finally, you just know a lot more than anyone else. I needed to go to London, I concluded. I needed to learn what Mario learned. (Why didn’t this process have a name—this self-education by self-abasement or what, in my case, always ended up being lessons got by making an ass out of myself?)

I made five trips. On each one, White taught me things, although they were rarely the lessons I’d expected. In the mysterious way of these matters—in which nutrition, mortality, and traditions of food unite in one continuum—Marco stopped cooking on December 23, 1999, when he turned thirty-eight, his mother’s age when she died. Instead, he now teaches cooking to cooks, or invents the dishes they will serve, or tweaks their preparations, or dreams up restaurants that others put up money to run. On one visit, for instance, White and his “people” bought a small place in East London on the day I arrived and over a weekend turned it into a lunchtime brasserie. On another, they’d just bought a grand restaurant in Mayfair called Madame Prunier. Two months later, on another visit, they’d bought a casino on St. James’s Street. The extent of White’s interests—thirteen restaurants, plus a five-floor gambling establishment—suggests a tycoon-like figure with a staff and a techno-modern office; at the very least a fax machine and an assistant. In fact, White’s life is nothing short of impulsive chaos and is a marvel to witness. He has no assistant and would have no place to put one anyway because he has no office. He can’t type, has no computer, and only occasionally remembers to carry a cell phone. He has a driver—Takanori Ishii, referred to as Mr. Ishii, who is employed mainly to take White hunting and fishing. Returning from one such expedition, I was shown White’s diary—Mr. Ishii keeps it—which consists of appointments to pursue a beast or bird of the forest. Business, such as it is, is conducted over a meal at one of White’s restaurants.

I witnessed how this was done after an architect had been asked to draw up plans for refurbishing the Prunier place. White had been expected at the architect’s office but was two hours late, which was immaterial since he’d got the venue wrong and showed up at one of his restaurants, Mirabelle. The architect, duly summoned, arrived with a gigantic model depicting the future Prunier, squeezing through the front door with great difficulty, his face saying, I can’t believe you made me do this. Once there, he had to fight for White’s attention. Without realizing it, White had arranged other lunches at the same time.

“Oh, Will, how good to see you,” he said to William Sitwell, the editor of
Food Illustrated.
“Let’s get you a good table. Who are you having lunch with?”—a question that surprised Mr. Sitwell.

“Er, well, you, Marco. I thought you and I were having lunch.”

A journalist from the
Evening Standard
arrived, greeted warmly by White, who pushed tables together to accommodate him, ordering another risotto and a bottle of wine.

A lawyer arrived. White was confused. He’d had no idea that these people, too, had been counting on having lunch with him.

A journalist from the
International Herald Tribune
appeared (another wine, another risotto), followed by White’s wife, Mati (“Oops!”), and then his PR guy, a close friend, Alan Crompton-Batt, whom around the fourteenth bottle White began referring to in the third person feminine—as in “She’s never very good after lunch, you know.”

I studied White. He was wearing Wellington boots caked with yellow mud, a bulky sweater covered with bits of straw, and a tattersall plaid shirt underneath, cut to be worn with cuff links, but with the cuffs open and extending out like flippers. He had a frenzied, unkempt look—his hair jaggedly pointing in several directions like a bird’s nest—that reminded me of demonic paintings of the young Beethoven. He smelled of dirt. He’d spent the night on a gamekeeper’s sofa, he explained to each person he greeted. He looked Mediterranean (dark hair, olive skin), sounded working class, and was dressed like a drunken country squire.

D
ESPITE THE
P
IERRE
in his name, Marco Pierre White is not French and has spent only a day in Paris, at a racetrack. He is half English (born in Leeds), and, like Batali, half Italian: his mother came from Bagolino, near Genoa. She met White’s father, Frank—a chef, fond of his drink, and capable of “starting a fight in an empty room”—when she was twenty-two, after coming to Britain for English-language lessons. The father named White’s brothers Clive, Craig, and Graham. Marco was named by his mother. “It was like being called Sue. I wanted to be Tom or John. Gary—I would have loved Gary. Or Jerry. Anything, just not Marco Pierre. I used to give friends my pocket money not to use my name. In the end, people grow into their names, don’t they? Know any Nigels? They all look like Nigel, don’t they?”

White’s mother died after giving birth to a fourth child. White was six and witnessed her collapse. Twenty-six years later, in a moment of personal crisis, he set out to recall every small-boy memory he had of her. Most pertain to summers the family spent in Italy and have, in White’s telling, the quality of an old black-and-white film. The sky is white, not blue, the figs are gray, a swollen river has no color, the wooden floors the boys sleep on are cold, until finally he returns to Leeds: the green carpet where his mother collapsed, the blue sofa where his father laid her down, the National Health red blanket, the white enamel doors of an ambulance disappearing over a green hill. White’s only invented dish is dedicated to his mother, a tagliatelle with oysters and caviar (“In Memoriam Maria Gallina White”), which, tellingly, is more French than Italian in inspiration: its parents are preparations by White’s mentors, a “huitres Francine” by the Roux brothers and a “tagliatelle of langoustines” by Raymond Blanc. In Britain, Italian cooking had no charisma; there was no Anglo-Italian tradition comparable to the Italian-American one. It had, in White’s phrase, “no rock ’n’ roll,” especially in 1978, when White, sixteen years old, a failure in school (“I couldn’t read—I stood up in front of the class with a book and had no idea what it was saying”), was dispatched by his father to Harrogate, a spa town in the Midlands, and told to knock on kitchen doors until someone gave him a job. Someone did, as a slave at the beck and call of a butcher at the Hotel St. George. Here, studying the “old boy’s use of a knife,” memorizing it, then gathering up the scraps, and grinding and stuffing them into a pastry for a family meal, White discovered a knack for imitating the people around him, who, invariably, were doing a version of a French classical menu, because a French menu was what you found at the time. It was the moment White began growing into Marco Pierre, on his way to becoming one of the best French chefs outside France. “My mother couldn’t have given me a better name.”

Harvey’s, White’s first restaurant, earned its first Michelin star in 1988, the year after it opened. It earned its second in 1990. Five years later, White, cooking in new premises, earned his third star. During this time, he also earned a reputation for theatre: he was so highly strung, so unpredictable, and got himself so worked up (in 1990, he was hospitalized after a hyperventilating panic attack paralyzed his left side) that people came to his restaurant in the expectation that the unexpected would happen. When he talks about this period, he sits up in his chair, his eyes bulge, he raises his voice, and he is animated and indignant all over again. Patrons (“fat ugly bastards”) who ordered meat well done were an insult to the kitchen, and on two occasions Marco ordered them to leave his restaurant before they completed their meals. (“It was ten months before I threw out my first customer,” White was quoted as saying at the time, adding, with a flair for exaggeration, that, once he’d got the taste for it, he couldn’t stop.) When someone ordered fried potatoes, he was so insulted he prepared them himself and charged five hundred dollars. “I used to go fucking mental.” He threw things; he broke things; unhappy with a cheese plate, he hurled it against a wall, where it stuck, sliding down as the evening progressed, leaving behind a Camembert smear. When his head chef fell and broke his leg, White assaulted him: “How dare you? If you were a fucking horse, I’d shoot you.” Once, frustrated by the kitchen’s slowness, he ordered his cooks to stand in the corner at the height of service. “‘You want to be naughty?’ I asked. ‘All right, then. All of you—in the fucking corner where you will watch me do your jobs. Let your consciences talk to you.’”

I’d heard variations of these stories and, once, fifteen years ago, had witnessed a little of the show myself when I was having lunch at the Criterion, off Piccadilly, shortly after White had taken it over, and caught an earful of the famous rage when the kitchen doors opened and members of the wait-staff scurried out with stricken, pale faces, their shoulders beaten into rounded stoops of humiliation. It was a perversely satisfying thing to have seen (was it what I’d come for?). Being a chef then, White explained, with no small nostalgia, was a license to scream. People screamed at him; he screamed at others. He enjoyed being a screamer and insists that everyone else did, too, with the exception, obviously, of the person being screamed at.

White is no longer a screamer because he is no longer in the kitchen, but he is still highly volatile. At one point, narrating another misdemeanor—an account of his being provoked by a remark he’d overheard by an American diner (“They say the chef’s crazy, you know”)—White grew so excited that he forgot why he was telling me the story in the first place, except as an illustration of a mind that was wholly unpredictable, even to its keeper. “And so I walked up to his table, and I said, ‘So you think I’m crazy? You think I’m fucking mad?’ I was starting to twitch. And I said to myself, I’m going to deal with this fucker. ‘Can I just say one thing in my defense?’ The bloke was horrified. ‘Yes,’ he said, weakly. So I said, ‘I may be many things, but I am not fucking crazy, do you understand? And I’m not fucking mad.’ Of course, even I realized that I’d confirmed I was completely fucking crazy.”