The Devil in the Kitchen (32 page)

Of the boys who worked for me, they were mostly aged about twenty-seven or twenty-eight and every one of them was a fine chef. Each one of them could walk straight into a job as head chef, and many had acquired enough knowledge to run their own restaurant and become a chef patron. If you look at most large kitchens, there might be two, three, or maybe four who have been there a long time. But now too many of them were talking of flying the nest. Cooks who had come to me as young men were on the verge of launching their own careers and I had to accept that I’d been very lucky to have them, but it was time for them to move on.

I
SUPPOSE WHAT
I could have done is what so many chefs do these days: stop cooking but pretend to the rest of the world that they are still at the stove, crafting and creating. But that is tantamount to lying, isn’t it? They’re simply pretending to be in the kitchen, when in fact they’re in front of the camera. And if they’re in front of the camera, who is at the stove?

Surely, if you go to a restaurant run by a top chef, you can’t be blamed for thinking that the chef who has his name above the door is the man who’s in the kitchen. Or maybe I’m wrong. Regardless, I am convinced that once chefs win three stars, they become disillusioned, just like I did. Winning becomes a way of life, and once you feel you can go no further, then it becomes nothing more than a job. You see it with boxers. They win the world title and lose their hunger. Why should chefs be any different?

I had lost the passion, so to stay in the kitchen would be the equivalent of lying to myself. By removing myself from the
Michelin Guide
, customers would know that I was no longer the one doing the food. I had lost all sense of direction, but now I was going to do something about it.

Mati was the one who suggested I hand the stars back to Michelin. We had been driving through London late one night when we passed the Hyde Park Hotel and I was reminded of my workload and grumbled. She said, “Why don’t you return the stars?” I looked at her quizzically and she continued, “Look, you’re not happy and you haven’t been for some time. If it is all about the pressure of having the stars, then why don’t you get rid of them? No stars, no pressure.”

When she asked if a chef had ever returned the stars, I replied, “No, of course not.” And then she said, “You made history by becoming the first British chef to win them. Why don’t you become the first British chef to hand them back?”

I thought about her comments for a couple of weeks. Then it all clicked into place one morning when I took myself out of the kitchen and onto the banks of the River Test for some fishing therapy.

Test Wood pool is on the Petworth estate and is a rewarding spot for fishing, perhaps the finest salmon pool on the south coast of England. You drive through a rough council estate in Southampton and come to a driveway, and when you get to the end of it—bang—you’re in a quiet little paradise. I was introduced to it back in the nineties by Johnny Yeo, the artist and a mate of mine, and it remains one of my bolt-holes. Two other anglers use it: one is called Jumbo and the other is a former gamekeeper known as Toad. We sit there, fishing, thinking, and talking, and at lunchtime Jumbo produces a lunch of fresh crab and lobster with his own potato salad.

It would have been one morning in September 1999, when Mr. Ishii picked me up in the Range Rover at dawn and drove me and my rod from London to Test Wood. Jumbo and Toad weren’t around that day, but I sat there for a couple of hours fishing with Billy Webb, my friend and the estate’s head keeper. I caught two salmon, put down the rod and wandered up to a nearby lawn for a break. I was standing there, drinking a cup of tea and smoking a Marlboro, when I suddenly thought, “I don’t want to be a chef anymore. There has got to be more to life than cooking.”

Standing in my waders and looking back onto the calm surface waters of the pool, I fixed a retirement date in my head there and then. My final day in the kitchen, my last day as a professional chef, would be December 23. It seemed the best day, as that’s when the Oak Room was due to close for a two-week Christmas break. Having decided that I would no longer be a chef, I knew it would be wrong to keep the Michelin stars. The stars, albeit hard-earned and cherished, would have to be returned. Mati was right: the pressure would be removed. I finished my cuppa, picked up my mobile and phoned Derek Bulmer at Michelin UK. “Mr. Bulmer, it’s Marco Pierre White speaking.”

“Hello.” He was friendly—he didn’t know what was coming.

We didn’t do “how are you?” or “isn’t it lovely weather?” I got straight to the point. “Just to let you know,” I said, “I stop cooking on December 23. Please don’t include me in your next guide.”

There was silence at the other end of the line. Cooks spend their lives working for a mention in the Michelin bible, this little book that has the power to bestow glory on slaves of the stove. Yet here I was, effectively returning the accolade it had taken a career to win. My dream had controlled me for two decades, but now I was in control.

There was a pause, a few seconds of silence, and when Mr. Bulmer eventually spoke, all he could say was, “Oh.” There was more silence. He must have hoped I would provide an explanation. He must have been anxious to hear the rationale behind my statement, but he didn’t ask why. The only thing I gave him was a very friendly, “Good-bye, Mr. Bulmer.”

I heard another “Oh” just as I was pressing End Call. And that was it. All done. It was perhaps the shortest conversation in Michelin history and now I could get on with my day. I put the phone back in my pocket and thought, Glad that’s over. There was a feeling of relief and happiness. Happy to be released from my pain, which might sound dramatic, but I think I was in pain. That phone call to Mr. Bulmer felt like the most honest thing I’d ever done. It was, as they say, the end of a chapter.

TWENTY-FIVE

Life Without the Props

T
HE PROCESS OF
doing this book has taught me more about myself than I could have expected. Unlocking my memory bank has been a tough chore at times, and I don’t mind telling you that I shed tears on more than one occasion. As the reader, you may well have been startled or shocked by a few episodes (and this is the moment for me to apologize, again, for the language). You’re not the only one. I have spent my life thinking, Wow, I can’t believe that just happened. Today I am sitting in Luciano, my restaurant in that very posh part of London, St. James’s, reflecting on how life has treated me since I retired from the kitchen. A couple of relationships have bit the dust. Some dear old friends are no longer on my Christmas card list. And some beautiful new relationships have begun.

Mati and and I had known each other for eight years and we had two sons, Luciano and Marco. But we had never seriously discussed marriage because my life, of course, was work, work, work. Now that I had left the kitchen, I was free to marry. One night we were at Mirabelle having dinner with Michael Winner, the movie director, when he raised the subject. I had retired from the kitchen partly to spend more time with Mati and the kids—marriage was the right step to take. We were in the romantic surroundings of Mirabelle, Michael shooting Cupid arrows, and we ended the meal with me proposing marriage to Mati.

We married on April 7, 2000, at the Belvedere, my restaurant in Holland Park, West London. It is in a beautiful setting and has a license that enables couples to tie the knot on the premises. Michael was best man and made a very funny speech, from which I cannot recall a single line. I had thought, who could I choose as my best man without offending anybody else? When you say someone is your best man, you can hurt someone else’s feelings. I chose Michael so none of my other friends would get offended, because although he was a great mate, he was out of my regular circle of friends. I never shared him with anybody because he might not like my friends and they might not like him, so I just tended to him alone.

The 170 guests included George Carman, my defender in court, as well as Piers Morgan, Rocco Forte, Fay Maschler and her husband, Reg. Gordon Ramsay and his wife, Tana, were guests, as was Piers Adam, a friend from my days on the King’s Road. There was also a smattering of aristocrats, including Lord Coleridge and the Earl of Onslow.

Alan Crompton-Batt had met Mati and a few of her friends to help do the seating plan. When she had asked him, “What shall we do with the lords? What’s the tradition?” he’d replied, “Easy. You put two lords on each table.” Forty minutes later, when the plan was finished, he stood up, clapped his hands and announced, “Right, it is now customary for everyone to leave the room and I get to fuck the maid of honor.”

His two-lords-per-table rule did not suit Onslow and Coleridge. They were pupils together at Eton and apparently one day Onslow accused Coleridge of playing badminton with his yellow canary. I am sure Coleridge would never have done such a wicked thing. The two men hadn’t spoken since that day decades earlier and it was only now that they found themselves sitting opposite one another and Onslow’s uncomfortable memories of being the Birdman of Eton came flooding back. I remember once going shooting with Lord Onslow and after lunch he said, “Nature calls.” He stepped ten paces onto the lawn and got out his cock and relieved himself in the middle of the lawn, facing the trees. He is a beautifully eccentric man and I thought to myself, I wish I had the confidence to do that but to do it facing the shooting party, rather than the trees.

The wedding was a great day and afterward Mati and I flew off to Venice for a honeymoon. We arrived at the world famous Cipriani Hotel and were unpacking our bags when the phone rang. It was the receptionist and she surprised me by saying, “Michael Winner is in reception waiting for you.” It’s unusual for the best man to join the happy couple on their honeymoon. Some people might be appalled by the intrusion, but Mati and I were touched that he had gone to the effort of keeping it a secret and there were only good intentions behind his decision to join us in Venice. He stayed for just a couple of days and took us sightseeing and to places of historic interest, like Harry’s Bar. Our Winner whistle-stop tour lasted forty-eight hours and then he disappeared, leaving us to enjoy the remaining five or six days alone.

The hotel bill must have amounted to thousands of pounds, but when I came to pay, the manager said, “Mr. Winner left instructions that on no account should Mr. White pay the bill.” Michael had picked up the entire tab. At least let me pay for the meals. “On no account.” Then let me pay for the champagne. “On no account.” May I at least pay for the cigarettes? Christ, I’ve smoked enough of the things. Again, the response was, “On no account.” It was a wonderful act of generosity.

Sadly, the warm feelings between us were not to last. Why is it that grooms so often fall out with their best men once the wedding is over? Michael is a very funny man, a brilliant raconteur and very kind, but he gets tetchy sometimes and I think that was the reason we stopped talking back in 2002.

I opened Drones Club with my friend Piers Adam, and Piers decided to throw a party. I didn’t invite one person, because as far as I was concerned, it was Piers’s thing. I felt it was too early for a party; the place wasn’t ready. I thought, Piers can have his party and I might have one at a later date. On the evening of the party I was due to be taking Michael for dinner at Drones Restaurant, my place in Pont Street, so it was unlikely that I would even show up at Piers’s bash. Then I got a call from Michael, who was swearing down the phone and going mad. “Why wasn’t I invited to the party?” he yelled, though I’ve cleaned up his language. It was a major bollocking and then the line went dead. He had hung up on me.

I rang him back and said, “Michael, we seem to have been cut off.” He was still ranting away. When I got home, I told Mati about the bizarre conversation, if you can call it that, with Michael. I was quite upset by it. He was making a big deal out of nothing. Or rather, to me it was no big deal but to him it obviously was. Mati took it upon herself to write Michael a letter, along the lines of:
Dear Michael, it wasn’t
Marco’s party. He didn’t feel Drones was ready. He was going to take you
there next week. This is all a silly misunderstanding . . .

Michael doesn’t live far from us, so Mati walked round with Luciano to drop off the letter. She has never received a response. On that day I made a decision never to talk to Michael again and our paths have not crossed since.

A
S FOR GORDON
Ramsay, I cut the umbilical cord a few years back. I stopped returning his calls. He had been a protégé at Harveys and he was always a hard worker and showed tremendous resilience when it came to my bollockings. Perhaps I created the monster Ramsay, the monster who ended up as a TV personality screaming at celebrities on
Hell’s Kitchen
, doing to them what I had done to him.

Anyway, I questioned my friendship with Gordon. I had given a newspaper interview in which I’d compared chefs to footballers and had wondered whether footballers made good managers, i.e., can chefs be successful restaurateurs? Gordon then gave an interview in which he used the same analogy but against me. In other words, he suggested that I may have been good in the kitchen but was I a good restaurateur? I was annoyed about it but he said he had been misquoted. I’d heard him say that before and I think that there’s a limit to the number of times you can be misquoted.

There was another incident when Gordon and I were pulled up for speeding and the story appeared in the papers. Gordon said his PR people must have placed it, but I wasn’t happy. I think Gordon can’t help himself and he would do it again.

I was also irritated to discover, quite by chance, that he had brought a film crew to my wedding. They were hiding in the bushes, filming Mr. Ramsay for his
Boiling Point
program. I had no idea they were there until about eight months later, when the producers sent me a videotape that contained the outtakes. Mati and I were happily watching it when suddenly we saw the two of us, dressed in our wedding attire, and then there was Gordon, winking at the cameras.