MARCO PIERRE WHITE – AGE: 45 – HOME: London – CLAIM TO FAME: A legendarily temperamental chef and mentor to Gordon Ramsay, Heston Blumenthal and Mario Batali, White, at 33, was the youngest chef in history to earn three Michelin stars. His restaurants were Harveys, c at the Hyde Park Hotel and The Oak Room at the Meridien. – TODAY: White has left the kitchen to invest in businesses (including restaurants), spend time with his family, hunt and fish. He has just published his autobiography, “Devil in the Kitchen,” recounting his unlikely rise from public housing in Leeds to the top of the culinary world. – FUTURE: White has just signed on as the next host of the reality TV show “Hell’s Kitchen,” formerly helmed by his famously abusive protege Ramsay.
Marco Pierre White slaved in England’s top kitchens for more than 20 years. He had become the youngest chef in history to win three Michelin stars. Rakish, long-haired, explosive and obsessed with culinary perfection, he had emerged as the first real rock-star chef.
But in 1999, at age 38, he hung up his apron and walked away.
Today, White claims he rarely cooks and, in fact, doesn’t “miss it at all.”
This makes it all the more shocking when, at a Northside Korean barbecue joint last week, the former chef grabs a pair of tongs and takes over the grilling at our table.
“I think that piece is ready,” his interviewer suggests.
“No, it hasn’t caramelized enough, darling,” he responds with none of his famous stove-side ferocity. “See?”
Eventually White abandons the tongs and, with his massive hands, starts turning the sweet, fatty slabs of short rib, recalling words from his seminal 1990 kitchen manifesto “White Heat”: “Use your fingers. I don’t care if you burn them; you weren’t given fingers not to burn them.”
With “White Heat” — a cookbook and collection of grittily glamorous kitchen verite photos — White inspired a generation of chefs; Anthony Bourdain says he “dreamed of nothing more than to be just like him.”
The 6-foot-3-inch Brit with the booming baritone was in Chicago this month to promote another book, his autobiography, “Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness and the Making of a Great Chef,” written with James Steen.
In it, he recounts his humble childhood growing up in Leeds’ public housing, suffering the loss of his mother at age 6 and his father’s cancer diagnosis a few years later.
Self-sufficiency and hard work would become his guiding principles, as he took after-school jobs at 10 and left home at 16 to find kitchen work anywhere he could. Less than 10 years later he would emerge as one of London’s culinary enfants terribles with his pioneering restaurant Harveys, where he earned his first two Michelin stars, having never gone to cooking school or, even, France. By 1995, he had become the youngest chef ever to earn a third star — with the restaurant Marco Pierre White in the Hyde Park Hotel.
His speed, precision, creativity and astonishing talent were as legendary as his punishment of misbehaving cooks (who got timeouts in the garbage can or tirades called “bollockings”) and misbehaving patrons (who were firmly invited to leave).
Leaned on
White famously reduced his protege — the pugnacious “Hell’s Kitchen” reality TV show host chef Gordon Ramsay — to tears, and Mario Batali recalls his time under White by saying: “Of course he made me a better chef, because what doesn’t destroy you ….”
Today, White has morphed into a Savile Row suit-wearing businessman “with interests,” he says “in many businesses, including several restaurants.” But his outspoken impulses have not faded. In fact, even before his plane landed here, the chef had lobbed a few grenades at Chicago’s culinary elites.
In an interview with Time Out, White accused Charlie Trotter of making and canceling reservations for a large party (an account that Trotter disputes) at his flagship London restaurant a decade ago; “you just don’t do that,” White said. In the same article he called a meal he had eaten at Maggiano’s on his last visit “Dreadful food”; and, when asked about Alinea-style molecular gastronomy, hesaid, “I don’t like to be dictated to.”
The half-Italian restaurateur made news of another kind this spring by agreeing to host the next season of “Hell’s Kitchen,” which was formerly anchored by Ramsay, his abusive acolyte chef. In his new book, White recalls the many bollockings he dished out to Ramsay, yet feels no responsibility for his savage TV persona.
“I think he has done more damage to our industry than people realize,” says White. “I want to [use my role as host] to inspire rather than belittle. How many parents who have kids in the industry must think every kitchen is like that?”
Back at the Korean restaurant, we’ve finished a meal of grilled beef, seafood pancakes, sticky rice, kimchi, radish pickles, dried fish and Korean beer, and White leans back in chair with a satisfied grin. He reaches for his Marlboros but remembers he’s in Chicago. Still, it’s 1 a.m., the restaurant is empty and a huge exhaust fan hangs over our table. White looks at the manager and she gives him the nod.
“I think this is one of my favorite restaurants in Chicago,” he announces a with a giant smile creeping across his face.
White bounced around the dining spectrum during his 48-hour Chicago stay — including a stop at Hot Dougs, which he calls “A sensational place.” But this former prince of haute cuisine says his preferences these days lie in “good, honest” food in a “comfortable environment” — with an emphasis on the latter.
The comfort factor
“If you sit down in an environment where you feel comfortable, you can appreciate what’s given to you,” says a man who once commanded an average of $600 a head in his dining room. “How many times have you been to a great restaurant but you didn’t feel comfortable? You’re on the edge of your chair, and no matter how great the food is you don’t rush to go back. Am I right? Posh restaurants were made for the middle classes because they are aspiring. You never see cool people in Michelin starred restaurants.”
That’s not to say you won’t see White in these types of places.
Despite his dismissive comments about molecular gastronomy in Time Out Chicago, White requested a reservation at Alinea the day he arrived. And despite a misunderstanding that prevented him from paying his respects in the kitchen, he called it his best meal in Chicago. “Firstly, I thought it was an extraordinary value,” he says of a restaurant where the tasting menus cost $100 and $195. “And second, I think the chef is very clever; he has incredible technical ability. You can see that he works very hard, and I think he deserves all the success he’s got and is going to get. But what will be interesting to see is how he develops as he matures as a chef. I think if he keeps on going like this he’ll one day win three stars in the Michelin.”
White’s mythic stature among a certain generation of chefs cannot be overstated. And so the idea that this man with such profound gifts no longer cooks or even misses the kitchen baffles his devotees.
“I am just not interested in it anymore,” White says. “You see, I’m an obsessive and so for me to let go of something, I have to replace it with something else. And I have tenfold with my children, time with myself, time in the countryside doing what I want to do — fishing, deerstalking, shooting. … My mum died when I was 6 and a part of me never got to be a child. But now I have a second chance, to watch ‘Jungle Book’ with my daughter, watch her laugh, go to the park, feed the ducks and go for a bicycle ride. If I’d never stopped cooking I wouldn’t have had that second chance.”
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meng@tribune.com
