MARCO PIERRE WHITE: All the rage
Celebrity chefs garnished with flaming tempers and waterfront-tough personalities are a staple dish these days, but none is more fiery or compelling than Marco Pierre White, who once managed to reduce even Gordon Ramsay to tears during a bruising encounter over the grills.
The youngest chef to be awarded two Michelin stars (when he was 27), White now has an autobiography to add to the string of top London restaurants that have borne his imprint over the years. Still just 44 years old and with a fortune probably measurable in millions, he has come a long way from a difficult childhood on a Leeds council estate, where he was beaten at home and a fighter at school.
Fury and rage seem to follow him to this day. There is little sense of a man at ease with his achievements, affluence and culinary status, amid fallings-out with business partners including Sir Michael Caine, Damien Hirst and Albert Roux.
There have been three marriages, too. His shortest one, to the model Lisa Butcher, barely lasted the honeymoon. The latest, to Mati, a former head waitress at one if his enterprises, has had its moments — she recently accused a waitress of sleeping with him, something that he denies.
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The physical presence seems to underscore the personality. White is 6ft 3in (1.91m). Dark, swept-back corkscrew hair adds to the sense of a flamboyant, forthright Rabelaisian figure living life to the full for blood and glory and, above all, money. He gave up his Michelin stars, three by the end, some time ago to concentrate on building a restaurant empire and, by his own wry admission, spend more time fishing. He also enjoys deer-stalking and holds the British record for shooting the largest roebuck in 20 years.
But more hidden from view is a man said to be fiercely loyal to family — he has three children — and a small circle of friends, which may owe something to his late mother, Maria-Rosa, a vivacious and adoring Italian. She died suddenly after a difficult childbirth when White was 6, leaving four sons. Their father, Frank, proved a distant and unemotional disciplinarian. There was little love, White has said. “I did everything to impress my father but nothing was ever enough,” he told an interviewer. “Because of that I spent three decades being f***ed up.”
There will doubtless be more rows and eruptions from a man said by one friend to be “driven and obsessed” by money and perfection. But in the end there will remain the dish that he says he cares about most, a tenderly cooked tagliatelle of oysters and caviar. It is dedicated to the memory of his mother.