‘Marco is not the egotist I believed he was’
Tom Doorley once said he was ‘patronising’ but now he takes it all back
LEAVING the cocoon of comfort on the Stena Line ferry from Rosslare to Fishguard on a bright day in early spring, I thought for a moment of the five-hour drive to London that I’ve done so many times that I don’t need the satnav any more. It’s a bit of a grind.
And then I realised that my journey would be pleasantly shorter; I’d be leaving the M4 at the exit for Bath and revisiting the countryside that I knew quite well when I was a teenager.
But the reason for my visit was an unusual one. I was going to visit Marco Pierre White, my fellow judge on The Restaurant, in a place that has become something of an obsession for him: Rudloe Arms, a rambling Victorian building rescued by him from years of neglect and bad taste, and now being meticulously – and very expensively – renewed.
If you had told me two years ago that this is what I would be doing, I’d have laughed. Marco descended on the last series of The Restaurant like a whirlwind, never stopped talking and drove many of us on the team mad. I had to tell him to ‘stop being so f***ing patronising’ at one point, which is rather out of character for me.
But the latest series (which starts on TV3 this Thursday) is a different matter. Yes, he still dominates the show (to be fair, he dominates everything with which he comes into contact) and he completely ignores directions from the crew when they conflict with what he wants to do, but – odd as it may seem – we now get on rather well together.
IT may have something to do with the discovery that we share quite a few views (apart from Brexit, Nigel Farage, marriage and Australian cuisine, to be fair). Like McDonald’s (good), Michelin stars (bonkers, these days), how to make salade niçoise, the pleasures of simple food, the value of classical training in the tradition of Escoffier and the like, dry stone walls, the terrible loss of hedgerows…
Rudloe Arms, on the old Bath Road near Chippenham, now being transformed into a country house hotel, gave me the opportunity to see Marco in an environment where he doesn’t have an audience but also where, I think, he has at last found what he really wants to do.
But before we go there, let’s consider whence he has come.
A working class lad from Leeds, Marco lost his beloved mother suddenly at the age of six. I believe this explains a great deal about the man he is now.
He started his career at the Hotel St George in Harrogate, having left school early and with no qualifications. From there he graduated to The Box Tree at Ilkley, which was awarded two Michelin stars in 1977, when he was 16 and still being trained.
The same year he headed for London and worked as a commis for the Roux brothers at Le Gavroche where he worked under Michael Clifford who would go on to head the kitchen at White’s on the Green in Dublin.
Then it was on to Pierre Koffmann at the legendary La Tante Claire, followed by a stint with Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons in Oxfordshire and then back to London at Nico Ladenis at Ninety Park Lane where he worked with Paul Flynn who now has The Tannery in Dungarvan.
As CVs go, there was none better for a still very young Marco Pierre White. As he says himself, he was grounded in the classical techniques – the painstaking, complex, strict skills that had built haute cuisine, the great gift that French gave the world and which, to be frank, has virtually died out today.
After a short spell cooking in a pub in Chelsea, he opened Harvey’s on Wandsworth Common in South London at the age of 26. The Times’ critic described his meal as ‘breathtaking’. The Good Food Guide said Harvey’s was ‘a meteor hurtling through the restaurant firmament’. One Michelin star was conferred within weeks, a second within the year.
When he moved to the Hyde Park Hotel in Knightsbridge, he got his third star at the age of 33, the first British chef to do so, and the youngest ever to get the top accolade from the tyre company.
But, at the age of 38, he left the kitchen.
He later recalled: ‘I was being judged by people who had less knowledge than me, so what was it truly worth?
‘I gave Michelin inspectors too much respect, and I belittled myself. I had three options: I could be a prisoner of my world and continue to work six days a week, I could live a lie and charge high prices and not be behind the stove or I could give my stars back, spend time with my children and re-invent myself.’ His detractors argue that while he was possibly the greatest British chef ever, he sold out at this stage simply to make money, fund an expensive lifestyle (at one stage he was paying the price of a small house each year on shooting) with brand endorsements for Knorr and a collection of companies involved in steakhouses, pubs and franchises (some of which have had financial troubles).
In Britain, the critics tend to smile when his name is mentioned, partly at the recollection of his sensational cooking, partly because they don’t approve of MPW Incorporated today. One of them said to me the other day, ‘What’s he up to now?’
Well, leaving aside the franchising and Wheeler’s restaurant in London, it’s about two things these days for Marco.
FIRSTLY there’s Hell’s Kitchen Australia to which he has just moved from Australian MasterChef because ‘the money is way, way better’, he tells me. And there’s Rudloe, a labour of love and quite possibly the reason he needs the extra Aussie dollars. He told me how much he has already spent on the project but swore me to secrecy. Suffice it to say, it’s a lot.
Walking in Rudloe’s grounds, we stop to chat with a young local man who is meticulously rebuilding a dry stone wall around what was the old sunken garden.
He points out the old mobile shepherds’ huts that he has had painstakingly restored and dotted around the parkland. We visit the free-range pigs. ‘That’s where the sausages and the black pudding you had for breakfast are from,’ Marco told me.
‘We get them made just down the road.’
He points out the long strip along the border of the almost 30acre mini-farm that is deliberately allowed to go wild as a sanctuary for wild life, especially birds.
Then, as we look across to the rolling hills of Somerset, we talk about the loss of habitats as fields have become bigger and bigger. ‘Do you still shoot?’ I ask. ‘I’ve given up killing things, to be honest,’ he says.
And on we go to visit his geese and hens and collect some eggs. These I am given, along with black pudding, when I head off to London the next day.
Then there’s a visit to Bath ‘to visit my favourite chipper’ which turns out to be rather more than that in the form of The Scallop Shell, a delightfully informal allseafood restaurant.
Jane, his girlfriend, does the driving – something Marco has never mastered.
Afterwards we collect Victorian flower pots and other items from a little antique shop on the outskirts of the city.
Every item has its preordained place in the furnishing plan for the hotel.
He lives himself in Salisbury, not very far from Rudloe, but I think his heart really lies here. I used to think Marco was self-obsessed, but no longer. He’s a troubled man but with a good heart and more than a residue of genius.
And I think Rudloe provides the nearest thing to peace that he knows.
The new series of The Restaurant starts this Thursday on TV3 at 9pm.