Marco Pierre White bars Michelin from his restaurant

THE restaurant world is known for its simmering rivalries and occasional full-blown incendiary spats.

Now Marco Pierre White, the original bad boy of British cooking, has turned up the heat on his long-running dispute with the Michelin Guide, refusing its inspectors permission to visit his latest restaurant.

“I don’t need Michelin and they don’t need me,” he said in an interview with an Asian lifestyle website. “They sell tyres and I sell food.”

The English House hopes to set Singapore alight with the delights of “modern British cuisine” when it opens in the city early next year.

But any attention the restaurant receives will not come via the worldwide restaurant guide, which has been awarding up to three stars for culinary excellence since 1926. White revealed in an interview with Singapore-based CNA Lifestyle that the Michelin Guide wrote to him to ask if it could include The English House for consideration in its 2019 edition. His reply? “No”.

The 56-year-old British chef has form with the revered culinary guides.

In 1999, Pierre White handed back the three Michelin stars he had been awarded five years previously for his eponymous restaurant at the age of just 33. He said at the time that he gave the stars back because “they didn’t mean that much any more”, adding: “Maintaining three stars is pretty boring”.

This complaint rings true throughout the kitchens of the world’s best restaurants. In 2012, Skye Gyngell quit her role as head chef of the Petersham Nurseries restaurant in London, citing the “curse” of the Michelin star for causing the small café, housed in a greenhouse, to be “rammed” every day, making service near impossible.

Earlier this year, Le Suquet in Aveyron, France, became the first restaurant to be removed entirely from the pages of the guide upon the request of Sébastien Bras, its chef, to allow him to focus on more innovative cooking.