Liquid Lunch

Barry Egan shares several bottles of wine with Marco Pierre White

Prepare to enter Marco Pierre White’s head. The famous provocateur and chef is an uncommonly complex man, embedded with myriad psychological layers — some of which are, perhaps, unknown

even to him. And I say this as a friend of his. A cigarette dangles from his Jaggeresque lips, and Marco looks like he is crying. “I was racially discriminated against for years as a child in Leeds because I was an Italian. I was called a coward. I was called a wop. I was called a spic. I was never beaten up. But I was picked on at school. It wasn’t just because I was a spic. I was also different. I had holes in my shoes. My uniform . . .” he says, stopping.

“I had to dry my shoes every time I came home from school,” Marco continues, “because they were wet. I remember one day being called to the headmistress’s office. I was about eight or nine. She showed me empathy on a massive scale. She had gone to the lost-property office and taken clothes out of that for me. I went home with two carrier bags from the lost-property office.”

I say to him that life must have been extremely difficult for his father, Frank, in the late 1960s — trying to bring up Marco and his two older brothers after their mother died of a brain haemorrhage when Marco was six.

“My father was a gambler,” he replies. “My father was a drinker. He wasn’t a very good gambler. He wasn’t a very good drinker. Drink didn’t suit him. It brought out the worst in him.”

Still, it can’t have been easy for him, Marco?

“You know something? It is not about being easy in life. It is about being correct. It is about being proper and decent and keeping your commitment — to, one, bring children into this world; and two, honour the memory of your wife, because you have a duty. Otherwise, hand the kids over.

“If you can’t do the job properly, then give that job to somebody else and let them do that job . . . even though my mother’s dying wishes were ‘Keep the boys together’. But only do that and accept that responsibility if you are prepared to be a mensch [a person of integrity and honour], as the Jews will say. Be a man. I am a believer that if you bring children into this world, then you have a responsibility to do your best, and support and guide them until the day you die.

“There were four of us. I had two big brothers. I had one younger brother [Simon] who was 13 days old when my mother died.”

Frank White sent Simon to Genoa to live with a childless Italian couple uncle Gianfranco, and aunt Paola — while Marco and his two older brothers, Clive and Graham, stayed with Frank on the council estate in Yorkshire near Leeds.

Maybe your father had huge guilt about his son being taken away from him?

“No,” Marco says shaking his head. “My father had no guilt. No guilt.”

How do you know he didn’t bury his guilt about your young brother with drinking and gambling?

“Because he was a drinker and a gambler before my mother died. It is as simple as that. It wasn’t the death of my mother that made him drink and gamble. I was brought up to respect my father and not to love him. I respected him.”

In his 2007 autobiography, The Devil in the Kitchen, Marco seemed to share a completely different view of his alcoholic father — who died in 1997 — than the one he is expressing today in Dublin. In the book, Marco recalls his brother Simon saying to him at this father’s funeral that Frank wasn’t his father, really: “He did not bring me up. My father is Gianfranco.”

As quoted in the book, Marco launched into him, telling Simon, “If that’s the case, then Graham, Clive and I are not your brothers. You can’t have it both ways. One thing about our father, what he did, he gave you a better life by allowing you to go to Italy. And he didn’t put my two brothers and me in a children’s home, which would have been totally acceptable in the 1960s. What he did was sacrifice his own life to keep us all together. And whatever you think of that is your opinion, but I think it takes a man to do something like that”.

The late AA Gill was once asked by the London Evening Standard what was the best thing a London cabbie ever said to him. To which the feted food critic replied, “I’ve had that Marco Pierre White in my taxi and he’s a bit of a pussycat, isn’t he? I don’t know what all the fuss is about.”

After meeting Marco, you might perhaps come away with a similar conclusion to that London taxi driver. Or you might not.

In my experience, however, Marco isn’t the grouchy growler, the hectoring macho bully of tabloid legend.

That said, he does know how to dole out the dog’s abuse on occasion — he once called Tony Blair a c**t. And he certainly knows how to cast his big, bearish presence, too, when it suits him.

Lunch with him is nothing less than an invite to get the juices going. Ours started at 1pm in his restaurant on Dawson Street, and finished at 8.30pm at his other Dublin restaurant in Donnybrook. Day became night. No thought was left unsaid. No bottle, it appeared, unopened.

He had his driver bring me — positively pickled in red wine — to my door. Under my arm was also a copy of a book he had given me, plus a request to come and stay with him at his home in Wiltshire before he disappears Down Under for three months to shoot Hell’s Kitchen Australia.

“Just turn up at the airport. I’ll send my driver.” I have a wife and a baby, I tell him. “I’ll send my driver for them, too.” And he means every word. To those who say that Marco doesn’t do conversations, he holds court instead, I say that they are reading too many hatchet jobs in certain newspapers about him. He is a mercurial motormouth. Of course he is. You wouldn’t be reading this article or watching him on The Restaurant on TV3 if he wasn’t. Underneath that moodybollocks bluster, however, is a gentle, vulnerable, sensitive soul, someone who cries in the middle of a conversation — as he does twice — and then hugs you.

Our seven-and-a-half hour GBH-ofthe-liver included: passionate homages to people no longer with us — the aforesaid AA Gill (“I’ll miss Adrian. Let’s raise a glass”); Paolo Tullio (“a great character”); Gerry Ryan (“I regarded him as a friend. I was very sad when he passed”); tales of shooting parties with Madonna and Guy Richie; philosophy; God; Johnny Rotten; Leeds United; memories of cooking for Prince Charles, and the future King of England talking to him in French because he assumed he was French (“I had to tell him I didn’t speak French”); and his friendship with the late Irish photographer Bob Carlos Clarke, who took the photographs for the 1990 cookbook White Heat — chef Anthony Bourdain described the shots as “borderline homoerotic in their near fetishistic lingering on a frankly beautiful Marco”.

Marco has his beautiful girlfriend, Jane, with him in Dublin today. She is from Huddersfield. They met last August in Bath. (She joins Marco and me for an hour before going back to The Shelbourne.) They seem quite smitten. Is he in love?

“Now, that is a very large statement. You always know when you’re in love . . . sorry, let me rephrase that: you always know you’re in love when . . .” When? “It’s like when you go to work in an establishment as a young man, it is not until you leave that you realise how important those people were in your life and how much you learned. When you work for someone, you never realise how much you are learning. It is only when you leave and you reflect back on life.

“And,” Marco says, eventually, “a woman is exactly the same. It is not until it is all over that you really know how much you love them, and how important they were in your life, because being a boy, boys all have one thing in common: we take everything for granted. We never think tomorrow will come. We never think it will be over. But the truth is, nothing lasts forever, including life.” (Thank God Jane has gone back to the Shelbourne.) You and Jane could last forever, I say. “I don’t take things for granted. I did when I was younger. I have got to that stage in my life when I take moment by moment, day by day.” You’re 55. That’s hardly old. “My hairline isn’t as thick as it used to be,” he laughs, as we compare hairlines. You don’t have jowls. “I have to thank my dear mother for that.”

All the wine he drinks hasn’t had too much of a noticeable effect on his figure, either. He had 11 bottles of wine the previous night with some pals for dinner in Dublin.