Swimming in the Deep End of Life

Marco Pierre White talks about caring and kindness ahead of an Auckland charity event. Kim Knight discovers the original rockstar chef is an acquired taste.

Once, Marco Pierre White was cheekbones draped in prosciutto. Sharp angles and translucent skin in a monochrome photo. His face has fleshed with age but his skin has, perhaps, become thinner. “We can see what kind of journalist you are,” he says.

I repeat his statement, incredulously.

“Of course! I’ve done more interviews than you.”

Rapid maths. My career began a decade before Google was founded. He is wrong and I tell him. “And you’re not an editor yet?”

Once, I say. Sort of.

“Did you not SURVIVE being an editor?”

It is 9am in the countryside just outside of Bath, England, where White has apparently decided to have a journalist for breakfast.

White was 24 when he became head chef and co-owner of Harveys, the London restaurant famous for oysters and tagliatelle, celebrity clientele and astronomically expensive wine.

Writer Graham Erickson: “I vaguely remember a Pet Shop Boy, Richard Rogers and Billy Connolly being in the room at the time. I remember Marco commenting that there was nobody interesting there that night.”

White is 57 now. His name is attached to the menus of 79-and-counting dining rooms across eight restaurant brands and P&0 Cruises. He is a brand ambassador for a company that makes stock cubes. In interviews, he espouses the need to be kind but media don’t always return the favour. In 2015, the Guardian’s Marina O’loughlin described White’s newest restaurant as a “sausage factory of mediocrity”. The Observer’s Jay Rayner once suggested the chef had entered a celebrity dead zone and was now “only news when he’s shouting”. British journalist Lynn Barber is arguably as famous as White. The pair drank wine, ate lunch and smoked cigarettes, then she wrote, “He habitually uses his mother’s death as his Get out of Jail Free card.”

In short, White ignites headlines. For example, when Masterchef Australia judge Matt Preston suggested his son and namesake Marco Pierre White jnr was off the rails, White snr told a

reporter: “With my hand on my mother’s grave I will get that man.”

I wonder if White snr has ever regretted yelling at anyone?

“Well, give me an example.”

Perhaps, I suggest, chef Gordon Ramsay — White’s one-time protege and the subject of an epically ongoing he-said-he-said tabloid feud? (Sample story: that time Ramsay reportedly gashed himself opening scallops and White allegedly grabbed his bleeding hand and buried it in salt.)

“Well, number one, I’ve never had an argument with Gordon,” says White. “You should know better than me. You’re a journalist. You’re the fabricators. The exaggerators. Not me. You’re the ones who try to turn boring stories into something exciting.”

I had planned to ask White about his shift from chef to restaurateur. I had planned to engage him on the topic of the original Parisian restaurateurs of the 1700s who were the first to offer what the famous food writer Brillat-savarin described as “an ever-ready feast” devised by a man who “must have been a genius endowed with profound insight into human nature”.

Instead, we have moved on to an argument about a reality television judge.

“You obviously don’t know Matt Preston, do you?” says White. (I don’t.) “Let me ask you a simple question. Do you have children?” (I don’t; he has three.) “Then you might not understand but can you imagine having a child and I slag that child off? Now you tell me, where’s your moral compass? What he should have said is, ‘I don’t know his son but I know his father and he’s a very hard-working, very decent person.’ But when you’re blinded by narcissism ... ” Preston is a narcissist?

“Well, look at the way he dresses. Doesn’t that say everything? His dress sense is larger than his personality.”

If you can’t stand the heat, get out of White’s interview. My mistake, he tells me, was to read the clippings. Don’t come with questions, he says, come with conversation. So I laugh. I call him a ratbag. And he softens, because he knows he has done his job. He has behaved like the legend that is Marco Pierre White.

White was born in Leeds to a home less posh than his accent suggests. He is the third son of Maria-rosa and Frank. His mum was from Italy, his dad an English chef. White left high school with no academic qualifications but, by the age of 33, had amassed three Michelin stars — the youngest chef in the world with that accolade, the only one ever in Britain. White was trained by the greats (Albert and Michel Roux, Pierre Koffman, Raymond Blanc) and some of the future greats were, in turn, passing through his kitchen — his website lists a team that includes Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal; other sources reference America’s Mario Batali and Australia’s Curtis Stone and Shannon Bennett. White has been called the godfather of modern cooking, an enfant terrible and the first celebrity chef.

In late October, he will appear at Taste of Auckland. Tickets to the white-tie charity dinner start at $460 a head. Inevitably, diners will be paying for his presence, not his cooking per se. He’s travelling with executive chef Andrew Bennet, who will be joined by local stars Josh Emett and Gareth Stewart.

“A chef’s allowed to stray from the stove but they must always stay close to the flame,” says White.

I dutifully write this down and then discover he’s given variations of this quote to a Singapore blog, several Australian food publications, a United Kingdom hotel trade magazine and the Shropshire Star. Clearly, I did not read enough clippings. Exclusive (as far as I can tell) to the Herald: “I’ve never planned anything in my entire life. The only time I plan things is when I’m in a kitchen.”

An audience with White is an acquired taste. Equal parts philosophy and platitude. He has found a recipe he likes, and he’s not messing with it — until he does. Then what he says is so intimate or brutal or totally mad that you think: Yes. This is how you end up with tagliatelle and oysters on the same, glorious plate.

“My mother brought me into this world to be a romantic idealist,” he says.

“What I have worked out in my life is that all I ever tried to do was replace what was taken from me as a child,” he says.