Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews (22 page)

‘Not passionately,’ I said. He shook his curls. ‘Milk-fed pigeon. Never even beaten its wings. Snuggled in a parcel with foie gras. Go on,’ he said, rising. ‘I’ll sort you out.’

We were cautiously happy to be sorted out. This is a chef who does not believe in giving people what they can replicate at home. And such bonhomie betokened an experience. Jennifer wondered if it also meant an experience on the house. Less persuaded by this hope, I furtively chose the cheapest rosso on Marco’s mostly three-figure wine list. ‘Usually,’ rasped Jennifer, ‘I carry my own drinks with me. One’s always given wine at parties, when what one wants is a proper drink.’

‘You mean vodka.’

‘Of course. Oooh, now look. What have we here?’

We saw no more of Marco. His messages to us were borne out on silver trays by legion emissaries. And they were superb statements of culinary bravado. Most of Jennifer’s utterances were simply rhapsodic reactions.
What a treat. How adorable. How absolutely adorable. Oh, I do adore that.
Passim. Sensing that their transcription might make her seem simply a senior Sloane Ranger, or the pair of us disgustingly carnal, I struggled to excavate a life history before the cult status set in.

One day she was beetling about on her moped in search of the original recipe for Bakewell tart, a producer spotted her, matched her with another eccentric, and there they were: the two large ladies, hooting away in the kitchen, and getting fan mail from the likes of Sir Alec Guinness.

Meagre scraps came. Jennifer Paterson is a creature of today. Her yesterdays can be very briefly summarized. A childhood in Sicily, where, she declared, her father had to be rescued from worshipping goats on a
mountain-top. ‘Really?’ I interrupted. ‘Well, it was something of that sort. Vair peculiar. I say, is that a dollop of caviar there? How outrageously delicious.’

Then a spot of au-pairing in Portugal. Then a stint in Benghazi, nan-nying for a colonel. Where she learnt to cook on a Baby Belling. (‘Not easy for a gal. I’d come back from the souk with quivering lumps of meat. No idea it had to hang.’) A turn in Harrods; matron at a school; a spell with the
Candid Camera
team; various chaperone posts. And more cooking – for the Ugandan embassy; then for the
Spectator
, the British weekly magazine, in the days when a weekly six-hour lunch was editorial policy.

‘Vair strange thing. Only the upper classes will work as domestics now. Everyone else regards it as demeaning. They’re silly. I’d far rather cook for a living than sit in an office for a living, wouldn’t you?’

Suddenly she shrieked. ‘The wireless!’ And at the same moment, her main course was unveiled. She flung down her serviette, and bustled to a phone behind a screen. This is what happens when you are a cult figure. The nation needs you to speak. We all heard her booming away. ‘I’m in Marco Pierre White’s … the most exquisite dish of pig’s trotter has just been set before me … stuffed with sweetbreads … yes, divine.’ A waiter came and remodelled her serviette into a lotus flower. Soon she was back.

‘What was that about?’

‘Some ridiculous programme.
Can Big Be Beautiful
, they wanted to know.’

‘Of course it can.’

‘Now how,’ said Jennifer, plumping down to business again, ‘can a beastly pig have such a tender little trotter? Isn’t this a miracle? Yes, of course it can. These twig-like waifs are just invented by poofs, to model their clothes. Get girls to look like little boys, you see – little boys in drag.’

Pigeon and pig’s trotter dispatched, an interim pudding arrived. Tiny creme caramel. ‘Ah, at last,’ said Jennifer. ‘Something I shall refuse. I never eat things that wobble.’ She lit another Woodbine, and beamed indulgently.

‘Clarissa,’ she said, ‘Clarissa believes that it was the Victorians who ruined our cooking. We used to be the best. The Puritans spoiled it all. Food became fuel, catering done with a grudge. You know. Clarissa is a
Roman Catholic, like me. That’s why we have such fun together. But don’t you think – ooh, look,’ as a second dessert materialized, non-wobbly – ‘don’t you think this is all perfectly wonderful – so long as one doesn’t do it too often?’

It was, in fact, her first visit here – her first taste, indeed, of Marco Pierre White’s mature skill. And she was the best of all possible guests – funny, opinionated, gossipy and well-connected (herself). But even between cult chefs, it seems, there is no such thing as a free lunch. At her insistence, I showed her the bill: £220. I escorted her out to find her moped, and she gave me a kiss. ‘My dear,’ she said, ‘remember the Prodigal Son. Seize the day.’

23 APRIL 1994

He is part cherub, part volcano. But no one is assassinated and there are only three flickers of temper

By Michael Thompson-Noel

My scallops are being served with awesome precision. The dish is immaculate, the service terrific. I glance at the waiter but he is carrying out his task with so much concentration that he cannot be distracted.

The reason for this is the identity of my guest, who is watching the serving of the scallops with such brooding intensity that I feel I have strayed into an Aztec ceremony.

This is Marco Pierre White, the best-known, most lauded of all English chefs – still only 32, born in Leeds, half Italian, beefy, tousle-haired, charismatic and tempestuous: able to pass, in an eye-blink, from cherubic to volcanic. Or so the folklore says. By accident or design, my guest has attracted some of the most enviable publicity in the history of cooking.

The words used to describe him pop up all the time. Volatile. Flamboyant. Firebrand.
Enfant terrible
. Profane genius. Wild man. Wild child. Sulphurous. Rudest chef in London. The Apollo of the Aga. There have been wives, mistresses, children, dust-ups and bust-ups.

Over the years, the image that has been created is one of danger, decadence and theatricality. That is not bad going for a celebrity-chef, though the decadence has been exaggerated. White says he has never tasted alcohol or tried narcotics, and that two years ago he gave up ‘smoking, gambling and marriage’.

There are those who must imagine that to enter one of Marco White’s restaurants is to stand a good chance of being grabbed by the chef-proprietor
and flung into the street for some imagined slight or lapse in table manners. But when I asked him how many customers he had expelled from his restaurants in the whole of his career, the answer was only two.

We are sitting in one of White’s two restaurants, The Canteen at London’s Chelsea Harbour, which has its own chef and one Michelin star. White owns a one-third stake. Another co-owner is actor Michael Caine. White’s other establishment is The Restaurant at the Forte-managed Hyde Park Hotel, Knightsbridge, London, where he has two Michelin stars. He won his first Michelin star at the age of 25, his second at 27 – the youngest British two-star chef.

Our lunch was going well. No one had been assassinated, apart from (absent) rivals. There had been comedy to start with. Neither of us realized that the other had arrived. White had gone to the bar, I to the table. At 1.40pm the manager asked if I would like a newspaper to read, to help pass the time. Three minutes later the mistake was realized, and White and I shook hands.

He looked concussed with anger. But no one was to blame, and he was soon transferring food from his plate to mine. A large part of White’s charm derives from his candour. His working-class Yorkshire childhood lurks just beneath the surface. I asked him where his extreme physicality and pugnacity came from.

He said, ‘I have to break everything I touch. It’s just something I’ve always done. Maybe it’s a positive or maybe it’s a negative, or maybe it’s related to my need to progress professionally. Originally my aggression could be attributed to a lack of social skills – and shyness.

‘Am I an arsehole? Some people say so. Some people rubbish me and my work, but who are these people? You don’t get two Michelin stars if you are only an arsehole. There is more to it than that. Here is an example. One of the things I believe in in my restaurants is value for money –affordable, Michelin-class food. Here in The Canteen, all starters are £6.50 and all mains £10.50. People can afford that. That’s why The Canteen turns over £70,000 a week.

‘I want to achieve that sort of value for money at The Restaurant. It’s too easy to rip the customers off. A lot of that goes on. The way I’ll make my money is in the long run. The last thing I’m ever going to do is jeopardize what I’ve got already.’

White trained with the best chefs in Britain – above all, with Albert Roux, former mastermind at Le Gavroche, the first London restaurant to win three Michelin stars. ‘I am an offspring of all the great (English-based) chefs,’ says White, naming others who guided him.

‘I was lucky. I appeared at the right time. I worked long hours, won my first Michelin star, attracted a few tarts – suddenly I became Marco Pierre White. But as a cook gets older his cooking gets simpler, and as I get older I have become more of a recluse. I spend a lot more time in my restaurants than I used to. I don’t remember the last time I went to a nightclub, a dinner party or an event. I only deal now with a few old friends in the profession. I have my girlfriend, my two children – and fishing.’

Fishing looms large in a conversation with White. He hunts down macho fish: pike, barbel, grayling, tench and trout. He says his best pike weighed 32lb. A monster. Did he cook it? Not for the first time, a guileless little question produced contradictory answers from the master-chef. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘I never kill the fish. I couldn’t kill anything. I love nature too much – bird-watching, everything.’

Later, however, he said he liked shooting. ‘The sort of customers I get, some of them invite me to shoot. I love it. I used to be a poacher. That was my first job. I went shooting on a private estate not long ago and this huge cock pheasant came strutting along the ground. It would not get up. It would not fly. So I blasted it on the ground.’

One of White’s attractions is his hatred of taxi-drivers. I told him that I shared it. ‘They’re fascists,’ I said, ‘completely rotten people, the same the world over.’

‘Yah,’ agreed the chef. ‘You’ve got it: fascists. I don’t own a flashy car. Don’t actually own a car ’cause I don’t even drive. But my girlfriend’s got an off-roader, the biggest you can buy, which I’m fitting out with bumper-guards and really major spotlights in case any taxi-drivers want to take us on.’

During lunch, White showed a flicker of temperament on only three occasions. He was irritated that the butter on our table was softer than it should have been, but said nothing. However, he told a waiter to go and tell someone in the kitchen to stop banging – ‘I did not come here today to listen to his noise’ – and remonstrated with another waiter for serving me cold milk with my coffee.

‘He asked for black coffee,’ White told the waiter, ‘but if you’re going to give him milk, make sure it’s hot. Cold milk kills the flavour.’ The waiter rushed away. White said to me, ‘Now he’s going frantic. Bet he thinks I’m an arsehole.’

On the strength of a single lunch, I formed the impression that Marco White is a lot cleverer than widely realized. I suspect that people see his Italian side, the charisma and machismo, and forget the Yorkshire half – gall, grit, gumption.

At 3.30, I said I would pay the bill, giving him a chance to read the six-page fax that a waiter had handed him.

‘Nah,’ said White. ‘Forget it.’

‘I’m supposed to pay,’ I said. ‘That’s the idea. We choose the guest. The guest chooses the restaurant. We pay the bill.’

‘Nah,’ growled White.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘The food was great. No doubt I’ll return in my own capacity. Then I can pay for myself.’

‘Yeah,’ said the big man. ‘In your own capacity. That’s the bill you slip through the
FT
.’

The thought had never occurred to me.

‘There you go,’ he said, laughing loudly. ‘You’ve found the real Marco White.’

19 JULY 1997

The newly elected MP for Ulster-Mid is hard to fathom – except when he talks about fishing

By Kieran Cooke

Martin McGuinness’s right-hand man walks across the bar and introduces himself as Dominic. With his black blazer and grey trousers I had assumed he was the head waiter. The image of Sinn Féin, political wing of the IRA, has changed. Gone are the donkey jackets and jeans. It’s more Armani than bargain basement these days.

In comes the newly elected MP for Ulster-Mid. At 47, he is slightly stooped in the shoulder but is built like a retired rugby player. McGuinness, a teetotaller, orders an apple juice. Dominic has a lemonade. I join the party and order mineral water.

We slide into things gently. ‘Is it true you’re a keen fisherman?’ I ask.

‘That’s an understatement,’ says McGuinness. He leans forward confidentially. ‘Do you know I have written an ode to the sea trout?’ I say I’d like to see it.

We are sitting in the bar of the Trinity Hotel in Londonderry. A party of US tourists in bright colours passes the door. So too do two army Land Rovers, with soldiers and machine-guns poking out of the top. The threatening and the humdrum live side by side in Northern Ireland. The tourists reach for their cameras.

For a time the conversation meanders around rivers and streams. McGuinness is worried about the growing problem of sea lice and the effect on the trout population. But the fishing talk is soon at an end.
McGuinness is first and foremost a product of Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’.

In 1972, when he was only 21, McGuinness was part of an IRA (Irish Republican Army) delegation that travelled to London for talks with the British government.

He has associated with leading IRA members and carried coffins at IRA funerals. In the early 1970s he was jailed in the Irish Republic, convicted for being a member of the IRA. He has never been convicted of terrorist offences in Northern Ireland. He is admired but also feared – described as a hard man with a soft face.