My Marco Pierre White obsession

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Angus Colwell has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Pierre White, Marco. Chef. Michelin stars: five (all handed back). Wives: three (all handed back). Restaurants owned: number unclear. Hours in a cell: 14. Party: Reform. Brands promoted: Knorr stockpots, Lidl, P&O Cruises. Protégé: Gordon Ramsay. YouTube views: hundreds of millions. Current residence: the countryside, somewhere near Bath, far far away from anyone who tries to talk to him.

The obituaries will all call Marco Pierre White a ‘rock star’, and they will be correct. In the 1980s, he was all shaggy verve and sweat and ash. He ‘changed the game’ – as they all say – not so much through his cooking, but through his good looks. He had no real signature dishes, other than rehashing Pierre Koffman’s stuffed pig’s trotter, or the oyster that he filled with tagliatelle and caviar. He was the last gasp of something that had passed, the white tablecloth, French-obsessed cooking of the 1980s. Across the city, chefs like Fergus Henderson at offal bastion St John were quietly changing our eating habits.

What he showed was that no profession was immune from celebrity. Previously, chefs were disgusting, drunken, hidden-away things. Marco Pierre White, in his late twenties, with his sharp cheekbones and his shock of hair, is the man I wish I could look like most. Meat cleaver in hand, cigarette in mouth, junior chefs in terror.

And there’s something of the aged rock star about him now. He’s kept his hair, as they all seem to. He’s put on weight, but somehow with dignity: he moves with authority and purpose, like a cargo ship. He seems disconcertingly chilled out.

No one who types ‘marco pierre white’ into their phone during a 2 a.m. YouTube blitz can fail to be addicted. It has happened to me, and countless of my friends. But while it’s fun to watch him during the 1980s and 1990s as he flirts with Wandsworth it girls and rolls pasta with a quivering Gordon Ramsay, what really tickles the synapses is  Late Marco.

A short introduction to the canon: his speech at the Oxford Union. A student asks him something as anodyne as how he started out cooking. Marco’s response is 24 minutes long, without hesitation: slow, metronomic, neglecting not a single detail. ‘My father taught me how to work hard. He taught me how to be disciplined. He taught me how to be punctual. He taught me how to never throw in the towel. If I threw in the towel, he taught me how to pick it up. Never give in. Never, ever, ever give in.’ All the cadences of his sentences stand up beautifully. Somehow, while doing this, he doesn’t come across as a prick, but nor does he come across as a philosopher (he’s not saying anything actually interesting). It’s just a joy to watch someone talk like that. He has a lovely husk to his voice, which took effort, years of committed smoking. He’s a gorgeous practitioner of talking, and a master of meter.

He is probably our most epigrammatic figure since Gore Vidal. Some of them are apposite: ‘Work is the greatest painkiller known to man.’ Others are more confusing: ‘I don’t think women should eat robust dishes. Women are much cleaner creatures than men, so they need a cleaner diet.’ All of them are soon contradicted: ‘A pig, in my opinion, should be fat. Like a woman.’ His most famous is on Ramsay: ‘I did not make Gordon Ramsay cry. He chose to cry. That was his choice.’

My favourite Marco moment (and we devotees all have one) is a bizarre television series from 2008 called Marco’s Great British Feast. It is unclear what headspace he was in at the time. He had a valet-type figure called Mr Ishii, who drove him around the country and listened to his musings. Marco subjected him to eight million Marlboro Reds in return, all smoked with just a sliver of window open. He has to pull over when Marco spots a ‘donkey. I like donkeys. Mr Ishii can you reverse, please, I want to see the donkey. Do you like donkeys? They live a long time, do donkeys. Look at this donkey. Fucking great. Look, can you hear him? I LOVE donkeys. Look, he loves me.’ The relationship is transfixing: Marco will occasionally ask Mr Ishii to sample something he’s cooking. He looks in his eyes and says, ‘I love sharing spoons with you, Mr Ishii.’

There’s a podcast out about Marco called Eat Me. Over three half-hour episodes, host Ciaran Tracey simply talks about Marco’s career, while some podcast-typical double bass burbles underneath. I’m not entirely sure what the gist of it is: the podcast doesn’t quite feature enough guests who’d known Marco through the years, but then it also doesn’t play enough audio of Marco himself, who we really want to be listening to. Ultimately, however, I have an immense amount of sympathy for the presenter and his aim. You can tell he’s just obsessed with Marco. And that all he wants to do is to talk about Marco. And, really, that’s fine, because that’s all I want to do too.