The Devil in the Kitchen

by Marco Pierre White

  How do we create it? Slowly heat a heavy-based pan on very low heat, perhaps for five minutes, and once it is hot enough, put in some butter, letting it gently melt. Then take your egg from a basket and crack it into the pan. (I don’t keep eggs in the fridge as it only lengthens the cooking process because you are dealing with a chilled ingredient.) If the heat seems too high, then remove the pan from the heat for a few seconds to let it cool down. Basically, if you can hear that egg cooking, then the heat is too high. Carefully spoon the butter over the top of the egg. After about five minutes you have your magnificent fried egg—more of an egg poached in butter—just the way you had pictured it on the plate.

  If you can visualize the food on the plate before you start cooking, it means, inevitably, that you can be more precise with portions: how often have you prepared a roast dinner intended for six but ended up creating enough food for a dozen? Picture it on the plate first, and you’ll not only get a better meal but save on waste as well—though do take into consideration the people who’ll want second helpings.

  * * *

  I needed a system for making sure the brigade brought my vision to life, plate after plate. At Manoir, it had sometimes been a problem that not every chef could copy Raymond’s artistic style. Quite simply, they didn’t have his flair. Somehow, I had to find an easy-to-follow way of enabling my chefs to imitate my desired presentation of dishes. I devised a simple method: the plate became a clock. The top of the plate was twelve o’clock and the bottom of the plate was six o’clock; three o’clock was to the right and, of course, nine to the left. So if a chef was dressing pigeon with a petit pain of foie gras, I could shout across the kitchen, “Foie gras at twelve, confit of garlic at four . . .” You can never go wrong, as long as your cooks can tell the time.

  * * *

  TO ACCOMPLISH ALL this—to turn a neighborhood joint into a temple of gastronomy, perfect from the moment you opened the door to the minute you got in the cab—I was racing constantly, like one of my father’s beloved greyhounds. Imagine you are running a marathon . . . at sprint speed. Now imagine what you might look like halfway through the distance and it will help you get a picture in your head of what I looked like during Harveys: gaunt, debauched and knackered.

  I suppose I was trying to kill myself. But then, sacrificing your health for your career was all the rage. Harveys opened against the backdrop of Margaret Thatcher’s greed culture. People talked about City types being “burnt out” by the age of thirty. Young men and women didn’t stop to question the damage that can be caused by chronic obsession; we didn’t pause to consider the consequences of the pace. Wall Street was the big movie of the year, and that was a film about greed and self-indulgence, about hunger for success. Its underlying message was that greed is destructive but the subtext was totally missed by most cinemagoers of my age. Instead everyone was reciting Michael Douglas’s line—“Breakfast is for wimps”—as if it was the mantra for anyone who wanted to get to the top. (My own breakfast, by the way, has always consisted of the same three courses: a cough, a coffee and a cigarette.)

  In Harveys I had found my Adrenaline Heaven. This was Pain Paradise. Customers may well have gone there to fill their stomachs but I went to feed my addiction to work, my addiction to adrenaline and to pain, and at Harveys something was always happening.

  Actually, it is wrong to say that something was always happening. During those first couple of months after opening there was zilch happening. Things were bad and certainly not helped by the winter weather, which was particularly brutal that year. We could handle forty-four covers but most nights the restaurant was virtually empty. One evening it was completely empty, so I came out of the kitchen with Mark and Simple Simon and we stood with Morfudd and her front-of-house team of two looking out of the window at the action outside: a blizzard was raging across Wandsworth Common.

  Through the snow, two scarfed-up, sludge-covered people suddenly appeared, trudging bravely in their boots and anoraks and approaching Bellevue Road as if it were the peak of Everest. It turned out to be the head jailer of Wandsworth Prison. He was bringing out his windswept wife for “a treat.” When they had finished their meal, I joined them for coffee and a chat.

  I was so overwhelmed by their Hannibal-esque trek to Harveys, impressed by the effort they had put into it, that I found myself telling them, “Don’t worry about the bill.” They wrapped themselves up again, in that cheerful sort of way that the British do before throwing themselves into a snowstorm. Stiff upper lip. Then they stepped out of the restaurant and into the blizzard and vanished.

  That was the worst night. Two covers, zero takings—and I don’t think Mr. and Mrs. Jailer ever came back. Life at Harveys remained quiet for the next couple of months—there wasn’t a noticeable growth in popularity—but rather than worrying about the lack of cash coming in, I concentrated on getting the menu right, and the few punters who came in ate well.

  Then one day in early spring, the kitchen phone rang. I got a flashback to Manoir Aux Quat’Saisons. Two years earlier, Raymond’s kitchen phone had rung and I’d picked it up, as was my habit at that time, pretending to be an answering machine. “Please leave a message and we shall come back to you,” I had said, before delivering an earsplitting “Bleeeeeep!” After the “tone” came a soft voice, announcing that it was Egon Ronay, the renowned critic and best-selling author of restaurant guides, and saying, “I would be most grateful if Raymond could call me when he picks up this message.”

  And so I was there in the kitchen at Harveys, listening to the same soft voice, totally unaware that Egon Ronay had visited my restaurant, eaten my food and was about to write a review for his column in the Sunday Times, and paralyzed with fear that he might recognize my voice. Instead, Egon explained that he had been in to eat at Harveys and had enjoyed his meal tremendously. He intended to write a piece for the Sunday Times but beforehand wanted to know a bit more about me. “I can tell from your accent that you are not Italian,” he said to me. “So how did you get a name like Marco?”

  “Well, that’s only part of my name,” I told him. “My full name is Marco Pierre White. My father was English and that’s where the White comes from. My mother was Italian, hence the name Marco. My aunt Luciana, my mother’s sister, came up with the name Pierre, but don’t ask me why.”

  When Egon’s review appeared, I was thrilled by his comments about the restaurant but alarmed to see that he had referred to me as Marco Pierre White. My middle name, for so long a well-kept secret, was not only revealed, but revealed in the pages of a broadsheet. Pierre stuck, of course.

  On the Saturday night before the review we were catering for the usual small crowd. The next morning, the Sunday Times came out with Egon’s critique, and that was it. Bang! The bookings never stopped. Egon, though short, fragile and getting on a bit, was the man with the Midas touch. For decades his guides had been telling British restaurantgoers where to eat out, and now here he was, in the spring of ’87, enthusiastically advising his followers, via a Sunday Times column, to head for Harveys. The impact was quite extraordinary.

  Before Egon’s piece I had been Marco White, but from that Sunday on I became Marco Pierre White. MPW. Quite posh. Quite confusing. Some people would think I was Italian while others would say I was French. And there would be those who thought I had made up the whole lot, because, after all, who do you know with an Italian-French-English name? Egon, I suppose, had refined me.

  Overnight success is a strange experience. Where there had once been virtual silence, now there was noise. Up until that point, we had all jumped when the phone rang. But after Egon’s article, when the pace picked up, the ringing phone became a continuous background noise at Harveys. All you could hear was ringing, chopping, hissing, frying, ringing . . . and me shouting (which I shall come to).

  The PR, of course, was picking up and my old friend Alan Crompton-Batt was out there somewhere, pouring booze down journalists’ throats and encouraging them to review Harveys. Meanwhile
the punters continued to flood in, coming to taste the food. They came for the Blanquette of Scallops and Langoustines with Cucumber and Ginger; the Feuillantine of Sweetbreads; the Hot Foie Gras, Lentils and Sherry Vinegar Sauce; the Noisettes of Lamb en Crepinette with Fettucine of Vegetables and a Tarragon Jus. They came for the Hot Mango Tart, the Passion Fruit Soufflé and Lemon Tart. They came to have something different.

  * * *

  We live in a world of refinement, not in a world of invention. That’s the way I see it. People who claim to have invented a great dish are only fooling themselves. Someone has always done it before. Customers and critics used to rave about my Harveys dish Tagliatelle of Oysters with Caviar. They thought it was a great “invention.” But I’m sure I didn’t invent it. Centuries before we were born, people were eating pasta with shellfish, weren’t they? It was simply the concept I had created. When I was at Manoir, we used to do a dish called Tagliatelle of Crayfish, which had crayfish sitting on top of a little hill of pasta with a fish sauce poured over it and finished off with a bit of chervil. I felt that to put the pasta inside a shell with the oyster and cucumber and caviar and a little beurre de champagne was very sexy because you get all those textures in one. If it was on a plate, rather than in the shell, you might have a mouthful of pasta and no oyster. I tried to design dishes that would not turn into a mess as you were eating, and this is a good example: eating the oysters would not destroy the picture. There was more, as well: the flavor, the texture, the explosion in the mouth.

  Again, the Pigeon en Vessie—pigeon in pig’s bladder— might have seemed new to Harveys customers in the late eighties, but Fernand Point was serving chicken in pig’s bladder in his French restaurant, La Pyramide, in the forties and fifties, and Le Gavroche did its own version of Point’s classical dish.

  Pig’s trotter, another Harveys favorite, was inspired by a similar dish that was done by my former boss Pierre Koffmann at Tante Claire. And Pierre’s pig’s trotter, if you take my meaning, was his own version of the one done by the French chef Charles Barrier. So I took it from Pierre, who had taken it from Charles, who doubtless took it from someone else.

  Pierre’s version involved stuffing the trotter with chicken thighs and sweetbreads before dropping it into boiling water. I got rid of the chicken, which I felt had been put there to pad out the more expensive sweetbreads. The trotters have to be soaked in water for twenty-four hours, which softens them, and then you have to pull out the bones: it’s like pulling tights off a woman. The trotter was then filled with the sweetbreads, morel mushrooms and onions, and bound with a chicken quenelle. Then I’d roll it up in tinfoil, gently poach the trotter in water at 85 degrees Celsius for ten minutes and then rest it before putting it onto the plate with pommes purée and truffle sauce. Pierre’s technique, in contrast, was to cook the meat for double that length of time. To my palate, my method produced a more succulent taste.

  From day one at Harveys I did the Pied de Cochon Pierre Koffmann, my own version of his pig’s trotter dish and a tribute to him. It would stay on my menu, from one restaurant to another, for the next twelve years until I retired from the kitchen. I had not invented the pig’s trotter dish, just like I hadn’t invented the Tagliatelle of Oysters with Caviar. I had refined it.

  * * *

  They came to Harveys not only for the food but also for the Marco Pierre White show. It was a lively show, a sort of circus of tension and drama and unpredictability. It was the big top within a small restaurant. There they were, eating this sophisticated food, while some poor cook was being murdered in the kitchen. It was like hell in the back and heaven in the front. And then out came this creature—me— looking like he’d crucified himself and was ready to kick out a customer. You could come along, have a good dinner, and see the customer at the table next to you get slaughtered by the chef. I borrowed a quote from Oscar Wilde and put it at the top of the menu: “To get into the best society nowadays one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people—that is all.”

  Well, punters were fed, amused and shocked.

  The media, for their part, were amused. Indeed, everyone, except for “establishment” food figures, was ready for a change and I was becoming gastronomy’s symbol of Thatcherite greed, the young chef who had crossed the North-South divide when it still existed. Make way for the long-haired, gangly cook who had won the heart of Egon Ronay. Word spread and then I discovered the benefits of fame.

  When you become famous, you become sexy. I might make a flirtatious remark to a woman customer and then, well, one thing would lead to another, which led to my office. The ladies’ loos were also used for brief, casual intimacy, and, weather permitting, there was even action in the courtyard outside the kitchen.

  I DON’T RECALL her name but we met on the staircase that took customers from the restaurant to the toilets. She was a brunette, full-bodied and somewhere in her early forties, dolled up in a low-cut black dress. She smiled at me as we passed each other on the steps. I interpreted her friendliness as willingness and so I asked, “Would you like to see my office?”

  “Where is it?”

  “Up there.” I pointed toward the top floor to the door marked “Private,” a door that led into the room where I would sit postservice, compiling menus and scribbling drawings of dishes while the rest of Wandsworth slept.

  Together we galumphed up the stairs and into my office, where we fumbled and groped, unzipped and unbuttoned. The newspapers had described me as the “Jagger of the Aga.” It wasn’t hard living up to the reputation.

  Three stories beneath my office there was a busy restaurant, where customers were eating Michelin-starred food and enjoying good company, as you hope to do when you eat out. And amid the tables, there was a table for two where a man was sitting alone. He was alone because his companion had excused herself and left the table to pop to the loo. The man had filled the first few minutes of solitude by observing his surroundings. Perhaps he had been gawking at the celebrities at a neighboring table: Is that Kylie Minogue kissing Jason Donovan?

  Then there came a point—there had to come the point—when he felt concerned by his companion’s absence and the questions came into his mind, “Is she okay?” “Why is she taking so long?” He was also feeling uncomfortable: he had done his gawking but was everyone now staring at him, wondering whether his date had departed? He was compelled to go and investigate the disappearance. He put his napkin on the table, stood up and started walking toward the stairs that took customers from the restaurant to the toilets.

  Tinkle, tinkle. The phone rang on my desk and it continued ringing. It was the infernal internal ring tone. I answered in the grumpy, aggressive tone of a bloke who has just been interrupted in a moment of passion because I was a bloke who had just been interrupted in a moment of passion. On the other end of the line was the maiître d’ Jean-Christophe Slowik, a.k.a. JC, and he relayed the grim news: “The husband is on his way up.”

  “Do you have a husband?” I asked the lady who had been on the other end of my lips.

  “He’s downstairs,” she replied.

  “No,” I said. “No, he’s not.”

  Abort mission, abort mission. The brunette and I rocketed into reverse. Clothes on, zips up. She could hardly escape via the door marked “Private” because her husband would spot her. It was just too dangerous and risky. There was no alternative. I opened the hatch door that led from my office to the roof and quickly helped her squeeze through the space. Once on the roof she positioned herself, crouching out of sight, three stories up from the pavement but with a terrific view of the common. Just as I was readjusting my apron and lighting a Marlboro, I heard footsteps at the top of the staircase. I opened the door, assumed I was talking to the husband, and asked, “Can I help?”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” he said, apologizing for being out-of-bounds, “but I’m looking for my wife. Have you by any chance seen her?”

  Seen her? “What does she look like?” I inquired. Brown hair, blac
k dress. I pouted and shook my head as he gave a description. I scrunched my face, hoping to send out a signal that I was bemused. “Nope,” I said. “Can’t help.” He turned and trotted off, back downstairs, and I opened the hatch door and tugged the shivering woman back into the warmth. She rushed back to her table, back to her mystified husband, and in time for dessert; the Soufflés of Chocolate with Chocolate Sauce, possibly, or the Crackling Pyramide, I don’t know.

  APART FROM THE groupies and the yuppies south of the Thames, punters crossed the bridge from Chelsea, Westminster and Mayfair to dine at Harveys. Celebrities came as well, and not just any old celebrities but the young, good-looking, sexy ones, the sort who are shadowed by the paparazzi and who would appear in newspapers alongside the caption: “XXXX pictured last night, emerging from Harveys.” They all wanted to be fed by the undernourished chef who was passionate, obsessed and intense. Denice Lewis, the beautiful Texan model who featured daily in gossip columns, would turn up with her boyfriend, “Green Shield stamps heir” Tim Jefferies. Koo Stark, Prince Andrew’s former girlfriend, became a regular.

  Mavericks seemed to identify with me. I was at Harveys one day when I answered the phone to Oliver Reed. That’s Oliver Reed, the British film star whose movie credits include Women in Love, The Four Musketeers, and, in 2000, Gladiator. He’s never reached the heights of fame in America, but in Britain, he was well known as a scrapping hell-raiser and all-round icon who’d do TV interviews when he was drunk and slurring. Ollie introduced himself and booked for dinner, and when he arrived with his wife, Josephine, he was everything you could have hoped for—and more. He sat on the floor, and that’s where he drank his aperitif before heading to the table. From that night on, he became a regular. He had to come to Harveys, he used to say, because he was barred from everywhere else.