One more defeated libel defendant retreats, rubbing his knuckles and is poorer than he was that morning. Another squabble, which picked its way to the High Court, was over for a triumphant Marco Pierre White last week: moments before the hearing, Tony Allen, owner of the Fish! chain of restaurants, withdrew claims that White had once served up a dish that, instead of cuttlefish ink, contained real ink, which had stained a customer’s face. He also claimed that White had tried to hoodwink him over a deal. In the end, Allen agreed to pay his adversary’s £1.5m legal costs, plus six-figure damages. He also apologised.
Marco, 39, is the boy from the Leeds council estate who can’t stop showing ‘em.
He does not drink or take drugs, as The International Herald Tribune discovered at a cost of £75,000 last year He doesn’t need to because he thrives on battles. There are those who become addicted to one-upmanship, especially when they are powerful. Showing ‘em is where Marco gets his kicks, whether it is being the most successful chef-patron in Britain or rubbing a nose in an unsubstantiated claim.Showing ‘em can also involve ludicrous acts of generosity, such as the day I met him 13 years ago when my lodger in Tooting, a stunning South African model, and I went into his first restaurant, Harvey’s, after having our handbags stolen Armed with a chequebook, we asked if we could have dinner. Scruffy and fed up, we were given a free dinner and half a night of monologue from Marco: a fascinating philosophy of food peppered with obscene jokes.For a few months in 1990 I shared a flat with him and his then girlfriend It was like living with an enormous child. He could barely read, had to be talked into having a bath, and would get up in the middle of meals to go and have a lie down. He would be out fishing all night, then come back and throw a couple of slimy pike into the bath; the fall-out after his fishing expeditions was pretty disgusting.
Weeks after he had moved out, the odd bluebottle would zoom around the room – the maggots had escaped when Marco’s fishing-tackle box had been knocked over, and had wriggled through the cracks in the floorboards. Napoleon chose the worker bee as an emblem; Marco should choose the bluebottle as his. It personifies his beloved fishing, the mess he makes and his unstoppable energy.He is highly intelligent. One wonders what he would be doing now had he stayed at school, or taken any further academic training.
Marco is an admirer of the great 19th-century chef Carême, France’s first chef-patron (the chef and owner of a restaurant). He was inspired by Carême’s remark that he had no need to go out into the world to learn because the world came to him.Marco has a talent for mimicry and has used it, rather than books, to improve himself. He landed on his feet in terms of restaurant apprenticeship: he had the right people to watch and imitate. Everything he learnt about food he heard or saw in the kitchens of the Roux brothers, Raymond Blanc, the Box Tree or Pierre Koffman.
