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"GOD SENDS meat, but the Devil sends cooks," runs an old proverb, which comes unavoidably to mind when considering Marco Pierre White, the millionaire, award-winning, volatile-tempered chef and restaurateur whom one restaurant reviewer for this paper described as "the oldest enfant terrible in town".
Not that he's particularly old: by most people's standards, 37 seems an inordinately young age for a chef to hang up his pans, as White did at the end of last year, with a view to concentrating on expanding his restaurant empire and spending more time with his family.
White had been saying for the best part of a decade that he planned to "get out" by the time he was 40, but whatever hopes he had for an uneventful "retirement", they have been vigorously stirred, shall we say, in a week in which he won a GBP 75,000 libel case and got married for the third time yesterday.
In a profession where petulance and tantrum-throwing are regarded as par for the course, White has effed and blinded himself a reputation as the bad boy of British cuisine, balancing the incendiary side of his nature with formidable ambition and an undoubted, single-minded talent that made him both the youngest chef to be awarded a Michelin star and the first British chef to win three of them, although he handed them back on his retirement, after cooking his last meal at the Oak Room in London's Le Soleil Hotel on 23 December.
This week's court case was over a syndicated article which appeared in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, alleging that White had indulged in "a well-publicised bout with drugs and alcohol". The jury's finding, and a GBP 75,000 award, delighted the chef, who said he had never taken drugs in his life and very rarely drank, having witnessed as a child the effects of alcohol in his family.
The volatile chef, who gained notoriety for making life hell for his staff and fighting with customers (reputedly throwing out up to 50 people in one evening) is no stranger to litigation. Only last November, court action taken against him by another London restaurateur, Oliver Peyton, who claimed what White's GBP 2 million Titanic establishment was a virtual...