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Good chefs go to heaven' wicked chefs go to the Orion publishing group. At least that is where Marco Pierre White, the original bad boy restaurateur and the most acclaimed chef of the last decade, went to sell his scabrous, sweaty memoirs. White Slave, the story of how he got driven, got angry and got three Michelin stars (and as many wives) is published next week, and has already attracted plenty of disapproval. One newspaper's serialisation of it was headlined "The Making of a Tyrant", a tag normally reserved for, say, Mussolini's diaries. Reviewer Jan Moir was so annoyed by his unrepentant nastiness she said he was like "a self-basting chicken, forever anointing itself with the gravy of righteousness". Can Marco Pierre White really be that bad?
On the evidence, yes - and worse. In fact he can claim to have personally propagated the nasty, aggressive, f-word culture that now dominates our restaurant kitchens. "Perhaps I created the monster Gordon Ramsay," he muses in his book, "who ended up as a TV personality screaming at celebrities on Hell's Kitchen, doing to them what I had done to him."
Ramsay joined White's staff at Harvey's restaurant in 1989 and lasted more than a year - unlike most new recruits who, White explains, ducked out after "the first three weeks. By the end of it they'd usually lost three stone, gained a dazed expression and cried themselves dry."
Working in White's kitchen meant running certain risks. Irregularly toasted brioche? Marco would hang you off the door by the apron strings. Cheese board stocked with -quelle horreur! - asymmetrically cut Brie? Marco would fling it past your head. Hol- landaise sauce separating? Marco would lift you up and put you in the bin. Oh,...