Marco Pierre White Walks Out Of Radio Interview After Being 'Bullied And Insulted'

So what do we know about the cooking genius and dummy-spitting toy hurler Marco Pierre White? He’s a monster to live with and has a terrible temper, according to at least one of his three ex-wives. He was a notorious bully to his kitchen staff when he actually bothered to cook in his own restaurants, and once made Gordon Ramsay cry (I suppose you can’t blame him for the latter).

He peddles stock cubes for Knorr and regularly appears in adverts proclaiming that adding a meaty crumble to a meal will lift it out of a slough of saporific drudgery - words that would have choked the younger version of White when he won his three Michelin stars, working 18-hour days behind the stove, fuelled by strong espressos, red Marlboros, and regular delves into his ingredient drawer.

And it seems that like all bullying celebrity chefs with monstrous egos - Ramsay, James Martin, Gary Rhodes, and the seemingly mild-mannered, rosy-cheeked Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall etc - he is also very good at dishing it out, but painfully sensitive when it comes to tasting his own medicine.

As happened when White walked out of a radio interview in Australia yesterday after being questioned - in his words “bullied” - about his three ex-wives and his cooking skills. The final straw came during the Triple M Adelaide breakfast show when one of the presenters dubbed the TV chef a “rude prick”.

Dale ‘Louie’ Lewis and co-hosts Warren ‘Warrie’ Tredrea, Jon 'Blakey' Blake, and Ali ‘Ali’ Carle were banned by the Austereo-owned radio station, still cowering from the royal prank call scandal, from playing the interview this morning, but were allowed to discuss the controversial exchange, pre-recorded yesterday.

Lewis, a former Sydney Swans AFL player, incurred the celebrity chef’s wrath after raising the question of White's three failed marriages, asking whether his “first wives” had been “dismissed, for want of a better word, cos they can't cook, or didn't like your cooking?” Lewis then quipped: “Cos if you're the rude prick you come across on TV...I wouldn't be there long either.”

White tried to play down the marriage dig, but took offence at the language. He ended the interview, telling Lewis there was “no need for rudeness” before accepting the presenter's apology. “Rudeness is not having fun when it is at the expense of another person. You're a very rude man. And I hope your mother's not listening to this show today because she would not be proud of her son,” he said.

White told reporters later he was deeply offended by the remarks.

“To be honest, I was a bit off balance when it was said to me and I thought why should people get away with this? Why should they be allowed to bully people? It's why I said what I said. What's very sad is this is a radio show where children could be listening and to use that sort of language in front of children is wholly inappropriate.”

If it was for comic purposes, White said “it was scurrilous behaviour.” He added: “This is my third time in Australia in eight months and this is the first time anyone has shown me rudeness or disrespect. I just excused myself and left.”

He added: “To expose listeners and especially children to that kind of language leaves a lot to be desired. I'm not saying I've been a good boy all my life but you get to a stage in your life where you've just got to be corrected. It's called growing up.”

I’m sure the many chefs who suffered in White’s “SAS-style” kitchens, under a constant tyranny of personal abuse and savage aggression, will be amused to hear him complain of being “bullied” and the victim of bad language. Especially the poor chef who was once forced to stand in the corridor all night with his trousers down, telling every waitress that walked past that he had asmall penis. Talk about a case of pot kettle White.

TRANSCRIPT:

DALE LEWIS: Hey mate, married three times, was (sic) the first wives dismissed, for want of a better word, cos they can't cook, or didn't like your cooking? Is that an issue with them?

(Female host giggles)

MARCO: I just think of myself as being a lucky man that I found three women who wanted to marry me.

(More laughing by hosts)

LEWIS: Yeah, cos if you're the rude prick you come across on TV, I wouldn't be there long either. That's just me surmising what I've seen on TV

ALI CARLE: Marco, I wouldn't stand for that

MARCO: All you're doing is giving me insight into you as a person.

LEWIS: (laughing) Now he's analysing me

CARLE: (laughing) He's reading you

LEWIS: He can cook and he's a psychoanalyst

CARLE: Like a book, Marco. Now, you said

MARCO: There's no need for rudeness

LEWIS: No, no, no it was just

MARCO: I think you should say good morning to me, and good bye, because one, I take offense to being called that. I haven't shown you disrespect, I haven't been rude to you. I don't like being called that word. I'm very sorry.

LEWIS: Well, I apologise Marco. I was just trying to have some fun.

MARCO: Your apology is accepted. Rudeness is not having fun when it is at the expense of another person. You're a very rude man. And I hope your mother's not listening to this show today because she would not be proud of her son. Have a nice day, bye bye.

A Message In A Bottle To Rick Stein

You meet some very strange people in Cambodia. It’s a place full of misfits and loners. Expats escaping from something, or looking for something, and nearly always reinventing themselves in the process. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever come across such a high concentration of alcoholics, junkies, perverts, arseholes, and compulsive liars.

For instance, I met a guy the other day who said he was the executive chef of a group of luxury hotels. He walked into the bar, introduced himself, and then held court on his barstool telling us how difficult it was drumming the basics of hygiene into his Cambodian cooks. We got chatting and I told him about my dismal failure retraining as a chef and the book, Down And Out In Padstow And London, I’d written about my experiences.

I told him how the cheffing door had been opened when Rick Stein agreed to let me do a week in his Seafood Restaurant in Cornwall. The executive chef suddenly butted in.

“He’s one of my best friends!” he beamed. “He even sent me a long email when Chalky died. He loved that dog. He was devastated.”

He told me they’d done their chef training together in France, and hinted at the drunken nights they’d had. I listened on, but was thinking of something else. I’d been wanting to send the celebrity chef an email thanking him again for the opportunity he gave me, and how if he hadn’t, my book would probably never have been written.

But I’d lost Stein’s email address and knew if I sent a message through his PR people it would probably never get to him. I’d have more chance of sending him a message in a bottle from one of Cambodia’s soon-to-be-developed Robinson Crusoe islands.

So when the executive chef eventually paused to take a swig of beer, I asked if he’d mind passing my thank you letter on to the TV chef. He handed me a smart business card with his email on it.

“Not a problem,” he said, “Oh, we had some times together!”

Then he stopped suddenly and looked slightly angry and bitter.

“Do you know the difference between him and me? Do you know how he got to where he is and I didn’t?” He didn’t wait for an answer: “Luck!”

A couple of days later I wrote a thank you letter to Stein and emailed it to the executive chef. I didn’t hear anything back. Not even anything to say he’d got it. Then a couple of weeks passed and my suspicions were finally confirmed when I was back in the same Irish bar talking to the owner Ronan.

He told me the executive chef had been in a few days before and tried some of his Irish stew - a dish tongue-in-cheekily described in his bar adverts as “the best Irish stew in Cambodia”.

We’d been chatting about the best way to cook it because the price of lamb out here - $47 for a small frozen leg imported from New Zealand - makes it impossible to make. At least at a price the cheapskate losers in Sihanoukville are prepared to shell out for. Goat would have been the next best option, but we couldn’t get hold of that, and when I jokingly suggested dog meat Ronan looked appalled.

“My dog would smell it! He’d never come near me again!” he whimpered.

So I told him to use beef instead, but to throw in a few anchovies to give it a richer flavour. He made the stew with the usual chunks of carrots, potatoes and onions, and then showed me his secret of mashing up a few of the spuds and putting them in a thin layer in the bottom of each bowl, and pouring the stew on top. It was a nice touch and kept the broth high in the bowl while allowing people to thicken the thin liquor to their liking without having to do the mashing themselves.

He told me the executive chef had raved about it in the pub. Ronan began laughing, his arched eyebrows wiggling away.


“‘Oh, he said, that’s a lovely bit of lamb! That's neck fillet isn't it?’ Fucking lamb! And he’s an executive chef! People were listening, so I just played on. What the fuck could I do? ‘I love lamb!’ he says. ‘It’s my favourite fucking meat.’ What the fuck! You couldn’t make that up now could you!”

No wonder the bloke hadn’t replied to my email. It probably wasn’t even his business card. The real executive chef was probably thinking who the hell is this idiot banging on about Rick Stein. I had to get the letter to him myself. The next day, I searched through my contacts list again for the TV cook’s email, and then decided to send a message to his press department, asking them if they would mind passing my letter on to Stein in between dunking digestives.

Surprisingly, I got an email from his PA the next day. She said she had forwarded the letter to Stein. And a week or so later, an email arrived from the celebrity chef, thanking me for my letter and saying: “I've heard a lot about the book and am ordering it.”

I can’t tell you how pleased I am. I’ve always liked the man. I know I rant about celebrity chefs and say they should all be napalmed, but like Fergus Henderson or the late Keith Floyd, who sparked the pandemic of TV cooks, he’s so different from the morons that plague our screens, newspapers, magazines, billboards, government campaigns, and stock cube adverts. He’s got a brain for a start.

Can you imagine Gordon Ramsay, James Martin, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall or Gary Rhodes even talking to you unless there was something in it for them, let alone arranging for a stranger and complete novice to do a week in one of their restaurants? And the lesser known TV chefs trying to squeeze their way up the rat cage walls are even worse.

I wonder what Stein will think of my book? I think he comes across pretty well, even if I do mention him in my tirade about celebrity chefs never actually being in the kitchen. I know he’s touchy about the name Padstein too, and there’s plenty on that.

But I’m far harsher on other TV chefs like Heston Blumenthal, who I only saw once in the three weeks I worked at the Fat Duck, and that was just a glimpse of him on the stairs as he took a break from filming in the lab. He didn’t even come down to the prep room to shake our hands and thank us for working for free in his restaurant. I wonder if that nutter in the bar knows him as well?


Book Update:

I want to apologise for the very poor delivery times of the paperback version of my book Down And Out In Padstow And London. For reasons that are beyond me, Amazon have had problems distributing recent batches. It’s something to do with the wrong metadata being input, whatever that means. But Completely Novel who print my book have promised they are trying to sort it out.

I don’t know how long it will continue, but I’ve been told that books ordered through Amazon will arrive soon, and they will obviously not take your money until they do post the book to your address. To help remedy this, an eBay page has been set up to sell my book. So if you want the book in the next few days, then cancel your order at Amazon and buy the book HERE... For the eBook version click HERE...

Chef Loses Restaurant Battle To Jay-Z

Imagine the confusion. It could happen to anyone. You pay millions to global rap star Jay-Z to perform at your celebrity-studded wedding and then an outdoor catering firm from Newcastle turns up instead.

What would your guests say, let alone your in-laws? How could you live with the embarrassment? And how could you ever stop such a dangerously likely event from ruining your big day?

Well, it’s exactly for this reason that the UK’s Intellectual Property Office has ruled in favour of Jay-Z in his battle with Tyneside chef Terry Miller to stop this devastating catastrophe ever happening.

The pair have been wrangling since 2006 after the American rapper’s music label Roc-A-Fella Records launched a writ against Miller’s Rockafella restaurant in Newcastle, claiming it breached its trademark rights.

Originally, Miller, winner of the Hell’s Kitchen reality show in 2005, won a ruling granting him a trademark for his Rockafella restaurant and food catering firm that gave him exclusive rights to its use in the UK.


Roc-A-Fella Records brought in heavyweight lawyers from London-based Forrester Ketley & Co to fight its case, claiming that people would be confused into thinking the two enterprises were somehow connected. (I’m not sure what sort of people they were talking about – perhaps people that appear on the Jeremy Kyle show.)

Now, surprise, surprise, the US label’s appeal has been largely upheld at a hearing in London. The bad news for Miller is he will now have to change the name of his outside catering business. The good news is he can use it for his restaurant, which he opened with his £250,000 Hell’s Kitchen winnings, even though it closed in October 2008.

In her judgement, Professor Ruth Annand said the original IP Office case manager was wrong to say the two names would not clash as a record label’s live entertainment events were not dissimilar to the catering trade.

But IP Office expert Oliver Morris said in his original ruling, which is now overturned: “There is a large degree of dissimilarity between restaurant and catering services on the one hand and the services relating to record production on the other.”

Funny how experts can disagree. (By the way, in case you’re confused, the internationally famous music star Jay-Z is pictured top, and Miller is pictured second next to Gary ‘Twat’ Rhodes. And in case you’re confused further, Rhodes is the one with hair.)

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The Bloody Rhodes Around Britain

If you ever wanted a better example of just how ridiculous the whole celebrity chef phenomenon has become, then look no further than Gary Rhodes.

The cook – whose empire spreads from London to Dublin to Dubai, and probably a bunch of other places I’ve forgotten - has just parted company with one of two hotels bearing his name in the frumpy seaside resort of Christchurch in Dorset.

It’s all quite civil, I’m told. But they always say that don’t they? Anyway, I suppose you’re thinking what’s wrong with that, Len? One less restaurant with his name on the menu gives him a bit more time to spend behind the stoves of all the others?

Well, no, not really. It’s the comments from the owner that reveal how ludicrous this whole sleb chef-branded restaurants thing now is.

Remember the time when chefs were just chefs, and wait for it, actually cooked for a living? Left school with an O-Level in metalwork, and did the jobs they were good at rather than fannying around TV green rooms, gameshow panels and celebrity parties?

Nicholas Roach, owner of the Kings Hotel (whose restaurant no longer bears Rhodes’ name) and the Christchurch Harbour Hotel (which still does), clearly doesn't.

He appears mightily impressed – surprised even - that the TV chef has actually honoured them with his presence for a change. Driven all the way to sleepy Christchurch no less!

Explaining the split, he told the Daily Echo: “Gary’s involvement in the Kings Hotel was always intended to be a one-year only operation. It was a way of introducing him to the town before Rhodes South opened up, and it has been very successful.

“There has been no dispute and Gary has actually been in Christchurch for the past few days working in the kitchen at Rhodes South – which demonstrates his commitment to the business and the area.”

What! Sorry, I’ve got to read that again – he’s ACTUALLY been in Christchurch WORKING in the kitchen!

It’s like saying a star player has demonstrated his commitment to a team by kicking a few balls around, or a comedian turned up to tell a few jokes.

And just in case you were thinking that (as Gordon Ramsay has vowed to do in a bid to patch up his crumbling empire) Rhodes was thinking of trimming back his branded ambitions over worries that he might be spreading himself too thin, then think again.

Roach added: “We are actually focusing on opening up some more Rhodes South restaurants in the South although we are unable to say at this time where they will be.”

And a spokesman for Christchurch Council had further distressing news. “I understand Gary has taken a decision to have just one restaurant per town from now on," he said.

Spare us! If it carries on like this, it really will be Rhodes Around Britain.

Keith Floyd: Stirred But Not Shaken

I wrote on this blog in July about the tragic news that Keith Floyd – one of my all-time heroes, and the man who inspired me to retrain as a chef - has cancer. The response rather surprised me. I had little idea of the level of feeling involved, and from all corners of the world.

The legendary TV cook had touched so many lives, it seemed, inspired so many people to get their hands dirty in the kitchen, and Delia aside, vanquished those dreary, sterile, studio-set cooking shows to hell in a chicken basket.

Of course, Floyd’s stardom led to the rise of twats like James Martin and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, not to mention Jamie Oliver and Gary Rhodes. But it was worth it, wasn’t it? Just for one show of the bow-tied roue on Floyd on Fish?

Well, the old soak doesn’t think so.

He has described how he would like to “napalm the lot of them”, and his battle against cancer has, if anything, intensified that bile.

But it’s not the Valentine Warners and Hairy Bikers who have really got him down.

It’s the genuinely-talented cooks who swapped kitchen life, and all its treasured pressures and camaraderie, for the plastic, pretentious world of television.

Floyd – clearly pained by the monster he has created - seems far more hurt by the celebrities who actually deserve the title ‘chef’, namely Marco Pierre White and his former protégé Gordon Ramsay.

Okay, Ramsay has wealth and fame far beyond what he would have got if he’d stayed in the kitchen, but what has it got him? His reputation is pretty much now in tatters.

Floyd, 65, savages Ramsay with the highest honour kitchen sledging can muster - the very Château d’Yquem of put-downs - and calls him a “c***”.

He claims that the likes of Ramsay and White have been "seduced" by TV glamour, insisting "television is crap", and that the "w*****s" on programmes do not understand the "language" of food.

“Some of them are terrific guys and some of them are absolute arseholes,” he adds. “Marco Pierre White is an extraordinarily good cook, but Gordon Ramsay, who used to be the pastry chef for Marco, has gone on a celebrity zig-zag, which is why I call them c****.”



He makes the comments, appropriately enough, in a Channel 4 documentary to be shown tomorrow (Monday) night called Keith Meets Keith.

The other Keith is that oh-so-hell-raising actor Keith Allen, in comparison to who the scourge of the celebrity chef is but a flea-bite on the arm of a tattooed giant.

Why they got the Sheriff of Nottingham and not Johnny Vegas to present the show, I have no idea. The roly-poly comic seems to genuinely love Floyd, and often sits for hours watching re-runs with a can in his hand. “It’s like drinking with an old friend,” he once said.

But Allen it is, and after getting nowhere with Floyd’s former agent Stan Green, he eventually tracks down a frail-looking, walking stick-aided Floyd at his farmhouse in rural France.

Fags and booze are to the fore, and Floyd dismisses the modern generation of TV gastronauts as “a bunch of arseholes”.

“The ill-conceived idea that all these w*****s who turn up on TV are chefs is a failure to understand the language. People who cook are cooks, a chef is a head of a restaurant kitchen,” he says.

Although Floyd only mentions Ramsay, pictures are flashed up of the Hairy Bikers, Jamie Oliver and Rick Stein (who his ex-producer David Pritchard formed into a poetry-spilling ‘mini-me’ when Floyd suffered his own zig-zag.)

Floyd tells of his money problems and says his rambling farmhouse in Avignon is being re-possessed by his fourth ex-wife Tess, 42.

Allen, father of pop star Lily Allen, and general all-round gobshite, asks Floyd: “Do you get foxes here?”

Floyd replies: “No, but I’m going to.”

The pair are filmed drunkenly singing, very badly, at a hotel piano, but Floyd is no arse and soon sees Allen for what he is.

The next day over lunch, Floyd tells Allen to “shut up” before being helped away “to go on a sofa”.

Allen, who at another point is called “a prick” by Floyd, said of the wine-glugging cook: “He’s mentally as sharp as ever and just as opinionated.”

Since the filming, Floyd has had chemotherapy and five operations. He has also published Stirred But Not Shaken: The Autobiography by Keith Floyd, which is out next month, and deals with how four marriages went down the pan and the money ran out.

At one point in the book, in true Floydian spirit, he deals with the health problems that have blighted him in recent years...

“The banquet was in honour of some long-deceased French chef — although as far as I could see it was nothing more than an excuse for the mother of all piss-ups,” he writes.

“Soup was served, oysters were gulped and a whole lamb was carved by an ancient maître d’ who looked like a cross between Dr Jekyll and the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Sweetmeats and trifles came and went.

“Bon Appetit! Keith Floyd enjoying a meal with a bottle of wine in a typical pose. Bare-knuckle boxing took place, port and whisky flowed as the night turned into dawn and I finally floated along the teak-paneled corridor to my bedroom.

“Later, I don’t know how long afterwards, I reached out a hand to press the bell for a steward.

“My mattress was hard, I needed a glass of water and what with the tubes in my nose, I couldn’t breathe properly. No steward arrived. Just a man in a white jacket with a stethoscope and a briefcase, from which he took a syringe and injected my arm.

“Strange, I thought.

“Morning came — along with a group of people who stood round my bed, talking about me while they pressed their cool fingers over my stomach. ‘How did you enjoy the dinner?’ I asked them, by way of conversation. Silence.

“‘Wasn’t it a great night?’ I said. ‘I mean, there was the port and the boxing, there was the whole baron of lamb, and then there was dawn. How do you manage to have such a place in what appears to me to be a hospital?’

“It was a hospital. ‘Mr Floyd, you have been hallucinating,’ said one of the group. ‘The medication we had to give you in order to keep you alive together with the effects of — how can we say it? — an overindulgence of alcohol. . .’

“It was unreal. The whole banquet thing had been a complete figment of my imagination. ‘You were suffering a nasty case of delirium tremens,’ continued the man, whom I had by now realised was a doctor. ‘DTs, Mr Floyd. We have played our part.

“Now it is for you to play yours. Drink again as you have before and you will die.’ That was a year ago, in the spring of 2008 and I’m thankful to say that somehow or other, I’m still here.”

I do hope he gets better. But even if he doesn’t – what a life!