The cover of Marco Pierre White’s 1990 cookbook, White Heat, features a grainy black-and-white photo of a brooding Adonis: Jean-Paul Belmondo meets Eddie Vedder, all full-lipped desire and shaggy-haired intensity. The original rock ’n’ roll chef—in his book Heat, writer Bill Buford calls him “the most foul-tempered, most mercurial, and most bullying” of all British cooks—White has served as mentor to everyone from Gordon Ramsay to Heston Blumenthal, and larger-than-life personalities from Anthony Bourdain to Mario Batali have admitted to styling themselves after him. But White didn’t just look and swear the part; he was, by all accounts, a genius behind the stove.
The third of four boys born to an Italian mother and British dad, White grew up in the industrial city of Leeds and got his first cooking gig at the age of 16. He arrived in London as a 19-year-old (with exactly seven pounds and thirty-six pence in his pocket) and, after talking his way into a job with Albert and Michel Roux, moved on to kitchens at Chez Nico, La Tante Claire, and Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons. By age 33, he’d become the youngest chef to be awarded three Michelin stars and the first British chef ever to do so—an exceptional achievement in itself.
White’s attitude proved as fierce as his talent. He became a regular in the London tabloids, which chronicled everything from the patrons he ejected mid-meal for offending him one way or another to the time he responded to a businessman’s request for an off-the-menu side of fries by hand-cutting, personally cooking, and then proceeding to charge the guy 25 pounds for the order. Readers also got the story of the underling who complained of heat in the kitchen and had the back of his chef’s jacket and pants slashed open by his knife-wielding boss, and of the mink coat held hostage in response to a customer who was being overly impatient for his soufflé. (Also well documented were White’s exploits with the opposite sex; he has been married three times, including, in 1992, to a 21-year-old model, a union that lasted all of 15 weeks.)
But not long after reaching the pinnacle of the culinary world, Marco Pierre White decided to ditch it all. In 1999, at the age of 38, the bad-boy wunderkind renounced his stars and quit cooking altogether. “I was being judged by people who had less knowledge than me,” he recently told a reporter, “so what was it truly worth? I gave Michelin inspectors too much respect, and I belittled myself. I had three options: I could be a prisoner of my world and continue to work six days a week, I could live a lie and charge high prices and not be behind the stove, or I could give my stars back, spend time with my children, and reinvent myself.”
Reinvent he did. Today, White is an entrepreneur in a Savile Row suit, the mastermind behind the $100-million White Star Line empire, whose assets include the London establishments Belvedere, L’Escargot, Luciano, and the Frankie’s chain of Italian restaurants.
But you still couldn’t find the guy with a sauté pan in his hand. Promoting his autobiography, Devil in the Kitchen (titled White Slave in Britain), in Chicago this past May, White reiterated his intention to keep his distance from the stove. “I can’t ever cook again, not day in and day out, not professionally, just to earn money.”
His 21 years in restaurant kitchens, he said, had caused a kind of social retardation and had kept him not only from getting to know his four children but from getting to know himself. (Not that he’s slowed down; he recently opened Marco, the Chelsea soccer-ground restaurant he named for his youngest son, and wrapped up a debut as host of the U.K. version of Hell’s Kitchen—known in the U.S. for the antics of former host and current White rival Gordon Ramsay.)
So what on earth is Marco Pierre White now doing crouched in a dusty roadside shed in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, stirring a pot of bananas and oats next to a grinning Rastafarian?
Back in May, the chef (who up until three years ago suffered from an acute fear of flying) had escaped from his book tour for a brief visit with his friend Gordon “Butch” Stewart, owner of the island’s Royal Plantation resort (as well as the more famous Sandals and Beaches).
“You can’t believe the produce,” White had gushed to me over the phone back then. “The trees are bursting with breadfruit and mango. All along the road, guys are carrying lines dripping with fresh fish. Food is everywhere.”
And so, five months later, here he is. And he’s not simply lying around on the beach. (In fact, says White, he detests idleness. “I don’t do vacations. Work, output, doing things, that’s what energizes me.”) Marco Pierre White has come to Jamaica to cook. After almost eight years in the wilderness, the man considered perhaps the finest chef of his generation has reemerged to develop a menu for his buddy’s resort. Assuming all goes well over the course of a week, Le Papillon, Stewart’s fine-dining establishment, will reopen later this year with a menu of island-inflected food and the name Marco Pierre White at the Royal Plantation hung over its door.
In rolled-up Levi’s, slip-on Keds, and a loose-fitting T-shirt, the six-foot-three chain-smoker looks on as the Rasta, Donald “Cereal” Brown, simmers a vanilla-scented porridge over a wood fire on the floor. As the concoction heats up, Cereal prepares his “magnum,” a thick tonic of banana, oats, sweetsop, peanuts, and malted soy milk. “When you’re having some sex,” he explains to his visitor, “this will give you extra energy.”
“I love that!” says White with a wicked laugh and another chug of the elixir.
Later that afternoon, I drive with him to St. Ann’s, where the stray dogs poking at garbage and the untamed food markets conspire to burst the island’s resort-bubble image. But White isn’t fazed by any of it—not by the cloudy buckets of mackerel or the tubs of floating pigs’ tails. So thrilled is he by the fragrant stands of pineapple, mango, sweetsop, and ginger that he can’t stop grabbing the produce and holding it to his nose.
“I’ve never seen ginger so small and dirty,” he enthuses. “It looks like they’ve just pulled it out of the garden. The pawpaws smell of pawpaw. The coconut water is sensational, and the coconut jelly amazing. I’ve never seen food like it in my life.”
The following day, en route to Negril, we stop at a fruit stand where a man with a machete is whittling down sugarcane and coconut as though sculpting carrots with a paring knife. White dashes out to chat and to grab some pineapples and bananas, then zips back into the car.
At Cloggy’s on the Beach, an open-air place in Black River, we’re nursing Red Stripes and relaxing to the reggae beat when he jumps up and disappears into the kitchen. There, he finds the chef pulverizing a tough piece of conch with a monkey wrench and, delighted, looks on as the man makes deep slashes down the sides of a red snapper, filling each one of the crevices with salty seasoning before sliding the fish into a cast-iron pan of sizzling oil. Eventually White is chased out by the boss, who complains that the other customers are being neglected, and settles back in at our oceanfront table, where we dig into the garlic conch and fried snapper, served on mismatched plates. “Overfrying the fish brings out more flavor,” he says as we watch the sun dip below the horizon. “Now this is proper Jamaican street food.”
The next morning, after a quick breakfast of salt fish and ackee (the national dish), the chef hustles us out to the beach by six-thirty in order to be there for the first catch. A blond Rasta offers us a bowl of a red brew known as “fish tea,” made with whole fish, bouillon, and Excelsior water crackers, which fluff up in the liquid to give them, as White says, “the texture of scallops.” He chooses some king crabs, still bubbling at the mouth, several spiny lobsters, half a dozen chicken lobsters, a tangle of squid, some snapper, and a bucketful of reef fish and leads us back to the hotel.
That afternoon, I find him hard at work in the kitchen, slicing fresh ginger into a fine julienne (and blanching it repeatedly to remove the heat) as lobsters crawl off the cutting board. He calls for a pot of boiling water, a stick of butter, parsley, garlic, and a piping bag. He slices the cloves lengthwise, removes the green sprouts, tops them with sea salt, and creams everything against the cutting board with a chef’s knife before blending the paste with the softened butter and chopped parsley. It all goes into the bag. Next he poaches the chicken lobsters and transfers them to a covered bowl. He splits the crustaceans lengthwise in two continuous slices, removes the tail meat, pipes butter into the shells, and replaces the meat. One more layer of butter, followed by a trip into the oven, and they’re ready to go.
But White isn’t finished. Before you know it, he’s plowing through rock lobster with basil, tomatoes, and olive oil; and a fried snapper with ginger in an orange reduction—a tribute to a dish we’d eaten at Cloggy’s the day before, with seasonings borrowed from a Caribbean cookbook he picked up at a spice factory on the way.
On the third day, I find myself standing over a garbage can popping out fish eyes with a pair of dull scissors. White has decided he wants to try his own version of fish tea, using more than a dozen of the reef fish he’d picked up that morning. I can’t help but notice the way he’s sliding all over the wet floor, as if there were actually a dining room out there filled with hungry customers. He is an incredibly physical cook, even eschewing utensils to run his fingers through pans of hot oil to check the temperature. The fish tea gets a swipe every ten minutes. And a lick “so I can see how the flavors are developing. You need to search out every ingredient you’ve put in,” he says. “If you can’t taste them, you need to add more.”
In the course of four hours, White has created not only a new, velvety version of fish tea, but four other dishes as well: crab salad in avocado; pepper shrimp on sugarcane with seared, caramelized mango; squirrelfish with garlic salt; and red mullet with scallions and ginger.
“From the time I walk out of the kitchen with one dish,” he says, lighting up yet another Marlboro, “my mind is on the next one. I like the spontaneity. Everything we buy, we use.”
“It’s quite magical being dumped in a place where you don’t know anything about the food culture,” he tells me later. “Because I’m dyslexic, I don’t absorb information through reading the way others do. I get it visually or by listening. Going into the markets, out to the fisherman’s beach, to Cloggy’s—that’s my way of understanding.”
So is White returning to the kitchen for good?
“I enjoyed cooking in Jamaica,” he says. “I loved the produce, but now I’m back to slicing cakes and doing deals. It was a short-term fling.” And fun while it lasted.