Marco Pierre White

• 1. Introduction

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  Marco Pierre White, an English chef and restaurateur, moved to London in 1981. By his own telling, he arrived with "£7.36, a box of books, and a bag of clothes". That was the entire stake of a young man who would later be dubbed "the first celebrity chef". Others called him the enfant terrible of the British restaurant scene. How does a boy who left school without a single qualification end up as a mentor to other chefs? Why would a cook at the summit of his profession hand back the honours he had chased for years? And what does a man who once ruled his kitchens with fury do after he walks away from the stove?

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• 2. From Leeds to Le Gavroche

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  On the 11th of December 1961, Marco Pierre White was born in Leeds, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. He was the third of four sons. His mother, Maria-Rosa Gallina, was an Italian immigrant from Veneto, and his father, Frank White, was a chef. When Marco was six, his mother died from a cerebral haemorrhage caused by complications after the birth of his younger brother.

  At Allerton High School in Leeds, school was a place of humiliation. Other children laughed when he was called on to read aloud. He left with no qualifications and decided to train as a chef, like his father. Only later, when his own son was diagnosed at school, did White realise that he is dyslexic. In 2012 he said he was fortunate to have entered a world where he did not have to read or write. Cooking let him express himself with his fingers, he said, and that built his confidence. Over the years, he added, he taught himself to read and to spell.

  His first training took place at Hotel St George in Harrogate, and then at the Box Tree in Ilkley. In London he began his classical training as a commis, a junior kitchen hand, under Albert and Michel Roux at Le Gavroche. Next came Pierre Koffmann at La Tante Claire, then the kitchen of Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir. Later he worked with Nico Ladenis of Chez Nico at Ninety Park Lane. Then he branched out alone, cooking at the Six Bells public house on the Kings Road. His assistant there was a young Mario Batali.

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• 3. Harveys and Three Stars

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  In 1987, White opened Harveys in Wandsworth Common, London. He won his first Michelin star almost immediately, and a second followed a year later. The same year, The Caterer magazine gave him the Newcomer Award at the Catey Awards.

  Harveys became a school for cooks who went on to make names of their own. Gordon Ramsay, Phil Howard, Stephen Terry and Éric Chavot all worked there. White's wider list of trained chefs also includes Shannon Bennett and Curtis Stone.

  He later became chef-patron of The Restaurant Marco Pierre White, in the dining room of the former Hyde Park Hotel. There, in 1995, he became the first British chef to earn three Michelin stars. At the age of 33, he was also the youngest chef ever to do so. From Hyde Park he moved to the Oak Room at the Le Méridien Piccadilly Hotel, the dining room where his cooking career would end.

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• 4. Kitchen Temper

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  A customer at Harveys once asked whether he could have chips with his lunch. White hand-cut them, cooked them himself and charged the man £25 for his time. Diners who offended him with their comments were regularly thrown out of the restaurant.

  Inside the kitchen, his behaviour was unpredictable. He threw cheese plates at the wall. He assaulted his head chef, who had recently broken his leg. When a young chef complained about the heat, White used a sharp paring knife to cut open the back of the man's jacket and trousers. White later admitted that in those years he would lose all control of himself.

  The most famous victim of his temper was a young Gordon Ramsay. White insisted he did not make Ramsay cry, saying, "He made himself cry. That was his choice to cry." Yet White's own written account tells a different story. He wrote that he could not recall what Ramsay had done wrong, but he yelled and Ramsay lost it. Ramsay crouched in a corner of the kitchen, buried his head in his hands and sobbed. The kitchen that White ruled this way was one he would walk away from in 1999.

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• 5. Returning the Stars

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  On the 23rd of December 1999, White cooked his final meal for a paying customer at the Oak Room. That year he announced his retirement from the kitchen and returned all of his Michelin stars.

  He had spent seventeen years pursuing his ambition. Despite the accomplishments, recognition and fame, he concluded that the career gave him too little in return for his personal life. He explained his reasoning bluntly: "I was being judged by people who had less knowledge than me, so what was it truly worth?" He said he had given the Michelin inspectors too much respect and belittled himself. He saw three options. He could stay a prisoner of his world and keep working six days a week. He could live a lie, charge high prices and not be behind the stove. Or he could give his stars back, spend time with his children and reinvent himself. He chose the third. The first of his new ventures was a partnership with a man named Jimmy Lahoud.

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• 6. Restaurateur

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  White Star Line Ltd was the company that White and Lahoud set up together. They operated it for several years, and their partnership ended in 2007.

  In 2008, White opened his first steakhouse, the MPW Steak & Alehouse, in the Square Mile of London. His co-owner was James Robertson, who had worked for him as a maître d'hôtel between 1999 and 2003. Since 2010 the two men also ran the Kings Road Steakhouse & Grill in Chelsea. In May 2016 the two restaurants became the London Steakhouse Co.

  White also held a stake in the Yew Tree Inn, a 17th-century dining pub near Highclere in Hampshire. ITV filmed much of "Marco's Great British Feast" there in the summer of 2008. In January 2009 it was reported that he would charge £5 for a pint of real ale. White defended the price: "Most pubs undercharge. You're not just paying for beer, you're paying for the place you drink it in and the people who serve it." After an acrimonious falling out with his business partners, the pub was sold.

  In 2010, White met the businessman Nick Taplin, owner of Cadbury House, a four-star hotel in North Somerset. In October 2010 Taplin opened a Marco Pierre White Steakhouse Bar & Grill there as a franchisee. Restaurants at Hoole Hall in Chester and The Cube in Birmingham followed. As more hotel owners made enquiries, the two men launched a master franchise in 2013 called Black And White Hospitality. It lets property owners open one of eight branded restaurants. They include Mr White's English Chophouse, Wheeler's of St James's Oyster Bar & Grill Room, Koffmann & Mr White's and Marco's New York Italian. The list ends with Wheeler's Fish & Chips, Bardolino Pizzeria Bellini & Espresso Bar and Marconi Coffee & Juice Bar.

  He has also written books. They include the cookbook White Heat, the recipe collection Wild Food from Land and Sea and the autobiography White Slave. In North America, and in the paperback edition, that memoir is titled The Devil in the Kitchen.

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• 7. Television Chef

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  In September 2007, White became the head chef of ITV's Hell's Kitchen. The tie-in book, Marco Pierre White in Hell's Kitchen, was published by Ebury Press on the 23rd of August 2007. One remark he made on the programme drew criticism from the Commission for Racial Equality. An ITV spokesman replied that viewers had been warned about the content and that a contestant, Lee Ryan, had challenged the comment. White returned to present the fourth series in 2009. In 2017 he presented Hell's Kitchen Australia for the Seven Network.

  In 2008 he hosted an American version of the Australian competition The Chopping Block, made by Granada America. It aired on NBC in March 2009 and was pulled after three episodes because of low ratings. After a three-month hiatus, it came back to finish its season.

  MasterChef became a recurring stop. On the 6th of July 2011, he was a guest judge on MasterChef Australia. He returned for a week of challenges beginning on the 15th of June 2014, and again in May and July 2015 and in May 2016. Starting on the 20th of January 2013, he was a principal judge on MasterChef Australia: The Professionals, alongside host Matt Preston. He also appeared on the South African version on the 11th of December 2014, and on the New Zealand version on the 6th of September 2015.

  On the 27th of August 2011, White set a cooking task on the UK's Celebrity Big Brother. In 2012 he fronted Marco Pierre White's Kitchen Wars for Channel 5, in which the best restaurant partnerships balanced food with front-of-house service. Critics at The Guardian and The Independent reviewed it positively. In 2024 he partnered with the BBC on a digital cooking course for the BBC Maestro platform.

  He also advertised Knorr stock cubes and stock pots in Britain. Critics said he had sold himself out as a chef. He answered that working with such companies put him on a bigger stage, adding, "Michelin stars, they're my past." In 2013 he apologised after an online Knorr video, in which he demonstrated how to cook rice and peas, drew accusations of cultural appropriation.

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• 8. Feuds and Family

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  Matt Preston, a judge on MasterChef Australia, alleged that White's son, Marco Pierre White Jr, had spent $500,000 of his father's money on drugs and prostitution. White quit the programme after its eighth series and joined the rival Hell's Kitchen Australia in retaliation. In 2016, Preston spoke on The Kyle and Jackie O Show about the son's time on Big Brother UK. White said he would "never forgive that man". He returned to MasterChef in its fourteenth series, after Preston had left.

  White has been married three times. He wed Alex McArthur at Chelsea Register Office on the 8th of June 1988. They had a daughter, Letitia, and divorced in 1990. He met the model Lisa Butcher at a London nightclub when she was 21, and they were engaged within three weeks. She sold coverage of the wedding to Hello! magazine in a £20,000 deal. They married at the Brompton Oratory on the 15th of August 1992.

  In 1992 he began an affair with Matilde Conejero, bar manager at The Canteen in Chelsea Harbour, and divorced Butcher for her. They married at the Belvedere restaurant in Holland Park on the 7th of April 2000. They had two sons and a daughter, and separated some time after January 2005.

  White also speaks freely about food and place. At the September 2017 opening of his Plymouth restaurant, he called English wine "nonsense". He said London was the number one food destination, asking how many three-Michelin-star restaurants Cornwall has. His answer was none. Even so, he called the rival Duke of Cornwall Hotel "a lovely place". He also said that the Cornish chef Nathan Outlaw "cooks very well", though he had not eaten his food.

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