The Devil in the Kitchen (25 page)

Anyway, moving on. Antony’s charm offensive had reaped dividends with Mati. She was no longer serving him drinks at the Char Bar, but sitting at his table having enjoyed a long dinner.

Mati wanted a packet of cigarettes but the cigarette machine was broken, so Antony said, “Don’t worry. I’ll ask my friend Marco.” They came over and she remembers that I was a huge guy slumped forward on the table, wearing a white T-shirt and white chef ’s jacket, with one arm draped around a girl and the other arm draped around another girl. On the table, there was an overflowing ashtray as well as scattered packs of different brands of cigarettes. Antony said, “Marco, this is my friend Mati. Can I have a cigarette for her, please?” I said to her, “What do you smoke? Marlboros are for hard-core people, Bensons are disgusting, Silk Cuts are for wimps.”

She said, “I’m afraid I’m a Silk Cut person.” I didn’t have that brand, so she took a Marlboro Light and that was it. No eye contact. These days she’ll tell you, “He must have left some sort of impression because I remembered the encounter, but it wasn’t a particularly good impression.”

M
ATI KNEW THE
Canteen’s restaurant manager Torquil, and he called her to say this great new place was about to open—mentioned the fact that Michael Caine was behind it—and offered her a job as a waitress. She didn’t want to do waitressing and turned down the job. Two weeks later Torquil phoned to say the bar manager had dropped out so would she prefer that position? She said yes. Amid the buzz of getting the Canteen up and running, I didn’t really notice her. But in those first few weeks after opening the Canteen, I became entranced. There were scores of good-looking female punters coming in each night, dressed to the nines and being friendly to me, but I was more interested in the woman serving the drinks than the ladies drinking them.

Mati Conejero was olive-skinned and beautiful. She was born in Majorca, the daughter of Spanish parents, but she grew up here, so her accent is London rather than Palma. My initial seduction technique with Mati—my own little way of telling her I was interested— did not involve conversation. At the end of evening service I would sit at the bar, flicking matches and rolled-up pieces of paper in her direction as she took care of the customers. Feeling the gentle stab of a match in her neck really annoyed her, but I figured that at the end of the night, when she came to sweep the floor, she would be forced to think about me.

Within a month or so I must have moved on from match-flicking to conversation and we became friends. If I saw Mati going for a break, I would follow her out of the restaurant and jump out behind her. “Fancy a coffee?” She’d agree and we’d take a cab from Chelsea Harbour to Pucci’s café on the King’s Road.

At first, neither of us remembered that we had already met at 190 Queensgate. Then one night Antony Worrall Thompson came into the Canteen, headed up to the bar and asked Mati if she would like to join him for a glass of champagne. She said she couldn’t because she was working, so he said, “Don’t worry. I’ll ask my mate Marco if it’s OK.” That’s when Mati realized that I was the “huge guy” with the cigarettes at 190. And when Antony came up to me to see if I would allow Mati to have a drink, that’s when it dawned on me that Mati must have been that “Spanish bird” he was always going on about.

One of the things I liked about Mati was that she came from the same humble beginnings as me. Her mother, Lali, was a seamstress (and, as I would later learn, a magnificent cook); her father, Pedro, was a waiter. I’d been out with posh girls—hell, I’d even married a couple of them—but I reckon you can only really love your own. In my opinion, if you’re from the poorer side of society, you can’t marry into upper-class circles because you’ll never be understood.

There were two obstacles that threatened to stop us turning from friends into lovers. The first was that Mati had a boyfriend.

She had been seeing this bloke, on and off, for about two years. She told me, more recently, that her boyfriend had asked her one night, “Are you in love with Marco?” She had said that no, of course she wasn’t in love with me, and told him off for asking such a ridiculous question. But I suppose it got her thinking. Shortly afterward she split from her boyfriend, moved out of his house and into her parents’ home in Holland Park. She then had a row with her father about her lurcher’s nonstop farting, so she and her dog moved out of her parents’ house and into a friend’s flat in Tower Hill.

When she told me about this, I gave her the keys to my flat in Pavilion Road, Knightsbridge, and said, “Go and stay there if you need to.”

She said, “I’ve got a lurcher that farts.”

“That’s fine,” I said, but she declined the offer and handed back the keys a few weeks later.

Some nights Mati would give me a lift home to my flat, and one evening I kissed her before leaping out of the car and hurrying into my flat. She didn’t see me for two days afterward, and even then I didn’t mention our snog—is that evidence that I was shy with girls?

So Mati was now young, free and single . . . The second obstacle was that Lisa Butcher, my estranged wife, wanted to get back together with me. Between the spring and fall of 1992 I had managed to charm Lisa, get engaged to her, marry her in Brompton Oratory and then separate. People make wedding speeches that last longer. Occasionally Lisa would pop into the Canteen for a chat, and then at some point in December, she said, “Why don’t we have another go? Let’s give it a try.”

Looking back it seems crazy that I even considered reconciliation. I’m sure I knew by then that Lisa and I were not suited and that our marriage had been a mistake. Meanwhile, Mati and I hadn’t done anything more intimate than the occasional kiss, but there was a feeling that we were growing closer. However, for some strange reason, I found myself agreeing to Lisa’s suggestion.

Lisa and I spent Christmas together at the Manor House Hotel, in Wiltshire. Surrounded by a few hundred acres of parkland, the setting was romantic enough, but our attempted reunion was disastrous. It just didn’t work, put it that way. I was reminded of all the reasons we’d broken up, one of the major ones being that we had nothing in common. I just didn’t know her and she certainly didn’t know me.

It’s never going to happen between us, I thought, so I said to Lisa, “I have to get back to London.” We cut short our stay and a friend of mine, Gary Bentley, came and collected us and drove us back to London. He dropped Lisa at her flat and me at mine. That’s it, I thought. I’ve got my freedom now. I had promised to spend New Year’s Eve with Lisa and it was a promise I kept, but before she turned up at the flat, I spoke to Mati on the phone.

“What are you up to tonight?” she asked.

“I’m spending the evening with Lisa,” I told her.

“That’s nice,” said Mati sweetly. “You’re going to try and make it work again, then?”

I said, “Well, I’m not in love with her. I’m in love with somebody else.”

“Who?” asked Mati.

I didn’t tell her and she later said she didn’t think I was referring to her. I ended the conversation by telling Mati, “I’m very fond of you.”

The dillydallying with Mati couldn’t go on forever, though. My uncertainty, indecision and hesitation were proving too frustrating for her. Our relationship was cemented in early January 1993, when we sat alone in the Canteen in the early hours of the morning. The customers had long since paid up and gone and the staff had cleared up and headed off. It was just the two of us together in this massive restaurant at a table at the end of the bar. We were talking about this or that when Mati suddenly stood up, climbed over the table and kissed me. We spent the night together and then I gave her the keys to my flat again; this time she held on to them.

Michael Caine kept his nose out of it. I can’t recall him expressing an opinion about me breaking my never-date-the-staff rule. He had never been enthusiastic about my marriage to Lisa, although he’d never said, “You’re making a mistake.” Michael was too polite to say something like that. But then again, when I told him I was going to marry Lisa, he hadn’t said, “Great stuff, Marco,” either.

When word leaked out that Mati and I were seeing each other, newspapers dispatched their hacks and hackettes to trail us. One of the most persistent reporters was Deborah Sherwood of the
Sunday
Express
. She was on my case morning, noon and night and arrived with a photographer at the Canteen one evening asking if she could speak to me. Deborah was thinking to herself, It could go one of two ways: Marco might want to have a drink with us or he might tell us to get lost. When she saw me walking in her direction with a glass in my hand, she thought, he’s obviously decided he wants to have a drink with us. I was not in that sort of mood. Instead, I removed the photographer’s camera from his hands and smashed it into tiny bits by hammering it hard on the Canteen’s tiled floor. They got the message and left the building, but not before Deborah, ever persistent, fired a few questions at me. I later paid for the camera. Like I said, she caught me in the wrong mood.

Mati became pregnant, and in December 1993 Luciano was born. A couple of months before he was born, Mati and I and a couple of friends went off for a break in Yorkshire. We were driving back down the A1 when I nodded off in the backseat. I must have had a nightmare and woke screaming, “Please stop the car. Get this car off the motorway.” I came to my senses and apologized for the outburst, then about fifteen seconds later we were overtaken by a lorry that pulled into our lane; the next thing we knew, our car became lodged between the lorry’s trailer and cabin. We were dragged down the road, with smoke all over the place and sparks flying, and then our car was catapulted across the road. We freed ourselves from the wreckage and wondered how the hell we’d survived, and when the police arrived at the scene, they were just as shocked that we were alive. They dropped us off at some motorway café and we called a taxi to take us back to London. When we arrived home, the house was freezing because the louvre windows had been left open. I stood on the window ledge trying to shut the window when it suddenly jolted upward and my head was crushed between the window and window frame. I was half dead. Weird that I should survive a horrific car crash then nearly kill myself trying to close a window.

NINETEEN

The Dream Becomes Reality

M
Y DREAM, OF
course, was to win three stars from Michelin and I wouldn’t have come by the third one had it not been for Michael Caine. He was the instigator, the one who introduced me to his friend Rocco—that’s Sir Rocco—Forte, who had taken over the helm of the hotel company started by his father, the great hotelier Lord (Charles) Forte. Michael and Rocco met for lunch one day in 1993 and my name cropped up.

Rocco liked the idea of teaming up with Michelin-starred chefs. He had recently done a deal with Nico Ladenis, renting him a restaurant of the Grosvenor House Hotel, which Nico called Nico at Ninety. It went on to win three stars—so Nico had done well out of the deal. There were also benefits for Rocco, though. First, he got the glorious PR that comes with having an outstanding chef on the premises; and second, Nico’s restaurant provided an alternative for guests who didn’t want to use the main dining room of the hotel but didn’t want to travel too far to eat. Rocco is blessed with vision, and I think he was the pioneer of this clever idea of renting hotel space to chefs. So the deal with Nico had worked very well and having sorted out the Grosvenor House, Rocco had turned his attentions to the Hyde Park. The old grill was on its last legs, perhaps because the punters were dying off. Nothing lasts forever.

Michael brought together me and Rocco for a meeting. Rocco was a real gentleman, very charming and courteous, and he asked me, “How do you fancy taking your two stars from Harveys to the Hyde Park?” Transferring Michelin stars was possible. Others had done it, including Raymond Blanc, who had transferred his two stars from his city-center restaurant to Le Manoir. I would need approval from Michelin, but it was certainly doable. What’s more, I liked the prospect because I had outgrown Harveys and Wandsworth. With its forty-four covers, Harveys had brought me two stars, but it was too small to win me another. I had started to see it as little more than a shop front with fifteen tables. The Canteen, meanwhile, was not set up to be a three-star venture. The restaurant at the Hyde Park Hotel, on the other hand,
was
the big stage. It was Forte’s flagship hotel, a magnificent Victorian building that sits imposingly on that stretch from Knightsbridge to Hyde Park Corner. At the back, the hotel overlooks the park and across from the front entrance you’ll find Harvey Nichols and Harrods. It was the platform that would enable me to win three stars in the
Michelin
Guide
. It was the place where my dream could—and indeed would— come true.

I visited the site with Rocco, did the deal and it all came together pretty quickly. In July 1993 I left Harveys, and two months later we opened Restaurant Marco Pierre White at the Hyde Park Hotel. At Harveys there had rarely been more than eight in the brigade, but at the Hyde Park I had sixteen, sometimes eighteen cooks. My team included five chefs who had been with me in the final days of Harveys: Robbie McRae and the aptly named Donovan Cooke, both of whom had worked at Michel Roux’s Waterside Inn before joining Harveys; Mikey Lambert, who had also worked at the Waterside and L’Ortolan before Harveys; Roger Pizey, who had won the Pastry Chef of the Year award while at Harveys; Lee Bunting, who had joined me at Harveys when he was a kid of sixteen or seventeen, after an unsuccessful and brief career as a waiter. Donovan and Mikey, by the way, later moved to Australia, where they have been voted the country’s best chefs.

Others in the Hyde Park brigade included Robert Reid, who had just left Robuchon in Paris; Spencer Patrick, who’d come from Hambleton Hall; Richard Stewart and Robert Weston. Thierry Busset had worked at Gavroche and came in to join Roger on Pastry, while Charlie Rushton, who’d done time at Harveys, was brought back into the fold. The average age of the chefs was twenty-five. They weren’t kids. They were strong people whose heads were full of experience and culinary knowledge and whose bodies could stand the pace and physical demands of working sixteen or seventeen hours a day in a kitchen. I also introduced the sort of classical hierarchy I’d seen at Gavroche. There was me, my head chef, four or five sous chefs, three on Fish, three on Meat, three on Pastry and four on Larder. There were the chefs de partie, the premier commis chefs and the commis chefs. Each of them was a head chef in his own right.