The Devil in the Kitchen (30 page)

Luciano and I walked along the yellow flagstones and my mind took me back to my childhood and those Saturday mornings when Dad would take me off to Leeds market to do a bit of shopping. For lunch he would buy me pork pie and mushy peas and we’d chop off the pie’s lid, chuck in some mint sauce and put the lid back on. Occasionally on those trips we would bump into one of Dad’s friends who would hand me ten pence, and as the coin was offered, Dad would nudge me to take it, saying in his dry way, “Don’t be shy. Your mother wasn’t.”

We drove to Moor Allerton to visit Dad for what would be the last time. Others in Dad’s position might have wanted a cozy pillow or some soft music to listen to, but a dose of horse racing was the thing that brought him comfort, so the telly was switched on for that day’s big race, the St. Leger live from Doncaster. As a lad I had witnessed him crouching in front of the TV, whipping himself with a rolled-up newspaper as the horses charged to the finishing post in “the ITV Seven.” Now we all stood around Dad, stretched out on his sofa bed, as the horses galloped along on the screen. I watched him more than I watched the race and I could see life in his eyes, as if he was aware of the dramatic commentary. Come on, my son. Come on, my son. Rather fittingly, the winning horse was called Silver Patriarch.

The doctor gave the old man a final shot of morphine and then he told us, “He won’t last longer than two hours. I’m sorry.” It was time to go, time to leave Leeds. I wanted to take the boys and Mati back to London and leave my father with his wife, so she could have that last bit of time with him. I can’t do anything for the old man, I thought. We said our good-byes and when we were on the M1, driving back down to London, my mobile rang. Hazel said that my father had died. He had passed away at the age of seventy, twenty-six years after a doctor had diagnosed him with cancer and given him six months to live.

We arrived back in London and I asked Mati to drop me off at the Hyde Park Hotel to have a coffee, smoke a cigarette and think things through. As I sat there, I also recalled a night at the Hyde Park, back in January 1995. Michael Winner had come for dinner with some of his journalist friends, who included Rebekah Wade, who went on to edit the
News of the World
and the
Sun
, and Piers Morgan, who was then editor of the
News of the World
and fast becoming the most talked-about maverick in the newspaper industry. Piers would become a good friend and on that first meeting he asked me, “What does your father think of you winning three stars?”

“He doesn’t understand,” I said. “As far as he’s concerned, Michelin makes tires.”

When I told Piers that he was, in fact, editing my father’s favorite paper, he said he wanted to send a features writer round to interview Mati and me for an article. My dad was delighted when, come the following Sunday, he saw his son taking up the entire center spread—for the right reasons rather than the wrong ones. As far as the old man was concerned, two pages in the
Screws
meant a good deal more than three stars in the
Michelin Guide
. He must be worth something, Dad would have thought.

Our father-son relationship had always been unhinged, I suppose. After I left home and he remarried, there was a period of more than a decade when we didn’t see each other and didn’t communicate. We did a good job of patching it up after Luciano was born, and unquestionably my father was a very good grandfather.

He adored the boys—he’d send them cards and toys—and from time to time we would travel up to Leeds and take him out for a day. We might go to Bridlington, where the old man loved to walk along the harbor top, looking out at the horizon and taking in the sea air. I’d buy him kippers and fresh crab to take home as a treat, and he said to me once, “I would love to have another ten years just to see the grandchildren grow up.” After our day trips and before heading home to London, I would always wait for Hazel to go out of the room and then give the old man five hundred quid—any less than that would have seemed mean; any more would have intimidated him. The money went straight into his back pocket. He didn’t call Hazel and say, “Here, love, put that in the teapot.” He was very funny, my old man, but he didn’t know it.

Two or three days after Dad’s death I was in a betting mood. There was a horse called Frank, my Dad’s name, racing at Lingfield, the name of the road where the old man lived. I had told myself that I would only have one bet that day and I had already put my money on Cloudy Bay, which was in another race. So I never put anything on Frank, which is a great shame, not least because it would have enabled me to tell you how I won a fortune. Frank, you see, was the first to romp past the finishing post, the lucky winner and home free.

TWENTY-THREE

Rough Seas

S
OME CHEFS WANT
to own their own restaurant so they can escape the mayhem in the kitchen. Not me. In fact, my growing portfolio of places to oversee just added to the opportunities for good, old-fashioned fun and games. Take, for example, my new project, Quo Vadis. A lively 120-seater in Soho’s Dean Street, it was where I’d worked in the mideighties for Italian chef Signor Zucchoni, the man who couldn’t work me out because of my long hair. I was to be a partner with Jonathan Kennedy, the PR man; Matthew Freud, the PR guru; and Damien Hirst.

So that meant there was Damien, the rock star artist with a wild, rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, and me, the rock star chef known for his temper. From the outset, it had a nitroglycerine whiff about it. There was, however, a big difference between the two of us. Although I was an enfant terrible chef, I was driven by emotion. What I did was not to create effect; it was me being emotional and expressing myself as a person. Damien, however, the enfant terrible of the art world, did everything for effect. He’d make statements or behave in a certain way purely for the shock factor. Anyway, I think I’m correct in saying that he would only do the deal if I was involved, and so that was how it all came about. We had more in common than simply being enfants terribles, though. Damien was a few years younger than me, but he was another Leeds lad and had been to the same school as my older brothers.

We put Damien’s paintings on the walls and the restaurant became home to his trademark style of art: on show were two skinned bulls’ heads floating in formaldehyde. One day, not long after we’d opened, I got a call from Matthew Freud. He said, “Marco, we’ve got a problem. You’d better get over here.” When I arrived at the restaurant, I was greeted by two hundred animal rights activists, chanting nasty things about Damien, bulls’ heads and our restaurant. As I pushed my way through the crowd, one of the protesters screamed, “That’s Marco,” and they all started spitting at me. The thing is, the bulls were dead long before Damien did his work on them. What’s the difference between a head in a tank of formaldehyde and a piece of meat on a plate? I didn’t stop to argue this point with them, though.

Inside, Matthew and I stood with the restaurant’s staff, gazing onto the street as the activists continued chanting. I couldn’t see where it was going so I said, “Why don’t we just give them some coffee to calm them down a bit?” The show got tedious, so I headed off, past the gobbing protesters, and soon afterward they stormed the restaurant. The maître d’ was chinned, the receptionist attacked. There was a full-scale scrap going on, and among the protesters were three or four undercover policemen who then waded in, fists flying. Furniture was kicked over and telephones were ripped from their sockets. Five of the activists were carted off to Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court. Then the mother of one of the girls who’d been arrested called me to say her daughter was a depressive on tablets. Would I drop charges? I was quite happy to drop the charges but the police wouldn’t have it because they treat activists like some sort of terrorist unit. It was a right mess.

Damien’s artwork caused further problems and ultimately led to the pair of us suing each other. The restaurant had a deal with Damien whereby it paid him to hang his paintings on the walls. If he wanted to take a painting down, he was obliged to replace it with another—it’s what you call rotating artwork. I didn’t like paying the rent for the paintings; it didn’t seem right. Then Damien started taking the paintings down because he wanted to put them in his house in Dublin, so he’d take out a painting that was, say, eight foot by six foot and replace it with something that was twelve inches by twelve inches. You can’t do that. The idea of rotating artwork is that you replace it with something of a similar size, otherwise it just looks stupid.

If you’ve got a deal where you’re being paid an art rent, then you’ve got to respect that. It wasn’t in the spirit in which we’d done the deal. I don’t know whether it was Damien taking advantage of a situation or whether it was Damien being Damien, but I wasn’t going to tolerate it. I asked him to move all his stuff out and there was no fallout. We needed to replace his artwork and I thought I’d do some pictures myself. It was supposed to be a humorous battle but lawyers ended up getting involved at one stage and there were accusations of plagiarism. For me it was all done with an element of fun. I took myself off to the country and did some conceptual art, painting a canvas black, sticking some cockerel feathers to it and then giving it some weird name like
Oil Slick.
It’s quite time-consuming but it’s not hard.

I got someone to prepare the canvases. Then I put a black acrylic over a big square canvas, put a glaze to it and stuck feathers on. It looked fantastic, to be honest, but creating a great meal is harder.

I also tried doing a bit of spot painting and then I’d slash up the picture and call it
Divorce
. So that was me being incredibly playful. Damien had done his famous DNA model, so I made a model with bulls’ eyes and called it
BSE.
There was lots of publicity as the media followed my entrée into the world of conceptual art. Most people seemed to get my point, that you can scribble all over a piece of paper, frame it, put it on a wall, and now it’s art. We were like a couple of kids having a play fight when it suddenly got out of control and lawyers became involved. Terrible really, isn’t it? We were two grown men, not a couple of ten-year-olds.

And do you know what encouraged me to try my hand at conceptual art in the first place? One day, when we were still mates, I’d been sitting with Damien and I’d said to him, “Do you remember the world we came from? There was always a fake
Mona Lisa
hanging over the fireplace and three ducks on the back wall, just like in Hilda Ogden’s house? I think you should make a really sophisticated version and do three ducks flying across the back wall in formaldehyde.” Three months later I picked up the
Telegraph
and there it was: three ducks on the back wall. That’s when I thought, it’s not that hard really.

Having said that, he is a genius who deserves everything he’s got. And that’s how I genuinely feel about it. His butterfly paintings were genius, and his spot paintings are fantastic. So you can’t take anything away from him. Maybe he just misinterpreted my playfulness.

What was nice about Damien was that while he had an infamous problem with drink and drugs, he managed to maintain a wonderful relationship with his lovely mother. The pair of them would come for lunch or dinner at one of my restaurants and I was always aware that his mother was very proud of her son. I used to think, Maybe he’s made his dream come true and his mother has been there to see it, but my mother hasn’t been here to see my dream come true.

W
E ALL MAKE
mistakes. Failure is often the first part of success. Go to the best restaurant in the world and you might still see failure. A sommelier might accidentally knock a bottle of wine onto the table so its contents spill out and onto your partner. Your beef or lamb might be overdone or underdone but certainly not the way you ordered it. These things shouldn’t happen in top restaurants, but they do. It’s what happens next that decides whether failure is turned into success.

If the maître d’ fails to deal with it, then failure prevails, but if the maître d’ realizes you are upset and dashes over to your table, a look of genuine concern on his face, he has recognized an inconsistency. Maybe he’ll offer you drinks on the house, or perhaps he’ll rip up the bill and give you the meal on the house. He walks you to the door and says sorry yet another time. Now, all of a sudden, you’re thinking, I’ll come back here. The place is great.

That is just one of the ways failure can become success in the restaurant business. With that in mind, look at what happened when the
New York Times
published a libelous comment about me. It was just a few words but nonetheless defamatory. The paper said that I had had “a well-publicized bout of drink and drugs.” I was angry because it was untrue and I asked for an apology. They could have said sorry immediately and turned failure into success. I would have admired that. But they didn’t. Nearly two years later I was at the Royal Courts of Justice, in London, with George Carman QC representing me in a historic case of American newspapers being sued in Britain for libel.

I’ll start from the beginning. I got a call one day from an American journalist called Florence Fabricant, who said she wanted to write a profile about me for the
New York Times
, a newspaper I thought of as influential and prestigious. I thought it sounded good and suggested we meet up. Then on February 13, 1998, she came for lunch at the Oak Room. She brought her husband, who enjoyed my hospitality but by dessert complained of jet lag and vanished. Florence and I stayed to have a chat and a coffee, and she asked me about my life, as you’d imagine, and I talked to her about cooking, restaurants and my personal background. At no stage did she ask me my views on drink and drugs, and if she had, I could have explained to her that I rarely touched booze and have never taken illegal drugs.

On May 13, 1998, precisely three months after I’d done the interview, a friend phoned to say something like, “My God. Have you seen the
New
York Times
?” When I got hold of a copy, I was horrified. Florence’s article wasn’t a fair interpretation of our conversation, put it that way, and then there was a line about me having “a well-publicized bout with drugs and alcohol.” I got on to my lawyers, Schilling & Lom & Partners. I wanted an immediate retraction and apology. A lot of my clients were American, so the piece was unarguably damaging. The
New York Times
didn’t respond. Then things got worse: the same untrue and highly damaging allegations were published in an identical article in the
Times
’ sister paper, the
International Herald Tribune
a couple of days later.