Celebrating A Bad Boy Chef

Before there was Gordon Ramsey and Anthony Bourdon there was Marco Pierre White , an Anglo Italian chef who was the culinary Mick Jagger. He was the original kitchen bad boy, exuding a jaded rock star image while creating amazing dishes.His first cookbook White Heat 25 has been updated, delighting fans and foodies across the globe.

New comer Dwight Garner wrote about this chef terrible in yesterday's New York Times Food section. White's seminal cookbook White Heat influenced a generation of great chefs>Mario Batali and David Chang consider it the most important cookbook of the modern era. He redefined fine dining, bringing elaborate French dishes to the forefront of the then boring English cuisine. He was precise and deliberate , much like most of the great chefs before him.However unlike them , he had swagger.He  was long haired and sexy, smoking a forbidden cigarette in the kitchen , weariness etched on his dark brooding face. Supermodels flocked to his restaurants to try his food and probably to try a taste of him.Like any rock god , he was also explosive, taking his rage on not just  surrounding sous chefs but also on patrons. His most famous move was "The whoosh", a great way of getting rid of obnoxious or rude customers. His staff would first come out ,. clear the table of cutlery and utensils and then Chef White would appear.The tablecloth was whooshed off the table, with the flair of a matador and the offending customers ejected.This only added to his bad boy reputation however those customers didn't have to pay.

It's not surprising that Gordon Ramsey, a time bomb himself in the kitchen, was his protégé. Chef White was not above putting sous chefs on meat hooks or chucked into the garbage tiffs.He made assistant chefs  stand in the corner. His flair in the kitchen was also legendary, wielding intensively sharp knives the way Bruce Lee flung around nun chucks,.Even though he had a three star French  restaurant , Chef white never actually apprenticed in any Paris restaurant which caused a lot of controversy. Many more established chefs founds this horrifying, After all how could he learn to cook haute cuisine and pay his dues when he had stayed in his native England. His influence probably came from his father, a chef, in Leeds, England where the younger Chef White was born in 1961. His mother was Italian , tragically dying in childbirth. Chef White retired from the trade in 1999 but has had a few reality shows along with the short lived NBC "The Chopping Block". Sadly younger chefs now know him as "the man who trained Gordon Ramsey".
Every industry has a rebel. Marco Pierre White was the one for the culinary industry. He was a kitchen rock star, long before, Bourdain, Flay, Batali and Ramsey.