Marco Pierre White, Angel of the East

By Sandra Roberts on August 22nd 2011

To use an apt culinary metaphor, Marco Pierre White is a man with a seemingly enormous appetite for life. Grand passions, big ideas and keen enthusiasms sweep him along through his packed days, creating a rich feast of projects and experiences. Right now, a new venture that has clearly fired his imagination is the Angel Hotel in Lavenham, the Tudor coaching house he acquired just a few months ago. The occasional visit to see friends in Saxmundam and Peasenhall meant the 49-year-old restaurateur –probably a more accurate title than chef, as he gave up professional cooking more than a decade ago – wasn’t immune to the charms of the county’s picturesque towns and villages. But when he first set foot in Lavenham’s Market Place, he was completely entranced. “Like everything else in my life, I discovered Lavenham purely by default. I bought a business that was on the market – six hotels – and this place, The Angel, was one of them. “Now I never, ever, look at a business before I buy it, I never go to visit. So when I came to Lavenham I was quite stunned, quite shocked by the location of my new acquisition. I don’t think there’s a more beautiful square in England, is there? It’s extraordinary. It’s like stepping back in time – it’s so beautiful and the countryside around here, with its patchwork fields, often feels as if it hasn’t really been affected by the industrial revolution”. 

An appreciation of the past was one of the driving forces behind Marco’s rapid overhaul of the interior of The Angel. He spent a month just trying to understand exactly what he’d inherited at the hotel before summoning the builders. “The most important thing to me is to restore as many of the original features as possible. The only thing that doesn’t date in my industry is romance. “Maybe in the 1950s and 1960s at The Angel they just thought they’d had it the same way for over 600 years and wanted a bit of modernism. But there was a magnificent chimney that goes all the way up through the building, and beams that had been covered up. I wanted to reveal all that again.” Along with restoring that behaviour, he didn’t want swearing and I didn’t want dogs sitting on furniture. “I’ve replaced the drinks with locally brewed organic cider and lager – I prefer to give my money to the locals. If you read all the blogs in the papers you’d see there were about 98 per cent of people in agreement with what I did. Let the people speak.” 

A very mild controversy in comparison to a fair number of others in his life – if you take everything you read in the newspapers at face value. He’s the ‘Godfather of modern cooking’, ‘enfant terrible of the UK restaurant scene’, ‘rock star of the culinary world’ – you can take your pick of these and many other well-worn epithets. It’s true, of course, that a turbulent private life – with three well documented marriages – television programmes like Hell’s Kitchen and The Chopping Block, a series of influential cookbooks and a characteristically frank autobiography entitled White Slave have all kept him firmly in the public eye. 

But ultimately, it’s all about cooking. It was in the blood – his grandfather Gaetano and father Frank were both chefs. “I came from a working-class background, in Moortown, Leeds. For people like me, the rule was that if the old man went down the pit, you went down the pit. So if your old man was a chef, the same principle applied. You never questioned the old man.” If a talent for cooking was in his genes, a capacity for hard work has been the other ingredient in his success. Even now, the pace he sets is relentless. “I don’t work 9 to 5, and I work seven days a week. My work is a way of life. Work is like a mistress to me – I sneak off and have my wicked way with the Angel, then I go off to The Pear Tree (another of his pubs, in Wiltshire).”

For architectural splendours, Marco has added plenty of other touches of his own. He knew the outstanding newspaper cartoonist Jak, and a selection of his works – including some featuring Marco himself – adorn the walls. In addition, six sculptures of angels – including a male one, St George – made by his friend Ivan Klep, sit in the pub’s windows. “Why give a name to a place if it has no resonance beyond that? My logic is, when you walk into The Angel you actually want to see an angel!” Marco made some other changes to alter the culture of the pub that ruffled a few feathers. “I took off Foster’s and Strongbow. I didn’t want laddishsome more! I’m sure a psychologist would have a lot to say about that. I bury myself in my work, but it’s also a form of expression. “I don’t understand the concept of holidays – I never go on holiday. I refuse to take a holiday – it’s just not the way I was brought up. “If I ever wanted to go on holiday, I’d go somewhere in England –it’s so beautiful. Why travel to far-flung places when you haven’t even discovered all the joys of your own country? It doesn’t make sense to me.”  

These days he’s increasingly drawn back to his home city, Leeds, and the surrounding countryside where he used to wander freely as a young boy. He’s planning a nostalgic trip with his daughter Mirabelle back to the Harewood Estate, which was just a 20- minute walk from his council house home. “When I was growing up I felt it was my own private playground – I never saw any other kids, perhaps they were hanging around on street corners! The grounds of Harewood Hall is where I would do my fishing and poach some pheasants; that’s where life really started for me, down on the River Wharfe. “If I was spotted [in the hall ground] I’d say I got lost. So I’d be put in a Landrover and driven off the property – and then, after being dropped off, I’d just come straight back!” 

When he wasn’t engaged in adventures around the Harewood Estate – legally or illegally – young Marco was scouring the adjacent Sand Moor course for lost golf balls. Here, he proved to be in the right place at the right time for an introduction to a footballing legend. “I must have been 12 or 13 at the time, and I was hiding in the gorse bushes at the back of a green. A lady wearing a white blouse and red trousers spotted me, and asked me if the professional had sent me to be her caddy. “I fibbed and said yes, the pro had sent me. That’s how I started caddying for the lady. At the end of the round she asked me if I’d like to come and caddy for her husband on Sunday, and I said I would. “On the Sunday afternoon I saw her walking down the slope from the clubhouse with a man whose face was extremely familiar to a football-mad schoolboy. He was Don Revie, Leeds United [and later England] manager, and the lady was his wife Elsie. “I caddied for him a few times after that. He was very polite, very nice, and he showed an interest in a young boy that not every golfer would bother to do.” In those days managers and players weren’t the aloof superstars they are now. “I’d wander down to the chip shop close to our estate and I’d see Eddie Gray in the queue. Now Eddie was a star, he was a celebrity of his day, but they were very humble back then.” Although he has an affection for his hometown club, he’s actually an Arsenal supporter (because his brother picked Leeds first in a Subbuteo game when they were boys), and in recent years he’s also started to follow Chelsea – where he has a restaurant in partnership with good friend Frankie Dettori. Football is clearly a passion for him and he talks eloquently and knowledgably about the game and its history. He recently enjoyed the documentary film One Night in Turin, a stirring account of how England so nearly reached the World Cup final in 1990. “Bobby Robson was a great man and manager, as that film demonstrates. I met him back in 1993, and last year I was with his wife Elsie and her sons at a charity dinner in the North-East, where they gave me his autobiography, which was really nice.” 

Marco reconnected with his Yorkshire roots in a tangible way last year when he acquired a 50 percent share in the Box Tree at Ilkley, the renowned West Yorkshire restaurant where his career effectively started back in 1979. “My first job was actually at the St George’s Hotel, Harrogate, where I used to polish clients’ shoes in the afternoon. One day I spotted an Egon Ronay guide next to my chair, so I picked up and started flicking through it. “I discovered that restaurants had stars, which intrigued me, and also that the Best Restaurant listed was the Box Tree. So one day, not long afterwards, I plucked up the courage to go and ask for a job and, by pure chance, I got one.”  The rest, as they say, is history. By 1995 he had three stars of his own – two of them for Harvey’s (his first restaurant) in Wandsworth Common, London, and the other for The Restaurant at the Hyde Park Hotel. At that time, he was the youngest chef ever to have been awarded three Michelin stars. In a Lennonesque flourish, he handed his stars back in 1999 when he’d retired from the kitchen, saying he’d given the Michelin inspectors too much respect. These days his perspective remains the same. “There’s more to life than Michelin stars. When you’re being judged by people who have less knowledge than you, what does it really mean? If you’ve been voted writer of the year by a group of judges who have never written professionally, well, it might sell a few books, but, as I say, what does it really amount to?”

 His fervor for his trade is clearly evident, none more so than when he extolled the virtues of the cooked breakfast he’d had that morning. “Local bacon, local eggs, local sausage, local black pudding – absolutely delicious. All from just a few miles down the road {the Gipping Valley Farm near Stowmarket}. “Only the beef is not local, for the simple reason that I don’t think England can give me the quality of beef I want consistently, day in, day out – whereas Scotland can. “I will pay most probably 20 per cent more for it, but a steak is a benchmark for a lot of restaurants, in my opinion; the working man will put his hands in his pocket a little bit deeper for a good steak.” The professional cooking career may have finished some time ago, but he takes the occasional masterclass for charity, plus a ‘charity cook’ about 20 times a year for those in his industry suffering from drugs-related problems. “I don’t miss cooking. When I was a young man, cooking was an obsession, not a passion. Today it’s a merely a passion.” 

When he finds time to relax, he does so by settling down to play chess, dominoes or cards with his sons Marco and Luciano. He doesn’t have a television in the home. Despite occasional journeys to Stamford Bridge, he actually prefers to watch football on TV in his local pub. “You have the ambience of the ground, with a decent crowd, as well as being able to watch all the replays, all the goals from different angles!” But the next project, the next idea, is never far from his mind. At The Pear Tree in Wiltshire he’s building a giant orchard with about 150 pear trees, as well as developing wild flower meadows. Finally, back to The Angel in Lavenham, and he makes this pledge. “We’re not trying to be flash, and we want to make it affordable. We’ll feed people at reasonable prices and we’ll feed them well”. 

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