Five Particularly Colourful Chef Stories

Marco Pierre White, Tailor
Joël Robuchon’s Plate Spinning
Gordon Ramsey vs The World
The Tom Aikens Brand
The Peter Langan Show

The tasting menu at the new Noma pop-up in Los Angeles this week costs $1500, which isn’t too bad for fish eyeballs and langoustine brains and, hold on, what’s that subtle note emerging beneath the seaweed remoulade? Allegations of long-term and violent bullying by the restaurant’s visionary founder René Redzepi? A touch of stabbing your unpaid interns in the leg beneath the counterline so that your fawning guests can’t see the mutilation? There is nothing particularly chortle-worthy about the raft of allegations un-cloched about Redzepi in last week’s New York Times exposé. Nor is there much surprise in learning that the man frequently cited as the greatest chef in the world is also the stabbiest boss on the planet. Water is wet, my friends who work in kitchens tell me. The emperor also happens to be naked.

But the story and its grisly details did kick off a chain-reaction of anecdotes about the most outrageous restaurateurs and chef-proprietors in the collective kitchen consciousness — a transportative tasting menu of its own, perhaps, albeit if one of the courses is cocaine. (“It pairs excellently with more cocaine, sir.”) Here, for significantly less than $1500 because that’s modern publishing for you, I present five of the least libellous.

1. Marco Pierre White, Tailor

Philosopher-Chef White is the only man who is known to have made Gordon Ramsey cry. (“Well, he made himself cry,” White later said. “That was his choice to cry.”) "I don't recall what he'd done wrong but I yelled at him and he lost it,” White said of the incident at Harvey’s in Wandsworth. “He crouched down in the corner of the kitchen, buried his head in his hands and started sobbing.” White could be just as harsh on customers who didn’t meet his standards, famously kicking out 54 of them in a single sitting. (Curiously, he’d also kill them with kindness, once preparing by hand a bowl of chips for an obnoxious city-boy customer despite the fact they weren’t on the menu. It took an hour of his three-starred time.) But his most infamous moment came when “a chef moaned that he was too hot,” Marco later recalled. “So I took a carving knife in one hand, held his jacket with the other and slashed it. Then I slashed his trousers. Both garments were still on his body at the time. ‘That should provide a bit of ventilation,’ I told him, and when he asked if he could change out of his chopped-up clothes I said, ‘Yes, at the end of the service.’”

2. Joël Robuchon’s Plate Spinning

But Marco Pierre White was a “fucking pussycat,” compared to Joel Robuchon, said Gordon Ramsey. The high-priest of French cuisine was crowned the “chef of the century” by the Gault et Millau cooking guide in 1990, who clearly didn’t anticipate the imminent coming of Jamie Oliver. He was perhaps best known for his nigh-on-liquid pomme puree, which Tom Aikens claimed contained more butter than potato. (It took two hours to make, and Robuchon would stand over his juniors shouting a rhythmic “encore du beurre, du beurre, du beurre” as they made it.) He held a record 32 Michelin stars at the time of his death in 2018, and had the sky-high standards to match. Robuchon famously threw a plate at Ramsey, who said working for him was “like being in the SAS.”

“I remember it was a dish of langoustine ravioli,” Robuchon told The Telegraph. “He hadn’t made it properly. I told him so and Gordon reacted in a very arrogant manner. Although he was very talented, his attitude had always been… difficult. At the end of every service, he used to fling his pan down on the stove and threaten to resign because I was so demanding. This time, it really got on my nerves and so I threw a plate at him.”

3. Gordon Ramsey vs The World

Ramsey gave as good as he got, however. The chef once kicked critic AA Gill out of his eponymous restaurant for previously describing him as a “failed footballer” whose food was only eaten by “plutocrats”. (Gill was dining with Joan Collins at the time, and Ramsay waited twenty minutes, or just until he got settled, to showily give him the boot.) But surely his most controversial moment occurred in1998 when Ramsay was head chef at Michelin-starred Chelsea spot Aubergine. Ramsey apparently suspected that he was about to be deposed by his rival Marco Pierre White at the helm of the restaurant. And so he arranged for a motorcycle-helmeted interloper to rush into the restaurant in the middle of service and steal the all-valuable reservations book. It was only in 2012, however, when Ramsey admitted to the New Yorker that he had been behind the heist all along in an attempt to frame White. “I nicked it. I blamed Marco. Because I knew that would fuck him and that it would call off the dogs.”

4. The Tom Aikens Brand

Tom Aikens said he felt like a “complete shit-bag” after his restaurant group collapsed into administration in 2008, leaving around 160 suppliers almost £1 million out of pocket collectively — before he opened it up again with the help of venture capital money, wiping his debts but allowing him to continue trading. It was not his first controversy. Back in 1996, at the age of 26, he had been named the youngest British chef to hold two Michelin stars at the head of Pied a Terre on Charlotte Street. But three years later he parted ways with the restaurant, after he branded the hand of a trainee chef who had displeased him with a burning hot palette knife. “Back then I was an obnoxious little shit who would shout and scream and refuse to delegate in the kitchen,” he later said of this period. “After I got fired, I learned to stop being such an arrogant arsehole.”

5. The Peter Langan Show

Peter Langan, who co-owned Langan’s in Mayfair with Michael Caine in its 1980s pomp, apparently subsisted on twelve bottles of champagne per diem. “Most nights,” photographer Richard Young remembers, “It was the Peter Langan show.” On one occasion, an outraged guest discovered a dead cockroach in the ladies’ loo. “Well, it can’t be one of ours,” Langan said. “This cockroach is dead. All ours are alive and healthy” — at which point he popped the insect in his mouth and swallowed it whole, washed down with a thimble of vintage Krug. On another occasion, Richard Shepherd received a nervous call during lunch service. “I am speaking from the managing director’s office at Sotheby's," the voice said down the line. “I believe we have Mr Langan in our sales room. I wonder if you could send somebody over to pick him up — he is halfway up the stairs on a bookcase, and every time somebody goes past he keeps telling them to fuck off.” Later on Langan barred dancer Rudolf Nureyev for the crime, simply, of “being himself”, called Orson Welles a “stupid fat fuck” to his face, and developed a notorious party trick which involved biting the ankles of unsuspecting female diners. He even fell out with Caine, describing him as “mediocrity with halitosis who has a council house mind,” though Caine soon shot back. “Peter stumbles around in a cloud of his own vomit and is a complete social embarrassment,” he said. “You would have a more interesting conversation with a cabbage.”

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