Medium Raw

A while back, I had the uncomfortable yet illuminating experience of taking part in a public discussion with one of my chef heroes, Marco Pierre White. It was at a professional forum, held in an armory in New York—one of those chef clusterfucks where the usual suspects gather once a year to give away, in the front lobby, samples of cheese, thimble-size cups of fruit-flavored beers, and wines from Ecuador. An unsuspecting Michael Ruhlman attempted to moderate this free-for-all—an unenviable job, as trying to “control” Marco is to experience the joke about the “six-hundred-pound gorilla” firsthand: he sits wherever he fucking wants, when he fucking wants to sit, and fuck you if you don’t like it. Marco was the Western world’s first rock-star chef, the prototype for all celebrity chefs to follow, the first Englishman to grab three Michelin stars—and one of the youngest chefs to do so. Every cook of my generation wanted to grow up to be Marco. The orphaned, dyslexic son of a working-class hotel chef from Leeds, he came up in an era when they still beat cooks. Years after famously handing back his stars at the peak of his career, he’s now got more money than he knows what to do with, has had every woman he’s ever wanted—and, as he likes to say, contents himself these days with the full-time job of “being Marco.”

He may spend much of his time stalking the English countryside with a $70,000 shotgun, contemplating the great mysteries of the natural world, half–country squire and half-hoodlum, but he’s paid his dues. He’s a man who, if you ask him a direct question, is going to tell you what he thinks.

On stage that day, I asked, innocently enough, what Marco thought of huge, multicourse tasting menus—whether, perhaps, we’d reached the point of diminishing returns. I knew he’d recently had a meal at Grant Achatz’s very highly regarded Alinea in Chicago—thought of by many as the “best” restaurant in America. And I knew he hadn’t enjoyed it. I thought it was worthwhile to explore why not.

Achatz, it is generally agreed, sits at the top of the heap of the American faction of innovative, experimental, forward-thinking chefs who were inspired by the work of Ferran Adrià and others. I thought it was a provocative but fair question—particularly given Marco’s own history of innovation, as well as his elaborate, formal, and very French fine-dining menus. He seemed to have had a change of heart on the subject of tasting menus—maybe even about haute cuisine in general—having insisted to me previously that all he wanted these days was a proper “main, and some pudding.”

What I hadn’t anticipated—and what poor Ruhlman certainly hadn’t—was the absolute vehemence with which Marco hated, hated, hated his meal at Alinea. Without bothering to even remember the chef ’s name or the name of his establishment, Marco spoke of an unnamed restaurant that was unmistakably Alinea as if Achatz had shot his favorite dog and then served him the still-steaming head. The way Marco went after him, dismissing all his experimental presentations and new cooking techniques with a contemptuous wave of the hand, came from a place of real animus. Warming to his subject, he went on and on—all of us blissfully unaware that Achatz himself, a beloved and respected figure in gastronomy, was sitting a few rows in—right in front of us.

The next day, there were hurt feelings and recriminations all around. Ruhlman, who’d worked on a book with Achatz and who is unrestrained in his admiration for the man and his food, found himself accused of treachery by loyalists and acolytes, pilloried for “allowing” such a thing as this public demonstration of disrespect. It’s rather hilarious to imagine Ruhlman or anyone else trying to stop it—given Marco’s fearsome reputation, rock-star ego, not to mention his intimidating size. The fact that Achatz had only recently survived a heroic battle with cancer of the tongue, having had to contend with the possibility of losing his sense of taste forever, added another layer of awkwardness to the whole affair. Ruhlman was shaken up by the whole thing. (It’s pretty much par for the course with Ruhlman and me. I always manage to put him in the shit. Last adventure I involved him in apparently got him blackballed from a budding career at Food Network.)

The next day, at the same conference, Achatz reacted directly. He stood up and gave an impassioned and well-reasoned defense of the kind of cooking he does, associating himself, appropriately, with other pioneers of the form. It was an argument with which, in principle, I am in total agreement. That without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, moribund. Of all the chefs in the room, he hardly needed to explain why he was eminently qualified for the job.