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“The Devil inthe Kitchen:
Sex, Pain, Madness andthe
Making of a Great Chef”
By Marco PierreWhite
The old book is “The Devil in
the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness
and the Making of a Great Chef”
by Marco Pierre White. White is
the original bad-ass chef. Long
before Gordon Ramsey was
yelling at wannabe chefs and
the French, White was telling
clientele who questioned his food
to “F*** off.” That in and of itself
is not admirable, however White
was the first of the star chefs to
say “the customer isn’t always
right.” And in White’s mind usu-
ally they are quite wrong.
Since “The Devil in the
Kitchen” is an autobiography
the story is obviously about the
life of White, who came up from
poverty to become a multiple Mi-
chelin star-winning chef. He lost
his beloved mother when he was
six and grew up an angry young
man. But he used that anger and
that “one single, soulful memory
of that moment when I last saw
my mother” as fuel for his dream
of culinary success. And no one
succeeded like White. He was the
first British chef (and the young-
est chef anywhere) to win three
Michelin stars, and future star
chefs like Mario Batali and Gor-
don Ramsey have survived tours
of duty in White’s kitchen. Work-
ing with White puts one into a
sort of war zone what with the
constant risk of flying pots and
plates. He’s notoriously as tough
on his staff as he is on recalcitrant
customers.
In his autobiography it’s not
that he tries to gloss over the bad
boy image so much as to explain
where it came from, starting
with the day he lost his mother.
He also shows that he paid his
dues working for (and ultimately
outgrowing and out cooking)
three major French chefs in Great
Britain. Of course, there’s some
selective amnesia, which you will
find in most autobiographies of
controversial characters, but the
story is riveting especially if you
have even a passing interest in
the culinary arts.
Literarea by Kevin Kizer