I had three Michelin stars, now I make macaroni cheese | Times2
I first came to the Rudloe Arms, Marco Pierre White’s country house hotel near Bath, five years ago. It was far noisier then, with a lot of angry-sounding geese and Oxford sandy and black pigs making themselves heard from sties round the back. Now they have all gone and White presides over a silent, post-livestock world. There are new ponds containing carp, pike, tench and gudgeon. There are dry stone-wallers hard at work and tree surgeons have tidied the woodland. The ponds and their bulrushes have attracted insects, which in turn have brought bees, newts and frogs and, in their turn, kingfishers and herons.
White, dressed in a tweed jacket and wearing 1930s-style circular rimmed spectacles, presides over his nature reserve with obvious joy. “My mother died when I was six and nature has always been my surrogate mother,” he says. “I in turn want to help the frogs, the toads and the crested newts.”
He’s then in raptures about his 14 species of bat and roaming roe deer. “We don’t kill anything now,” he says. “I even release pheasants.”
Wow, that’s a change — 20 years ago White would shoot at Madonna’s 1,200-acre Wiltshire estate just south of here, accompanied by the ex-footballer Vinnie Jones and Madonna’s then husband, Guy Ritchie. And the halls at Rudloe are still lined with mementoes of the old hellraiser life.
White became the youngest and first British chef to achieve three Michelin stars
ALAMY
There’s the young White with tousled curls, cigarette dangling from his lip, wielding a meat cleaver (next to a portrait of a woman in a short skirt scratching her bottom). White was the first celebrity chef, winning two Michelin stars at Harveys, his south London restaurant, where he led a kitchen staffed by Gordon Ramsay and Jason Atherton, among others. After he left Harveys, he became the youngest and first British chef to achieve three Michelin stars with his self-named restaurant.
In his pomp, White was known for throwing rude bankers…
..