The Gospel According to Marco
The godfather of British cooking is back on the warpath: he gets a lot right and a lot wrong
Marco Pierre White is back in the news, promoting the wonders of P&O Cruises. At least, that’s what he was supposed to be doing. In an interview with The Telegraph, the original bad boy of British cooking gave his successors an absolute mauling.
White was as quotable as ever: “When I open up menus now, I can smell the accountant’s fingers.” He laid into set menus, tasting menus and small plates, “They’re canapés on a plate. It’s conveyor-belt cuisine. It’s void of emotion, void of romance.
These staccato flurries evoke images of a boxer peppering his target, and even in print, you can feel the force of White’s attacks: “Food is all about emotional impact. When something is minuscule, how can you have retention of heat? It’s a masterclass in an individual’s technical ability and ego.”
A man who used to work 100 hours a week, believes chefs aren’t tough today: “There’s no intensity any more… A lot of those young cooks can’t cook à la carte… It’s cooking by numbers. ABC. It’s soulless.”
Let’s start with the easy parts. He’s right about the hideousness of cold food. Nothing frustrates me more than seeing my food perched on the pass, getting colder by the second. The best food gives you comfort, it gives your insides a cuddle: it has to be hot.
Only the very best tasting menus worth having are the very best, most are joyless imitations, teases, finger food that always leaves you wanting more. Small plates are a fun, sociable way to eat, but too often the menus are all the same: a man can only stomach so much hummus, torched mackerel and burrata.
Elsewhere, I’m conflicted. Accountants’ fingerprints are all over menus, but that is not the chefs’ fault, it’s the reality of running a business in 2026. A tsunami of rising costs has left us with a choice: support restaurants that cook by numbers or be left with no restaurants at all. I know which side I am on.
White’s remedy of gritted teeth, longer hours, and thicker skins appeals to nothing more than my base instincts. Everyone at a good restaurant already works a damn sight harder than me - who am I to tell them they need to make even more sacrifices so I can save £5 on my steak?
With a return to Europe and a cheap supply of foreign labour still off the cards, the industry has no choice but to make careers attractive to British workers. If that means shorter menus, it’s okay with me.
No matter how much White wants to, we cannot turn back the clock to 1987. Society has moved on, people expect to be treated better, to have a life outside of work. As trainees at Le Gavroche, my dad and his colleagues often finished work in the early hours and grabbed a couple of hours of kip on the kitchen floor before they started prepping for lunch. This would never happen today and that’s something to celebrate.
But none of this is an excuse for sliding standards. White is right that certain types of restaurants have become egotistical and up themselves - finished with polished concrete and cool beats, they scream “you’re lucky to be here”. Good press and fawning influencers give these places momentary hype, yet precious few achieve longevity.
The Waterside Inn, the place White believes is the best restaurant in Britain, has endured for fifty years because it takes the opposite approach: you are their guest, they make you believe they are lucky to have you. An illusion? Quite possibly. But it’s a jolly effective one.
If you boil it down to its bare bones, that’s all hospitality is: being made to feel welcomed, to feel wanted. This is the standard the industry should defend above all others. Of course, we can admire a restaurant’s coolness, the chef’s imagination, the genius of a good wine pairing, but feeling relaxed and having a good time must always come first.
Because when Marco talks about hospitality being “like stepping into a warm bath after a cold day in the woods” he is describing the feeling that takes us back to our favourite restaurants again and again.