He looks like a tousled philosopher, sounds like a Zen teacher, walks like a giant would in a world crawling with Lilliputians and drives chefs to a point where the impossible becomes normal. He is Marco Pierre White, widely known as the father of modern cooking, the youngest British chef to get three Michelin stars and probably the only chef in the world who returned his Michelin stars so as to focus on real life because he did not want to be slave driven by his fame.
We have seen him before in the show Marco’s Kitchen Burnout but it is in MasterChef Australia: The Professionals, currently being aired on our TV screens (though the series wrapped up in Australia a few months ago) that he is seen in all his glory. As a teacher, mentor and soul reader who never ever says a superfluous word to the chefs fumbling with their weaknesses, unfamiliar ingredients, their egos and impossible challenges.
Once known as a volatile man in and outside his kitchen, today he has a sense of repose that makes him formidably inspiring. With his famously unruly hair and wise, all seeing eyes, his note perfect knowledge of food, his empathy for those who still haven’t reached where he has and his knack of saying soulful oneliners, he is a TV personality like no other. And for a man who self-confessedly made Gordon Ramsay cry, he never gets personal with contestants. He is never abusive and never swears like his most famous protege who more often than not turns a kitchen into a slaughterhouse where people are cut down to size like root vegetables, barked at and made to lose, among other things, their self-belief.
Marco is like an instinctive chef whisperer. Someone who can see gold in dross, potential in messy mistakes and even when he is disappointed, he targets not the creator but the creation. And when he says goodbye to contestants, he sends them out with a reassuring vote of confidence and most of them leave feeling grateful for the opportunity to work with a man who knows that the most important ingredient in any kitchen is the human spirit.
And so when Anthony Bantoft, one of the earliest contestants, responded ungraciously to his elimination from the show, Marco chose to say nothing positive instead of saying something negative and managed to convey his disdain for a man who cannot take criticism and has no real desire to learn from his mistakes. And he reaches out to self-doubt, fear and pain with a wisdom that is hard won and gleaned from many personal challenges he has overcome in his career and in his life.
The romance of a personal story in a dish, the scars of loss and struggle carried by a single mother, a woman who lost her soulmate in a car crash or a Sudanese refugee are never lost on him.
One shudders to think what he would have made of the recent Masterchef India finale where contestant Doyel Sarangi was seen on something that looked like a paper lotus, dancing to Ishaqzade’s famous song, Main Pareshan, pareshan, pareshan! But then, no reality show in India can be complete without song and dance, tears and melodrama and demeaning vote appeals.
For Marco, it is obvious that food is an end in itself. It is a sacred goal and a journey and cooking a perfect dish is like walking the razor’s edge between instinct and thought, between talent and strategy. Sad that in India we do not have a single food philosopher like him or a TV personality who can turn a commercial kitchen into a cathedral.
(Reema Moudgil is the author of Perfect Eight, editor of unboxedwriters.com and an RJ)