Sous Chef. Michael Gibney J.

       PREFACE

      ON A WARM AFTERNOON IN THE SPRING OF 2011, I FOUND myself on a shady corner of Forty-Third Street, just off Times Square, smoking one last cigarette before returning to the twentieth floor of the Condé Nast building to complete the second half of my day clipping magazine articles for The New Yorker’s editorial library—a temporary gig I’d taken between kitchen jobs. I was about to chuck the butt into the gutter when, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a figure whose large silhouette seemed familiar enough to warrant a second look.

      He was a tall man—at least six foot three—with a nest of unattended curls atop his head that made him appear even taller. He stood with his back to me, a navy-blue pin-striped suit hanging loosely over his broad shoulders. He puffed at a cigarette and chatted on his phone, making lively gestures with his free hand while a nimbus of smoke collected in the air around him.

      Even though I couldn’t see his face, there was something about his posture that I recognized immediately. He was poised, yet oddly stooped at the same time. His movements were quick and fitful, yet marked by a certain calculated, meditative finesse, which could be detected even in something as simple as the way he flicked the ash from his cigarette.

      And then my eyes fell on his shoes and it hit me: checker-print slip-on tennies—with a suit, no less. I knew this man: Chef Marco Pierre White.

      I lit up another smoke and waited for him to finish his phone conversation so I could say hello.

      Of course, I didn’t actually know the man; I only knew of him. I had read his books and I had seen the hoary BBC clips of him preparing noisette d’agneau avec cervelle de veau en crépinette for Albert Roux while a young Gordon Ramsay traipsed around in the background trying to make his bones. I knew that he was the kitchen’s original “bad boy,” the forerunner of our modern restaurant rock stars. I knew that he was the first British chef (and the youngest at the time—thirty-three) to earn three Michelin stars, and I knew that the culinary world quaked when he decided, at age thirty-eight, to give them all back and hang up his apron. And I knew that in recent years he’d made his way back to the stove, in one form or another, on television and elsewhere. So while I didn’t actually know him, I did know that no matter how gauche it is to descend starstruck upon idols, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to make his acquaintance.

      At first, I was met with the annoyance and reservation one comes to expect when approaching celebrities on the streets of Manhattan. I assume he thought I knew him from television. But once I announced that I was a fellow chef, and mentioned the inspiration I drew as a young cook from his books White Heat and Devil in the Kitchen, he let his