Book description
Marco was born of working-class parents on a bleak council estate in
Leeds, and his Italian mother died when he was six years old. Today he
has become a star chef of international renown, a controversial media
celebrity, a national icon of the 1980s and 1990s, and a
multimillionaire entrepreneur - all before the age of 40. How has this
staggering rise to fame and fortune been achieved? MPW (as he calls
himself and many of his new restaurants) is today widely regarded as the
best cook in the country, but his astonishing talents and understanding
of food are only part of the explanation. As this fascinating book
reveals, there are many sides to this complex man which the massive
media coverage he has received over the years have never revealed.
Charles Hennessy tells the story with insight: the unpromising early
life, his first job as a kitchen porter in Harrogate, the epiphany at
the age of 17 when he went to work at the Box Tree restaurant in Ilkley,
his arrival in London, learning under the Roux brothers, Pierre Koffmann
and Raymond Blanc, and the opening of his own first restaurant, Harvey's
from whence his fame and fortune grew. Charles Hennessy has had two
distinguished careers, first as an advertising copywriter in such
distinguished firms as Benson's, where Dorothy L. Sayers was his
colleague, Ogilvy & Mather in New York, and J. Walter Thompson and
Young & Rubicam in Paris. Then he turned to journalism, and has been
a regular contributor to
The Times
, to its Saturday magazine, and to Bon Appétit.
He published his memoirs, Nobody Else is Perfect,
in 1980.
