UFO Info Week-End

La Repubblica got very excited about someone it called Mamma Cherie making Mrs Blair

La Repubblica got very excited about someone it called “Mamma Cherie”, making Mrs Blair sound like a New Orleans blues singer, and describing verbatim her flamboyant greeting to Flavia Prodi, wife of the Italian prime minister: “Ciao,” she apparently said. But, but, but, you find yourself protesting silently, I started coming here long before it became fashionable with New Labour.Notwithstanding the above, I flew to Italy on the same day as the Blairs and was able to follow their arrival in a blow-by-blow account in the Italian newspapers. Especially when someone admires the dress you’re wearing and you have to admit it’s a little Moschino number which you just happened to spot after an idyllic lunch in a town on the lake. You also come across them in the supermarket, filling trolleys with olives and pecorino cheese and sun-dried tomatoes, and discussing the superior quality of Italian sausages. When, three or four years ago, Nico Ladenis got his third star, Marco rang his old boss “Congratulations,” he said “I just want to ask you one thing. Did you get it for your eat-ins, or take-aways?” Of all Marco’s surrogate fathers, it was Albert Roux who could handle Marco, and who fondly dubbed him the “little genius”.The little genius took over a 60-seater called Harvey’s in Wandsworth, south London, in 1986. Italy in August.

The Blairs are up the road in San Gimignano and everywhere you go there are English tourists. You meet them in Borgo Sansepolcro and Urbino, on what we old hands call the Piero trail – Piero della Francesca, that is – reading the bits from the guidebooks about the “enigmatic” composition of his Flagellation (the subject for discussion being “what are those three blokes doing in the foreground?”). Press reports vary as to how much the deal is worth to Marco: pounds 2m? pounds 3m? All Marco says is, “If I die tomorrow, I know my three children will be taken care of.”. Meanwhile, the “little genius” from a back street in Leeds is busily buying and selling hotels with his new surrogate fathers at Granada. He commands personal loyalty from a line of young chefs going back to the Wandsworth days.”I have to keep expanding so the people I train do not become my competition,” he says. What may give Marco an inside track over Sir Terence Conran, a rare egotist and expansionist restaurateur of Marco’s order, is that Marco’s a cook.

MPW is already serving 100 a day, and has received gurgling praise from London Evening Standard critic Fay Maschler, who pointed out that Marco was the chef who may, or may not, have cooked the recent birthday dinner for Camilla Parker Bowles at Highgrove.Not that Marco cooked Maschler’s lunch, or will be cooking ours at planned MPWs in Bath, Oxford and Leeds This will be done by his “boys”. It didn’t need much transformation: the original architect, David Collins, had worked with Marco on Harvey’s and the Canteen, so, in a sense, the place was already in Marco’s style. A private endeavour with Soho restaurateur Jimmy LaHoud to revamp the old dining spot Quo Vadis has been bumpier. A tie-in with Damien Hirst gave it the twist of glamour, but the detail wasn’t right, and as Alastair Little puts it, “Marco has the best eye for detail in catering”. It is still being tweaked.Last month, Marco and LaHoud opened the first of what they say will be a chain of MPW brasseries in the former Cafe Pelican in Canary Wharf. The man who brought Marco an element of sanity, safety and solidity was Sir Rocco Forte.Marco’s subsequent conversions for Forte of the Hyde Park Hotel dining room and the Criterion Brasserie were lavish, substantial successes. The Canteen was a success, winning another Michelin star, though the partnership with Caine palled and Marco’s takings from it have allowed his more recent expansion.