Marco Pierre, why?

Wheeler’s is such a dreadful restaurant that I wonder if Marco Pierre White even knows his name is on it. I suppose, for legal reasons, we must assume he does, and was not held hostage in a cellar while they built and fretted and hung inflated photographs of their prisoner all over it, like the bedroom of a starlet in full madness.

We must assume that White knows that Wheeler’s of St James’s, which was a famous restaurant, was closed, and reopened inside the Thread-needles hotel in Bank, and it does have his name on it, and this is the worst thing he has ever done; worse than promoting Knorr stock for Unilever — ‘the best thing to happen to cooking since me’ — which he sold by implying that if you bought Knorr stock, you would not only get a base for a soup or stew, you might get full sex from White, or at least a grope.

You know the original celebrity chef has reached a nadir of greed and self-disgust when, at the entrance to this newish cave — it opened last year, and I tried to review it then, but they telephoned to cancel, saying they had forgotten they were closed — there is a vast photograph of him in his youthful beauty, that is, in 1987, at Harveys in Wandsworth. He sweats, pouts, and strokes a meat cleaver, as if it were a lover, and maybe it was, to him; two parts anger to one part need, he is the Phantom of the Opera, sponsored by Knorr.

The Threadneedles Hotel was beautiful too once, when it was a bank, which seems preposterous; now it smells of Toilet Duck. The lobby is full of people breathing Toilet Duck fumes and thinking they are somewhere special, because a photograph of White is outside the door, with a caption saying ‘Let’s do lunch’; do they know they are breathing Toilet Duck fumes inside a narcissistic delusion or hoax? The dining room is mid-Victoriana mated with Ernst & Young.