Why MasterChef’s Marcus Wareing has quit the restaurant industry

Marcus Wareing has hung up his chef’s jacket, left his Michelin-starred kitchen and taken to the open road. After shutting his restaurant, the exacting judge of MasterChef: The Professionals is on a “new path”, which has already taken him to Provence on what he hopes was just the first leg of an epic exploration of European cuisine.

Wareing, 53, closed the doors of his restaurant at the Berkeley Hotel in Knightsbridge for the last time on Boxing Day. Initially, new restaurant projects were promised but today Wareing seems to be newly unburdened and relaxed and is even talking of ending his simmering feud with Gordon Ramsay. He certainly has no enthusiasm for standing at the pass again.

“I don’t need to open another restaurant. I’ve done a lot. Since the age of 25, I’ve been dealing with chefs and rotas and suppliers and bills and accounts and HR and customers and complaints. It’s been fabulous. But do I want to do it for ever? No chance. I don’t want to continue on the same boring path. I wanted a change in my life and to do different things.”

He closed his other restaurant, the Gilbert Scott, at the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel London, in 2021. “I’ve chosen a new path. I’m free of my professional kitchen to do the things that I want to do. A lot of chefs have to carry on cooking to the end because they need to pay their bills.”

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Wareing’s restaurants, books and television work have been lucrative. He lives in Wimbledon, southwest London, with his wife, Jane, and their three children. Fine dining kitchens had become a little dull, he says. “They’re quiet. We use water baths; tweezers to put food on plates. No one chops anything any more. No one sautés anything.” To stay at the forefront of the business he felt he needed to be in the kitchen every day and with his TV work he wasn’t doing that. “I was missing out because I wasn’t there. I’d go into the restaurant and I felt that the staff were looking at me like: where have you been?”

And then the pandemic proved a catalyst. During the lockdowns, he was a vocal advocate for the industry but he was also looking ahead to the economic challenges that would follow. “I could see that coming a mile away. Not a lot of chefs did. I could see the tsunami that was on the horizon.”

The effect of lockdowns, followed by a cost of living crisis and the continuing challenges caused by Brexit have forced many restaurants to close. Wareing points out that Monica Galetti, his fellow MasterChef judge, has just closed her restaurant and Jason Atherton is closing Pollen Street Social in Mayfair. Other famous names, like Tom Kerridge, have spoken of the challenges of keeping their businesses going.

“Why go through that? Why not make those changes? Why sit and suffer?” Wareing says. “If the Berkeley [restaurant] was still open today, I’d be struggling like crazy. And I’d be really worried. I’ve removed that problem.” Today, he estimates, he would have to charge a couple £600 for dinner. “Who goes out and has £600 for two for a meal?”

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Instead, he has been having a lovely time poking around in the south of France. Wareing had a French classical training and cooked in Paris as well as in French restaurants in London, but says he has never spent time travelling to educate himself. He has made a series about Provence, where he explored the region’s sun-soaked produce.

Recently Olivia Grégoire, France’s trade and tourism minister, triggered a national debate and international headlines when she said that French gastronomy had been facing the rise of foreign competition and could not rest on its laurels.

“You could say that France has not been influenced by the rest of the world and it very much sits within its own field and has done for many years,” Wareing says. “They don’t look at the world as a place of inspiration, they look at their back garden. The French can be very passionate/arrogant about that. And so they should. I’d be very much the same if I was a Frenchman.”

Grégoire even suggested that French chefs should go abroad to study, including to Britain. “Those chefs are not going to have that. Can you imagine telling a French chef to go to London to get inspiration? Gosh almighty! Talk about red rag to a bloody bull.”

London is a “gastronomic temple”, but only because the restaurants have drawn chefs and influences from around the world. It does not really reflect our national eating habits. “That’s just a representation of the chefs in restaurants who are inspired from around the world by their social media and who they follow. It’s easy to follow other people.” More interesting, he suggests, is “looking into your own roots to identify who you are”.

If he could only choose one world cuisine to eat, he would still go for French, and cooking French food remains great training, he believes. But if it was a race, Italian food would be “just a nose behind”.

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He then casually drops into the conversation a question so incendiary one imagines steak knives being brandished at dawn and accusations that an Englishman is trying to whip up a continental war between French and Italian gourmands: is French cuisine really Italian?

Is it correct, he asks, that the cuisine he so adores, was “created by the French? Or was it created by the Romans that walked through Europe?” While he was in Provence, a historian pointed out that the tree lines followed ancient Roman roads. If the Roman influence was still so clear in the landscape, why not its food? “So who are the real chefs? Was it the French or was it the Romans?”

He hopes to pose that question in a subsequent series about Italian food and would like to move on to other European cuisines. Cooking in tiny courtyards and roof terraces in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the new series, the man who was as demanding of brigades of chefs in restaurants as he was of nervous contestants in the studio, seems very laid-back and makes the act of rustling up a simple tomato sauce look like an art form.

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In a previous series, Tales from a Kitchen Garden, he championed field-to-fork cooking at his Sussex smallholding. I mention that I had enjoyed eating some wagyu beef from Japan recently, but felt uncomfortable about its cost and how far it had travelled. “You shouldn’t eat it. People shouldn’t buy it,” he says. He would eat it if it was put in front of him — “it’s delicious” — but wouldn’t cook with it. “We are all responsible for the produce that’s flown across the world. Give me a local steak any day of the week. I don’t need my cows to be massaged or my beef injected with anything. I just like a local farmer.”

At a Provençal primary school, he was astonished to find the children being served a three-course lunch, freshly cooked from local produce. Dishes included minestrone soup with pistou and lobster bisque with squid. The subsidised lunches gave the pupils their main meal of the day and supported local farmers.

His father died in March. The series was completed well before then and watching it now he can’t believe how much he talked about his dad in the episode that featured the school. His father was a fruit and potato merchant in Merseyside and supplied school canteens. “Unfortunately my father will never get to see a show that is dedicated to my fruit and veg upbringing.” He helped his father when he was growing up and attributes much of his success to the example he set working seven days a week. “People ask me, ‘How did you get to where you are? You must be so brilliant.’ No, I am not, I just worked bloody hard at something I adored.”

His father drove him to the train when he left for London. “He told me, ‘Just keep your f***ing head down, stay focused and you can reach all your goals. But don’t come back to Southport. You’ve made this leap of faith. Now stick with it.’ He gave me the work ethic. So when I stood in the Savoy kitchen at the age of 18, I could work any cook under the f***ing table all day long.”

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Wareing and Ramsay were young chefs together at Le Gavroche, the legendary French restaurant founded by the Roux brothers. Over many years he worked for Ramsay at various restaurants, including Pétrus, where he was head chef. But the friends fell out when Wareing wanted to go out on his own and they became embroiled in a legal tussle over the name Pétrus. Ramsay kept it but Wareing retained the premises and said: “If I never speak to that guy again for the rest of my life, it wouldn’t bother me one bit.’’

Now the two men appear to have reached a rapprochement. “If you think of the chefs in the UK, there’s only really one that’s conquered global cookery, TV and holding top accolades here in this country. And that’s Gordon. He has managed to tick every single bloody box and is still doing that. But then I always knew he was going to do that from the day I met him. Just cut differently from the crowd.”

He learnt a lot from Ramsay, who gave him opportunities to make a name for himself. “I wouldn’t be in the position I’m in if I hadn’t worked alongside that chef and that’s a fact. Gordon has done a lot for my career, and one day we will have a glass of wine and talk about those days. We are two men with great businesses, great opportunities, fabulous families. And our paths I guarantee will cross. He sent me a beautiful book not that long ago from his restaurant group that I really was appreciative of and he wrote a fabulous message in it. And so whatever happens in the past it’s water under the bridge. We’ve all moved on.”
Marcus Wareing: Simply Provence is on BBC2 at 6.30pm on Monday