White is, of course, the chef unafraid to call mashed potato “potato mousseline” and was never going to take Oliver’s heat without making reply.
“I’d like to see him call me a bully to my face,” says White, a challenge reproduced on the Sun’s front cover.
White is no bully and the thinly veiled threat that he will beat anyone who says otherwise into a mousseline is testament it.
And White will not leave it there. That’s just for starters. Over two pages (“HELL’S BITCHIN’”), White delivers his call to the Celebrity Chef Smackdown.
“Go and win your first Michelin star, Jamie, and then I might take you seriously.” White, admirably, resists all temptation to punctuate his pep talk with “grasshopper”, astutely observing that that would over-egg the pudding, or Jamie.
White has been there and done it. He’s not only on barking terms with stars like uncomplicated comic Jim Davidson and 80s singer Paul Young but remains the youngest chef to have earned three of the coveted Michelin stars.
But Oliver is a star in his own right, a legend in his own lunchtime. But White is unimpressed. He says Oliver’s school dinners campaign was a “cheap publicity stunt”.
And chucks in for good measure: “I’d rather be who I am than fat chef with a drum kit.”
White would, one suspects, grudgingly acknowledge that you can only make something with the ingredients to hand. And if Oliver is a fat chef with a drum kit is because he has not bought a guitar or, say, a saxophone.
White also has words for the Hell’s Kitchen maître d’ Angus Deayton, still seeking a comedic role in a presenting setting.
They did not get on like peas in a pod, nor a Domaine Lafage Muscat Sec 1999 with surf ‘n’ turf. “ITV didn’t want me to batter him,” says White.
Indeed, not. Best stick with the mousseline…
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