Raw material

If you pick up a copy of Antony Worrall Thompson's newly published autobiography, be sure not to leave it on Aunt Edna's chair. Raw is not for the faint-hearted. With tales of sexual abuse, early erotic awakenings with the school nurse, beatings at public school, a horrific facial disfigurement in a rugby accident, some scary and violent encounters with the Essex "mafia" and two failed marriages - all interspersed with a healthy quota of legitimate sexual encounters throughout his adulthood - the story of Worrall Thompson's life makes for an exhausting, surreal, damn good read.

Not for Worrall Thompson the services of one of the ghostwriters favoured by most celebrities: Raw was written by the bearded chef himself, in longhand, over the past two years and reveals a talent for amusing and engaging prose.

That the book doesn't weigh in at more than its 384 pages is down to some wholesale cutting by Worrall Thompson's editor. "The publishers had to cut about 50,000 words, which was a shame, but they know the length of book that is going to sell," Worrall Thompson explains.

Readers may have been denied a few extra lurid tales, but the fact that the book is being published a year after it had originally been intended has, at least, given him the opportunity to include a chapter on his recent high-profile antics in I'm a Celebrity - Get Me Out of Here! "I didn't want to do a saccharine-sweet book, like so many chefs have done before," he says. "I was inspired by Tony Curtis, who wrote a very honest and graphic account of his life and gained a lot of respect from his readers for doing so. Chefs are generally not intellectuals and therefore not good writers. But to me, writing is a hobby, and if I'd had someone else telling my story, I wouldn't have got across the ‘cheeky chappie' feel to it that depicts me."

AWT's cheekiness - or, some would say, pig-headedness - certainly comes through loud and clear in the book. It is a characteristic that undoubtedly got him through the bad times, of which there were many in the early part of his life. The product of a short-lived marriage between an actor and actress, Worrall Thompson was constantly told by his mother that he was an unwanted inconvenience as she attempted to pursue her career, while his father walked out of his life when he was a toddler.

As a result, he was packed off to boarding school at the age of three, an event that would have been psychologically damaging for many a youngster. But in AWT it seems to have instilled a stubborn independence that helps explain the way his career eventually developed as a self-taught chef.

As a free spirit, Worrall Thompson developed some of the most ground-breaking restaurants of their time, particularly Ménage à Trios, then 190 Queen's Gate, and Bistrot 190, followed by a whole range of eateries with Simpson's of Cornhill.

Eating Heston Blumenthal's innovative food today at the Fat Duck in Bray reminds Worrall Thompson, to some extent, of the pioneering menu of just starters and desserts that he offered at Ménage à Trois. "Every chef should go through an experimental stage, but I wouldn't be surprised if Heston comes around to classic food again. Everyone mellows and grows up eventually, but there is nothing wrong with playing with food in the meantime."

Despite Worrall Thompson's restaurant successes during the 1980s and early 1990s - with the public and media alike - it seems that it is only in recent years that he has truly found contentment in what he is doing. No doubt this is partly due to his new-found personal stability with his third wife, Jacinta, and their young children at their home and work base near Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. But it is also down to the realisation that, perhaps as the result of his Taurean stubbornness, he is better off without work partners.

Worrall Thompson says in the book that "morals and principles have often been my downfall", and certainly sticking to them steadfastly has often being his undoing. It explains, too, the reason why he threw off what he deems to be the shackles of belonging to such organisations as the Restaurant Association - despite once being its vice-chairman - and the Academy of Culinary Arts.

"When I resigned from the Restaurateurs Association [now the Restaurant Association], I was told that I would be a lone voice outside, but I've proved otherwise. There is so much bickering in these big organisations that they end up not getting anywhere. If you make yourself heard loud enough, someone will listen." Which, indeed, he frequently does - in national newspapers, radio and TV - on issues he passionately believes in, such as his support for organic farmers and compulsory cookery education in schools, as well as his opposition to genetically modified foods.

By becoming such a high-profile and eloquent speaker on such subjects, the thought has often crossed his mind that he should consider entering Parliament in order to further these causes. But, although he describes himself as a Tory, his ever-present free spirit might make it difficult for him to toe the party line.

"My wife says that I can probably make more noise outside Parliament, and she is probably right." So, instead, it looks as though his writing career will continue apace, with six cookery books on the horizon. Meanwhile, he is running his west London restaurant Notting Grill - where he serves the best available produce, simply cooked - as well as keeping up his TV and radio work and product development of both kitchen gadgets and edible items.

There's even a novel planned. "It will be set in the restaurant industry using the knowledge I have of one or two characters," he says with a twinkle in his eye - but how will the fiction ever live up to the fact?

Raw by Antony Worrall Thompson is published by Bantam Press, price £17.99

Raw extracts

• On teaching himself to cook while at King's School, Canterbury: "I whiled away many afternoons experimenting with a couple of gas burners, a saucepan and a frying pan. I spent a good deal of my pocket money on food and loved cooking for my mates. Soon the word got out, and I found myself the hot property in a bidding war between monitors eager to secure my services."
• AWT's grandmother's views on his dream of cooking for a living: "I didn't pay for you to be educated at a top public school for you to become a chef."
• On nouvelle cuisine: "Half-a-dozen mouthfuls and it was gone. When you remember it now, the food always looked as if it had passed through 10 pairs of chefs' hands… But I'm not embarrassed about having produced that style of food. It is what the customers wanted then, and I gave it to them. I have always been a bit of a slave to fashion. I keep my ear to the ground and try to be there or thereabouts when a food fad strikes. And I have to say that - although in all honesty I prefer good, gutsy, wholesome food - I did enjoy nouvelle cuisine."
• On the demise of waiters due to the rise of nouvelle cuisine: "I'm sure we chefs didn't realise what we were destroying, but I guess it was our fault. What the country gained in the quality of its food it lost in the quality of its service."
• On the Michelin guide: "My early ambition was to become England's first British holder of three Michelin stars. That ambition soon waned when I realised that the British edition of the Michelin guide was so stuck up its French parent's arse that it could have cleaned its teeth from the inside."
• On the catering industry's initial views of AWT's success with Ménage à Trois: "To the glitterati of the chef world I was a jumped-up cowboy who had cottoned on to the nouvelle cuisine trend."
• On achieving the Meilleur Ouvrier de Grande Bretagne (now Master of Culinary Arts) in 1987: "It was like my village football team winning the FA Cup, one of the biggest days of my life."
• On one of his all-time favourite restaurants, Riva, in Barnes, south-west London: "It's a small place, seating about 40 people, and it's not pretentious. There are no inflated egos flying around, and it's not about some named chef, although the northern Italian food is very good and head chef Francesco has been there since it opened."
• On being a self-taught chef: "On the plus side, you don't get tunnel vision. You're not pre-programmed into a college form of cookery and you can let your imagination run riot. The drawbacks are that you become very difficult to work for, your kitchen management skills are limited, and there's no one master from whom you can learn and whose experience you can absorb on a daily basis."
• On receiving a bad restaurant review at Ménage à Trois: "I nearly choked on my Weetabix when I read it. I felt as if a dagger had been plunged into my heart. I know now that you have to take reviews in your stride, but in the early days I took them all personally. A single review was capable of making me feel like either a million dollars or a sack of shit."
• On chefs and relationships: "A career as a restaurateur or a chef is tough on relationships, and casualties are frequent. Your partner has to be exceptionally understanding, monumentally trusting and to have the patience of a saint. The hours are invariably awful, the pay is crap, at least initially, and your other half has to put up with living with someone who comes home smelling like a bag of chips."
• On Ready, Steady, Cook: "To its critics I say, for goodness' sake, get a life… For those who don't learn about food from their parents, Ready, Steady, Cook might well be the only cookery education they get."
• On food critics: "Food critics have a valuable job to do and for the most part they do it well." AWT goes on to name his top three food critics as Fay Maschler of London's Evening Standard, AA Gill of the Sunday Times and Matthew Fort of the Guardian. Michael Winner of the Sunday Times lies in 1,000th position and "Jan Moir of the Telegraph would also be there or thereabouts… she is an excellent writer of profile pieces, but as far as her contributions to the food pages are concerned, she seems to have been put there on the quality of her writing alone."

• On Gordon Ramsay: "I'm no great fan of Gordon Ramsay, although he is a brilliant chef. His television series Ramsay's Boiling Point was an embarrassment to everyone in the catering industry and tarred us all with the same brush. It might have made good telly, but it's hard enough to get chefs in our business, and even more difficult to get youngsters to enter the trade in the first place, without Gordon giving the impression that we are a bunch of psychotic dictators.

  "It's exactly the sort of behaviour the industry is trying to drive out, and there is absolutely no excuse for it. It's time the Michelin guide, the paranoid chef's bible, made a stand against it by removing the offenders from the guide completely. Only then will they realise that it's time to grow up and calm down… Gordon is a brilliant chef, verging on the genius, but in my view he will never be as great as Marco, the acknowledged genius. There are times when I think Gordon has crossed that fine line between genius and insanity." (Worrall Thompson says that since Raw went to print, his ongoing spat with Ramsay has been resolved following a recent phone call between the two of them.)

Reader offer

Want to read more of the thoughts of Worrall Thompson? Put your wallet away - we've got signed copies of Raw to give away to the first 20 readers to contact us. Simply e-mail us at chot@rbi.co.uk or write to us at Caterer & Hotelkeeper, 5th Floor, Quadrant House, The Quadrant, Sutton, Surrey SM2 5AS, marking your message "Wozza offer". Good luck.