Food snobs? I hate them. Posh bakers? They drive me nuts. Marriage fourth time around? I've moved the mother-in-law in! MasterChef's Gregg Wallace cooks up a storm
After slicing and dicing fancy bakers and culinary elitists, MasterChef ’s Gregg Wallace reveals how he took to Twitter (for the THIRD time) to find a much younger woman... and why he’d far rather his children were rich than happy
Gregg Wallace is angry. ‘Food snobbery has got to be outlawed,’ says the MasterChef presenter, working himself into a hot mess. ‘It’s the last snobbery that’s allowed. People sneer at what other people are eating. Does anybody pull up in the expensive car, unroll their window and laugh at the cheaper car? No, but we still do it with food. It’s really wrong.’
Wallace spends his life finding the best cooks in the country, but he’s a working-class boy from Peckham who loves pie and mash as much as fine dining and he hates those foodies who look down their noses at the rest of us.
Gregg Wallace is far from just a cheeky barrow boy. ‘I have a foot in two classes. I’m obviously a working-class boy but I also read history books’
‘If someone’s got the money and the inclination to buy expensive ingredients, that’s great, but please don’t tell the rest of the world that what they’re eating is s***, because it’s not true. There is no nutritional difference between a 39p loaf of bread and a £4.50 loaf.’
Paul Hollywood, star of rival show The Great British Bake Off, had better watch out.
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‘Bakers are the ones that drive me nuts. What makes an artisan baker bringing in four hundred grand a year think he’s more worthy than someone earning 19 grand putting in five ten-hour shifts a week? Some of these artisan producers think they’re on a level with charities, and they drive me round the twist. I really like the Warburtons loaves that are much cheaper and come out in their millions, because everybody can have them!’
Wallace is boiling over like a pan of unwatched peas. Celebrity MasterChef began recently, with Keith Allen, Spencer Matthews and Monty Panesar among the contestants. Wallace is also about to go out on the road with his own live show. This promises an evening of ‘anecdotes, culinary expertise and behind-the-scenes tales’ from the man whose catchphrase is: ‘Cooking doesn’t get tougher than this.’
He started out as a greengrocer, making his first fortune at Covent Garden market before he was famous, and was drafted in as the ‘ingredients expert’ alongside his mate John Torode, when MasterChef was revamped so successfully 13 years ago. We never see him make anything, so can he even cook? ‘Yeah. There’s a difference between a cook and a chef. I can’t run a kitchen but I’m a really good cook. I’ve spent my life around food.’
Wallace had a troubled upbringing in South London, and only discovered at 14 that his boozy father Allan was not in fact his dad
But as we talk, it turns out that Wallace doesn’t even do most of the cooking at home these days. ‘One of the best amateur cooks I know – and obviously I’m very fond of her – is my wife,’ he says.
Anne-Marie Wallace – Anna – is his fourth wife. Remarkably, as we’ll explore later, she’s the second he’s met on social-media platform Twitter. She’s also over two decades his junior (at 32 to his 53). Anna took over the kitchen at their £1 million home in rural Kent after they married two years ago. And it turns out her mother, Rina, has moved in too, and has taken on the housework. ‘Anna, by her own choice, doesn’t work. Her mum doesn’t work. They’re funny these southern Italians, very old-fashioned. They take their roles very seriously. They don’t think what they do is secondary, they think it’s the other half of my role.’
The Sterpini family are actually from Sicily and Naples via Coventry. Today, Anna sits beside her husband on the sofa, holding his hand. He encourages her to speak, but she’s never done an interview like this before, and admits to being shy. I ask whether what he’s saying about her wanting to stay at home and cook is right? ‘Yes, it is,’ she says, smiling. So what is her husband’s favourite home-made meal? ‘Lamb mince, boiled potatoes and peas all kind of mashed together with a mint sauce. A big bowl of slop.’ Baby food, basically? ‘Yes – it does taste nice, though.’
The first Mrs Wallace was called Christine and they were married in 1991, when he was still a young greengrocer. They both knew they were making a mistake even as they took their vows, according to his autobiography Life On A Plate, and ‘the shortest marriage in the world’ lasted just six weeks.
Next came Denise, a chef at a London member’s club. The couple had a son, Tom, in 1994 and a daughter, Libby, in 1997 before they got married in 1999, but divorce came in 2004 after he had an affair with an employee. Denise suffered a nervous breakdown, after which, unusually, Wallace was given full custody of the children. ‘I was a complete mess,’ the former Mrs Wallace told a newspaper in 2009. ‘I wish I’d never married that man.’
Wallace refused to be drawn into that at the time, but now says, ‘My proudest boast is that I’m a single parent. I brought those two up on my own for almost 15 years.’ Tom and Libby were ten and seven when their parents divorced and they moved to live with him in Whitstable in Kent. How did that work – surely he was away all the time for TV?
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘You make a decision. You either stay at home at the expense of your family’s financial future, or you carry on working and neglecting – or possibly risking – their emotional welfare. You throw nannies and housekeepers at the situation.’
How did his children feel about this?
‘I sat down with Tom before a rugby match many years later and said, “Tom, you’re older than your sister, it couldn’t always have been brilliant. I’m ready if you want to talk. Tell me if things weren’t right.” And he looked at me and said, “That’s a little bit deep, Dad. Fancy another pint?” ’
FROM LEFT: Wife No 2 Denise Wallace; Wife No 3 Heidi Wallace; Wife No 2 Denise Wallace
MasterChef had made Wallace really famous by the time he met his third wife, teacher Heidi Brown, in 2009. She was 17 years younger than him. They met after she sent him a tweet asking if he knew he’d been named as a ‘weird crush’ in a magazine. He replied, offering to buy her lunch if she was ever in London. They were married in 2011, and Wallace said that she sorted out his diet, brought stability to his life and was great with his kids. When they divorced 14 months later he said, ‘I’m gutted – but we’re very different people. I want to be out on the town. I crave company. I want to take my sexy, elegant wife to smart restaurants dressed up in her heels, on my arm. She likes the local Italian.’
Wallace met his next partner at the Ideal Home Show in Glasgow, where he posed for a selfie with 26-year-old model Cara Franco. Once again he flirted with her on Twitter before they got together. The relationship lasted five months.
Wallace spends up to three hours a day joshing with his 211,000 Twitter followers – and when he was single took it further with private messages to the ones he fancied. Asked whether he was just using his fame and money to get dates with strangers, Wallace quotes Steve Coogan in The Trip: ‘No one turns round to a young bloke and says, “You’re just using your good looks and your body like Adonis.”’ Why has he been so keen on dating women much younger than himself? Wallace grins and says: ‘Well, who wouldn’t?’
Anna hasn’t stopped him using Twitter. He hates people telling him what he should or shouldn’t do, whether it’s girlfriends or dress codes. ‘I’m anti-posh. I just don’t want rules. I don’t want regulations. I don’t want jacket and tie. I don’t want school crest.’
Hang on, we’re sitting in a Soho private member’s club, the Ivy, which is very much for the media elite. ‘As far as I know, the only rule here is no shorts.’ You can’t get in without money though. ‘Yeah. So I’m anti-middle-class-aspirations, I suppose.’
But he clearly still has them. ‘My kids were the first in our family to go on to further education. I wanted them to have that experience of boozing, sh****** and partying. I’m not kidding. Because I’d have loved it. I helped fund it as best I could. If they came out with a degree as well then great, but that wasn’t why I wanted them to go.’
Libby, 21, has a first-class degree in theatre, while Tom, 24, studied economics. ‘My son’s a bit of a hippie, even though he’s got an economics degree. I’m the one with ambition. Parents say, “Oh, I just want my child to be happy.” I go, “Wow. Are you burdening them with that much ambition?” Happy? I just wanted mine to be rich!’ Wallace is said to be worth a couple of million now.
His first contact with Anne-Marie Sterpini came in 2013 when she sent him a tweet asking about a recipe for duck and rhubarb: ‘Does that really work?’ Once again, Twitter contact put his mind onto more than food. ‘I started flirting with her, because she looked great. I sent her my phone number and she texted back. I phoned her every night for a week. Then I invited her to London.’
Anna had heard about his reputation but says he was a perfect gentleman to her. He then invited her parents to his home to speak to them. ‘I said, “I’m a lot older than your daughter and I’ve been married before.” Her mum said, “I know, but your children live with you and your mum is around the corner. You must be OK.” That was enough for the Italians.’
When the couple were on holiday in Arizona, a cheeky barman compared them to Beauty and the Beast, so Anna went down the aisle at their wedding in 2016 to a song from the Disney film.
Some men might baulk at having a live-in mother-in-law, but Wallace says he’s delighted. ‘It’s made me feel more secure having her family so involved. Anna can’t leave me because Mum would have to leave as well. So, for an insecure old man with a younger woman, that’s good news.’ His father-in-law is also preparing to move down from Coventry.
What do his children make of the new set-up? ‘It’s made a family home for them that they’ve never had now that Anna and her mum are there all the time. At Christmas two years ago, my son put on a stone!’ When Libby had her tonsils out, Wallace’s mother-in-law looked after her. ‘She made a bed on the sofa for her and sat on the armchair beside her for three days. Just nursed her through.’
Now the scene is set for a new addition to the family, if they are successful with the fertility treatment they are currently having. ‘When you fall in love with a younger woman, you’ve got to realise that the chances are they are going to want a family,’ he says, turning to his wife. ‘I remember you saying to me, “I’m going to want to get married and have children. If that’s not what you want, then don’t mess me about.” ’
Why should this marriage last when the others failed? ‘The game of love, in my opinion, is a lottery,’ he says. ‘I got very lucky this time. I’ve got it badly wrong before, but I think I’ve been lonely. I think I’ve always been looking for some sort of stability and just grabbing at it far too quickly.’
Wallace had a troubled upbringing in South London, and only discovered at 14 that his boozy father Allan was not in fact his dad. His mother Mary had got pregnant by her boss Gerry but hid the truth for years – until it finally came out and she married him. Her son’s reaction? ‘Great. You owe me 14 years’ pocket money.’ But he couldn’t cope when his mum moved from working-class Peckham to suburban Sydenham and started to criticise his habits. As he says in his autobiography, ‘I just felt like I was a dirty cup me mum couldn’t put away’.
So is food served cold on TV? Gregg spills the beans
What’s the best thing you’ve ever eaten on MasterChef?
‘A poire belle Hélène. A classic French dish. You poach a pear in sauternes then serve it with a hot chocolate sauce and Chantilly cream. Oh, my God. You don’t want to eat it, you want to take it home and sleep with it.’
And the worst?
‘Things that are raw. They’re browned on the outside but you cut them open and you can see their heart still beating.’
MasterChef’s John Torode, left, and Gregg Wallace. 'I didn’t realise how little cookery knowledge the nation has. We’ve got a major problem,' says Wallace
Who has been your favourite MasterChef contestant?
‘In the amateurs, Simon Wood, who now runs a restaurant in Manchester. He was incredibly skilful and knowledgeable. Out of the celebrities, Phil Vickery, the England rugby captain. He’s told me he’ll be at matches and players are whispering to him, almost embarrassed: “Phil, on Saturday night I made a raspberry soufflé...” As if they were confessing to being crossdressers!’
What do MasterChef fans want to know when they meet you?
‘They always ask, “When is it on?” I never know because the BBC don’t want their competitors to know. The second most asked question is, “Is the food cold when you eat it?”’
And what is the answer to that?
‘You’re tasting food as you would if you were finishing it in a restaurant. If you go out for a curry tonight, how long is it going to take you to eat it? Half an hour? You think that you eat hot food, but it’s really room temperature. You can’t taste food when it’s hot – the heat will numb your palate.’
You caused an international incident on MasterChef earlier this year by sending a contestant home after complaining that the skin on her chicken rendang wasn’t crispy. Even the Malaysian prime minister got involved, pointing out that the dish from his country isn’t meant to be crispy. Do you regret that?
‘No, because I never, ever said that a rendang should be crispy. She didn’t make a rendang. She made chicken with a rendang sauce. The chicken skin was raw. Crispy was the wrong word – what I meant was the skin wasn’t cooked and it was flabby. I just can’t ever see Theresa May writing a complaint because somebody suggested the cod batter shouldn’t be soggy on fish and chips. It shows the power of MasterChef to get people involved, across the world.’
They’re now reconciled and very close, but back then Wallace struck out on his own, leaving school at 15. He got a job at Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market, worked his way up and eventually started his own company specialising in high-quality ingredients such as rocket or fresh herbs that are standard now but were very hard to get in the early Nineties. ‘All salads were iceberg lettuce and beetroot was out of a jar,’ he says.
Wallace employed a ‘posh’ buyer called Charlie Hicks who brought in produce from Paris and Milan. The company was soon supplying all the best chefs in London, sending bespoke ingredients out from the market at midnight ready for the dining table at lunch time. ‘They lived through and helped bring about the food revolution in Britain,’ says Sheila Dillon, presenter of The Food Programme on Radio 4.
The company had a turnover of £7.5 million a year by the time Wallace and Hicks were given a radio series of their own in 1998, called Veg Talk. The producer had some sage advice for the mouthy Peckham lad who was always cracking jokes: ‘Stop playing up to their idea of a cheeky chappie – it’s not going to get you anywhere. Don’t change the accent, but give me all the knowledge you have.’
When Wallace switched to television to launch Saturday Kitchen in 2002, Jamie Oliver was at his peak and it was trendy to drop your aitches. ‘I was very fortunate in that I knew a lot about food, but I wasn’t posh, at a time when things were changing.’
Wallace is far from just a cheeky barrow boy, though. ‘I have a foot in two classes. I’m obviously a working-class boy but I also read history books.’ His unexpected passion is military history and his favourite books include The Art Of War In The Western World by Archer Jones and one on Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore. ‘I’m a Millwall supporter who coaches rugby. I’m just as happy with pie and mash as I am at Le Gavroche. I don’t think the two are exclusive. I don’t see why the love of a roast quail should forbid the love of a Big Mac.’
But not everyone agrees. ‘We were in a Harvester in Herne Bay,’ he recalls. ‘I went to the bathroom and an old girl turned round to my mum and said, “What’s he doing here?” My mum said, “I think he’s having his lunch dear, the same as you.”’
Wallace looks intense, with his shaven head and tendency to stare, and he can be combative if you cross him, but he’s also funny. ‘Obviously Brexit will change MasterChef. I think we’re going to have British-only food, so there will be curry, lasagne, kebab and pizza!’ It takes a moment to work out that he’s joking.
‘I’m looking forward to the egg-and-chips round and, during the final, the pie-and-mash round. One of the skills tests is going to be: how long can you boil these vegetables?’
But if anyone knows how the British make and eat food it’s Wallace, who also fronts the series Inside The Factory and Eat Well For Less, in which families are confronted with their bad eating habits (including 17 takeaways a week for one household).
‘Eat Well For Less really scared me. I didn’t realise how little cookery knowledge the nation has. We’ve got a major problem. If nobody knows how to cook, we are going to carry on buying more expensive foods than we need to, and foods with additives in that we are finding increasingly difficult to check. Do you know how many McDonald’s cheeseburgers you’d have to eat to get the equivalent saturated fat as a branded coconut yogurt? Seven. Have a look at the amount of fat and salt in an M&S chicken tikka. It’s a real issue.’
Is he going to do a Jamie Oliver and campaign for change? ‘It’s terrified me to the extent where I’d like to get involved, because there’s a chronic lack of cookery skills.’
He proposes a dramatic solution. ‘I want legislation for an hour a week on basic cookery skills in schools, from the age of five to leaving age. Roast meats, grill meats, boil vegetables, chop things up. That would be enough. I also want the grading of vegetables to be outlawed.’ Yes, he is proposing a ban on all the sorting and washing that supermarkets make farmers put their produce through – in the process chucking away millions of tons of perfectly edible food every year. ‘Farmers are getting carrots all within a certain size for the supermarkets at huge expense. What a load of nonsense that is.’
So is he one of those people who believe supermarkets have ruined the high street? ‘Have they b******! All they did was open shops. It’s me and you who ruined the high street. I’m completely pro-supermarket. Only a century ago, people were starving. You go back to those times and suggest there will be stores open 24 hours a day with food that never runs out, that is 100 per cent safe and costs less of our income that it’s ever done, they’d have made you a saint.’
These are the kinds of issues Wallace will be exploring in his new live show this autumn. He’ll spend the first half lifting the lid on MasterChef (see panel) and fame as well as his 25-year relationship with John Torode. The Australian chef was quoted last year as saying that they’ve ‘never been friends’ – but they posted silly selfies on Twitter (again) straight afterwards to show that wasn’t true. Wallace says: ‘I talk about me and John’s relationship in the show and how far back we go. John was the best man at my wedding to Anna – that tells you all you need to know.’
Wallace also gets the audience involved in thinking about the way we cook and eat. So volunteers might be asked to see if they can tell the difference between fresh and frozen cooked sweetcorn, or three bottles of wine worth £5, £20 or £70. ‘Normally it’s the £20 bottle they like.’
Fans will probably get a response if they tweet him after the show, but Anna will be hoping there are no more flirtatious direct messages with any of them. He’s less likely to go out on the town these days, preferring to drive straight home for his comforting lamb mince. What’s it like cooking for one of the most opinionated food judges on television? Anna smiles again, looks down at their two hands folded together and says: ‘Very easy.’
It must be love. You can bet the contestants on Celebrity MasterChef won’t be saying the same, but the fourth Mrs Wallace is definitely through to the next round...
‘Gregg Wallace: Doesn’t Get Tougher Than This’ is at Chipping Norton Theatre on Sep 21 and tours until Nov 10. Visit greggwallace.com
