'And which Marco would Sir like with his dessert?'

I may, I confess, have been a little confused at the time. Somewhere behind the sommelier, beyond the vast windows of London's Belvedere restaurant, Holland Park was spread gaunt over a nasty March afternoon; grim and chill and leached bone-free of colour. All London's colour, all London's reds and yellows and golds, had that day distilled themselves into a glass resting before me, a glass being topped up by a beaming Marco Pierre White from a decanter which was increasingly failing to contain a bottle of Chateau d'Yquem 1970. A little over £750 a pop, as I later learnt while making a token effort to cover some of the bill (in much the same way as blanched spinach makes a token effort to stand up and stride out of the pan). We moved on - since you ask - to another d'Yquem (just an '86 this time) and managed a glorious four bottles of the Vega Sicilia 1990 along the way. A set lunch at the Belvedere costs £14. By my estimation, our bill - Marco's bill- came to around £2,500. Though I did let him bum a couple of cigarettes.

So I may have misheard, but it seemed a suitable enough premise. Which Marco?

There's the vintage Marco, 1987-1999. Bad-boy Marco, enfant terrible, the explosive Marco of leonine rage and silk-shark seduction. A mercurial bottle. Brilliant at its best but, frankly, a little unreliable. A number of chefs hated it, although the young ladies couldn't seem to get enough

Or there's this new bottle, Marco Nouveau. Marco reformed, two years after hanging up his apron. A little more flesh to it. Married and faithful and coyly proud of fatherhood, no longer cooking daily but helping to run a £50 million empire and determined to become the best restaurateur in the land. The Marco who says, now, 'I don't lose my temper any more,' and 'I leave my emotions at home,' and 'I've never been happier in my life.' Charming and trustworthy, all knives locked firmly in the cabinet. Perhaps one for your mother, if I may suggest? Although it can tend, at times, to taste a little twee.

Or there's the full Marco. Forty this year. Complex. Still with the glints and barbs and flashes of old, but aged into something quite different. An altogether more subtle mix than generally suggested, and takes a little time to get to know, but it could reward you hugely in the end.

Oh, I don't know. Would it be possible to try a little of all three?

'Of course I was a shit in those days,' he says, lighting a fat Cubano and quietly ordering a fatter bottle of champagne for the sweetly giggly fortieth-birthday group of mothers at a far table, whom we will later attempt to charm with our best obscene jokes. 'I was terrible. I didn't like myself. No one could. But there were reasons for it all, I promise you, there were reasons.

'Firstly, I wanted that first Michelin star so much.' And the the next, and the next: the first two gained at the legendary Harvey's in Wandsworth, scene of spitting battles with staff and customers, the other at the Hyde Park Hotel, making him the only British chef to win three stars (and the youngest in the world, ever). The stars rocket-boosted the burgeoning MPW empire, which now enfolds 14 of London's finest restaurants including the Criterion, Mirabelle, Titanic, the Grill Room, the Oak Room at Le Meridian and the Belvedere, and is about to expand throughout Britain in collaboration with his friend Rocco Forte, whom Marco says is now 'free from his father's shadow' and able, finally, to do something about building a reputation for good food.

'The Michelin star was all I could think of. I loved cooking, obviously, but also I had something to prove. Or I thought, then, that I did. But, look, also, I was so unhappy in my twenties, desperately unhappy. There was an awful lot of stuff I hadn't dealt with.

'So I became driven, totally driven, totally critical of myself, wanting every dish to be three-star, and that changes you, and changes the way you behave to people.' So yes, he shouted at his staff; yes, he screamed; 'but that happens in every restaurant.

'Working that hard, in that heat, those hours. I was going for perfection. And perfection, it turns out, is simply a lot of little things done very well. So I shouted. And I got my stars.'

What about rather famously shouting at customers, and throwing them out? 'There was always a reason. I was trying to create something special, and they were trying to spoil it. My pet hate, with customers, is those that think it's all about wallets. You get four silly boys, spoiling it for some guy with his wife at the next table, so you ask them to behave, and they take the attitude: bugger you, we've spent a lot of money. Well, bugger them. They're missing the point totally. Usually it's City boys, these expense-account types who know nothing about food. Yes, I threw 54 of them out one night. It was an engagement party, but they were far too rowdy they were dropping cigarette butts on the floor, for Christ's sake.'

Which also, he says, accounted for the tale of the £25 chips. 'Well, yes, that's true, a one-off. But this guy was just trying to show off in front of his City boys - there were no chips on the menu, but he asked for some. Fine. So I spent a long careful time on them - hand-cut, blanched, lovingly fried, served up with a little silver plate of sauce. An hour of my time. £25. He hadn't thought to ask the price.'

And throwing out food critics for wearing bicycle-clips? 'Well, yes, one. I mean, I expect a little courtesy. Generally I respect critics; they have their job to do.' He counts among his friends A.A. Gill and Michael Winner, the latter of whom was best man at his wedding last year to Mati (Matilde) Conejero, his third wife and mother to two of his three children, and who gave them their honeymoon at Venice's Cipriani.

I ask, tangentially, what he makes not of critics but of TV chefs - for he was, after all, Britain's first real celebrity chef, as famous in the world of tabloids as the one of terrines. 'Well, live and let live. I'd hate it. And you'll soon lose the touch in a real restaurant kitchen. Look at Jamie [Oliver]; what's he going to remember about restaurant cooking after Sainsbury's? But let them have their time, they're doing no harm. Look at Ainsley Harriott. He's big, he's black as the ace of spades, and he's great fun, so what's wrong with that.' Is he a good chef then? A huge laugh. 'Fuck, no!'

I also ask about the women. It's a slightly touchy area. 'Mati's a good Catholic girl, whom I adore, and have now very very happily married, so of course there were no women before her. I wasn't a womaniser.'

Except he was. An industrial-strength womaniser. I'd done a straw poll of female colleagues who had met him, and of the two I found, he had only flirted with both of them, and only tried to bed one. Marco has the grace to laugh as I remind him of the latter, whom he phoned up simply because he liked the sound of her voice when she tried to book a table, many years ago at Harvey's, for herself and her then boyfriend. He was utterly charming, she recalls, and utterly persuasive in getting her out to lunch, and utterly good company, and utterly unashamed in suggesting, after coffee, that they repair to his flat.

He laughs, but claims to have no memory of the event. Just as he claims to have completely forgotten the time when, after serving up a magnificent meal for a respected publisher and his gay partner, he kept insisting there must be something else he could do to make their meal complete, then had the brainwave of lifting out his manhood and slapping it onto the linen before them. He laughs, and doesn't confirm or deny. And he's uneasy about saying much more about those times, especially about the women, because of Mati; other than to repeat 'I was unhappy. My twenties were the worst period of my life.'

Seldom more so than during his brief benighted marriage to model Lisa Butcher, who infuriated him on their wedding day by wearing a £3,000 Bruce Oldfield dress which offered more to the camera than a husband had a right to expect to be offered that evening. 'Yes, it was sexy. But who was it sexy for?' The marriage lasted 15 weeks.

And then there were the fallings-out. With Michael Caine, over their misadventure at the Canteen in Chelsea Harbour - although Caine will not now say a word against Marco, nor vice versa. With Damien Hirst, whose artworks were removed from Quo Vadis, the Soho restaurant they co-owned, and replaced with Marco's own Hirst pastiches, which guests reportedly prefer. 'I didn't fall out with Damien. I just issued a writ. He copied one of my paintings, called Rising Sun, and tried to pass it off as one of his own. I was very happy with the outcome. Damien was a friend. But I just didn't like what he tried to do.' With mentor Albert Roux, who had nicknamed him his 'little genius', and of whom Marco now says, sadly, 'He's lost it, a little. Albert was always chasing the money, always the money; he was everywhere but in the kitchen. But the food should come first, and the money will follow.' With rival (and former friend) Tony Allen, owner of the Fish! restaurant chain, who recently paid him an eye-popping set of damages for claiming Marco had once, as a joke, substituted real ink for squid ink in a dish of scallops and cuttlefish. And he's still not a person with whom you'd want to fall out. He tells me, with genuine anger, of one very well-known entrepreneur he and Mati recently entertained who failed to show any grace or courtesy to his wife and left without thanking her and exuded astonishing rudeness throughout. Marco asks that I keep his name off the record.

Not that you can't simply argue with him. In fact, it's great fun. For all the changed-man stuff and the 'never been happier' stuff and 'perfect wife and children' stuff and 'I never go to parties now' stuff, he's still at his best when he's the real Marco: a couple of glasses down, sharp as a boning-knife and swearing with exuberance. So we argue about politics for a while. Says Marco: 'I'm a socialist in my heart and a capitalist in my head, which I suppose makes me, well'

Well, a capitalist, actually, completely; the socialist stuff is bollocks, isn't it? I go on to demolish his arguments about Thatcherism by talking very quickly with lots of food in my mouth; he attempts to demolish my arguments about socialism by ordering us another of his £750 bottles of plonk. We move off politics, and onto the subject of Tony Blair. 'I just can't stand him,' says Marco, with real feeling. He turns to his PR. 'In fact, can you make sure the smarmy bastard's banned from my restaurants. Come to think of it, ban Hague too, absolutely no better - even more stupid and cynical. Tell you what though, Gordon Brown can come and have a meal. He's a proper man, and at least he seems to believe in something.'

Read the second part of Euan Ferguson's interview here