In London’s insatiable appetite for reliving the 1990s, chefs having beef is an unhinged main course. Marco Pierre White versus Gordon Ramsay remains a thrilling storyline decades on: a classic riff on the master and apprentice; Blur and Oasis but with cutlery in place of microphones. And then Heston Blumenthal? Maybe he’s Pulp. A younger, quieter, but by no means less impactful and progressive third part. Never mind the snail porridge.

Considering the new documentary Rise of the Rockstar Chef, it’s a shame the term “kitchen sink drama” was conceived in the 1950s, because what a fitting moniker: working-class men, gritty and with something to prove, frustrated by social constraints and economic rigidity… tirelessly, hopelessly romantic all the while. Who would’ve thought chefs, once pinned down to hot dark basements, skilled but unseen and almost always French, would become rockstars from northern council houses, McCartney-esque, befitting of a Hollywood caper let alone a BBC three-parter? It took years of negotiations to see White, Ramsay and Blumenthal in the same room, around the same table, eating three of their most lauded dishes.

I’ve heard Jamie Oliver was considered for the bill. “I wouldn’t have done it,” White tells me over a bowl of lentil soup. “He’s not a rockstar chef, he didn’t do what we did.” That is to say, sacrifice almost everything in pursuit of winning three Michelin stars, and compete, sometimes bitterly, while doing so.

Before the grand finale, when White, Ramsay and Blumenthal break bread, the show dissects a mad time, one that saw tears and “stolen” reservation books and unwanted camera crews at weddings. “We were bigger than the Beatles,” White jokes. “And we fed more people.” It delves into the toxicity of Britain’s much-feted dining renaissance: one fuelled by equal parts passion and competitive drive; there’s a splash of reverence for every dash of sourness.

The mini-series begins when White opens Harveys in Wandsworth, the celebrated restaurant that helped put him on the gastronomic map aged just 25, before he went on to become the first British — and still the youngest ever — chef to win three Michelin stars. Ramsay, now the richest and probably the most internationally famous, is his once dutiful, now sometimes scalding protégé. Blumenthal came a little later and, by his own admission, mostly taught himself, but was in his early years helped by White, who lent him a car and helped out with suppliers.

These enfants terribles chewing the fat make for sensational viewing. Words like “brilliant” and “crazy” are bandied around. It’s as captivating as any football saga, band split or A-list break-up. It enamours me because restaurants are deserving of the same cultural capital of any bestselling book or 100 million dollar movie. These three made much of the country admire and better respect a previously dark world, and they still have a way with drawing the diners. Ramsay even storms off at

one point, after he and White discuss the incident with tears by the coffee machine. Scripted? It doesn’t feel like it — great cook, less an actor. White declines to assist in the kitchen when a team at Carbone in Mayfair attempts to recreate his tagliatelle of oysters with caviar, a dish this newspaper’s former critic Fay Maschler first tried while wearing a disguise. She loved it. “They used the wrong oysters,” White tells me. “It wasn’t generous enough. You know, they got the flavours but it wasn’t an absolute replication.” He can be dismissive of the industry today. “They hand out Michelin stars too easily. I’m not sure chefs work as hard.” Are chefs still rockstars, then, same as in the 1990s?

Ramsay demurs when asked the same. “Times have changed,” he tells me from Mexico, over the phone before a trip to a local taqueria. “What happened then was different. Marco is a mad genius, no doubt about it. We haven’t always seen eye-to-eye.” Diplomatic. Ramsay is positive and less unpredictable in his new guise as a world leader: “There’s so much talent out there. I don’t agree that Michelin doesn’t mean the same as it did. Chefs still strive for those stars, and still work incredibly hard. And I see my role now as passing on the baton. I do believe anyone can cook — if you want something enough, wherever you’re from and whatever your background, you can go from zero to 1,000.”

I ask Ramsay about reliving the era that made him the powerhouse he is today. All those 20-hour shifts, the unrelenting striving for perfection. Crying over… onions? No. Turn the cameras off. We’ll never know what happened because we were never there. “I still spend a lot of time in Wandsworth and walk past where Harveys used to be. I remember finishing service and fishing for carp with Marco at 2.30am, falling asleep by the pond and waking up freezing cold a few hours later.

“I imagine him [Marco] sitting up in the window looking down at us peeling girolles on the Common. We used to play football there.” Ramsay had a brief stint playing youth football for Glasgow Rangers. “Marco was too tall and gangly. I’d nutmeg him and he’d fall over like a daffodil.” The digs, ho ho, they still happen. Three ageing rockstars (Ramsay turned 60 on Sunday) never tire of fun. Sad as it is there doesn’t seem to be any chefs like them today. Probably the silliest thing to happen in the last 10 years involved clingfilm-adjacent sex and, while funny, it wasn’t enough to transcend industry gossip to front the front pages of the tabloids. Or have we all just lost our sense of humour?

“The level of cooking is incredible now,” Blumenthal tells me. “At the same time, I’m not sure there’s much that’s new in terms of techniques and ideas in this country. Innovation needs money and investment and, short of finding a visionary millionaire or doing TV that involves research and development — obviously not options available to most chefs — it is becoming more and more difficult to be creative.”

Calling time on the rockstar chef might be no bad thing. White, bored by it all, handed back his Michelin stars in 1999, then still in his thirties — “It was gutting,” Ramsay tells me, “it was like he stepped out of the ring just as I was properly getting into it” — and Blumenthal suffered with his health, so much so that he had to spend some of the year in the south of France, where he cooks lasagne and poaches salmon. “I never aimed for stars, that was never my ambition,” he says. “I just cooked and cooked, with total focus and intensity and unstoppable curiosity, and it very nearly burned me out.”

The final scene in the series is a dramatic one, equal parts irreverent and warming. It’s almost therapeutic, definitely sensitive. At this point, I think these three old-timers are mostly just having a laugh. As for the food, it feels almost entirely inconsequential, which is beautifully ironic. Maybe that’s it: you can be a rockstar chef, but it won’t be long before you reach boiling point. Eventually, even the most pioneering chefs must take stock.

Rise of the Rockstar Chef is on iPlayer now.