Spatulas at twenty paces

When the Soho restaurant Quo Vadis was re-opened by Marco Pierre White and Damien Hirst a couple of years ago, it was into the maw of the Cool Britannia pizzazz. A glut of hype ensued, lauding this collaboration between two Brit enfants terribles. How could it fail? Indeed, it soon proved so grand that it did not even allow photographs to be taken of its instantly famous Hirst-designed bar.

On went Hirst to Pharmacy, where he maximised his obsession with all things medical, and White turned his attention to the Titanic. Lo and behold, Quo Vadis has since become an unhappy ship. Hirst has become disillusioned with White and has been trying to sever his links with the restaurant and take back his art works. MPW - as he is often known - is not budging. Though the restaurant is still open, the doors of the bar are now closed.

Part of the blame can be laid at the door of the two volatile personalities involved. White has fallen out with famous collaborators before, notably Michael Caine, whose venture in Chelsea Harbour, called The Canteen, caused MPW to flounce off when the actor suggested putting fish and chips on the menu.

And White has certainly hit new heights of hubris with his latest plan: to place a blue plaque commemorating his presence at the restaurant. It is a joke worthy of the artist Gavin Turk, whose work was represented in Quo Vadis and who, for his Royal College of Art graduation show, exhibited a blue plaque stating that he had worked in that studio.

White's plaque is both playful gag and preposterous arrogance, particularly as it would sit next to a plaque already on the building commemorating Karl Marx - as if the architect of Communism and the doyen of celebrity chefs had an equal stake in history. Even if it is an ironic gesture, the self-importance is staggering.

Lee Chapman, husband of the actress Lesley Ash, has now had a few years' experience in London's restaurant circles with his restaurant and club Teatro, and with the benefit of hindsight he is under no illusions about the business.

"It is a bitching, backbiting business, full of jealousy and resentment," he says.

"No one lets anyone live and let live. You could put the worlds of acting and footballing together and it comes nowhere near the arrogance found in the catering fraternity."

Chapman was recently involved in a spat with the celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey, who had originally been drafted into Teatro as executive head chef. But his approach proved too formal and pricey and he was asked to leave, which prompted a confrontation between the two on Soho's Old Compton Street, coincidentally on the very day that the chef had been arrested following an earlier bust-up with the pastry chef Nathan Thomas - the 22-year-old lad's crime was allegedly to have made an under-par banana pudding. The confrontation between the two former professional soccer players ended with a policeman being summoned.

For some reason, the baton of creative tantrum - once the province of artists - seems to have been handed to chefs. Once painters such as Modigliani, drunk on absinthe, would play the wayward creative genius to the hilt. Now chefs have the sort of arguments that make the Oasis-versus-Blur spat of a few years ago seem tame.

The chef Steven Saunders, who has appeared on television's Ready Steady Cook, recently took a sideswipe at Delia Smith, saying her show was like "watching paint dry" and also managed to get in a dig at Ainsley Harriott for "joking around with food". Gary Rhodes, the Nigel Kennedy of the frying- pan, called Delia's TV series How To Cook - the show, remember, that advised us how to boil an egg - "insulting and offensive", though this incident was subsequently played down by all those involved.

Indeed, there is even a new book by Peter Mullan composed of interviews in which the chefs indulge in a little mutual bitching; it reads like a vicious new version of La Ronde. Tom Aikens of Pied-a-Terre has a go at Nico Ladenis, as does Michel Roux of Le Gavroche. Ladenis responded to Roux by reviving the great parliamentary jibe against Geoffrey Howe - "like being savaged by a dead sheep" - and meanwhile puts his solicitors on to Aikens; and Marco Pierre White derogates Aikens's two Michelin stars as having been "inherited". With all this going on, how on earth did they think that Quo Vadis could possibly avoid a personality pile- up?

"Putting two highly volatile personalities together can be a recipe for disaster," says Laurence Isaacson, of the catering group Chez Gerard, which includes restaurants such as Bertorelli's, Livebait and Scott's. "Also, anything that is personality-led rather than product-led and customer- led depends on the commitment of the personality involved. What was Aubergine without Gordon Ramsey? And somewhere like Pharmacy has to rely on perpetual hype."

Some industry observers think that the whole Quo Vadis concept bit off more than it could chew. "Is it an art gallery or a restaurant?" asks Enzo Quaradeghini, of the Etrusca Group. "Those who play the publicity game usually end up suffering for it. It's a great recipe for disaster."

Quaradeghini also thinks that the "art restaurant" may be a concept that has had its day. "It's passe," he says. Maybe, but any new restaurant worth its salt seems to have a design and art input.

Antonio Carluccio's Neal Street restaurant features British Pop art from the Sixties generation, such as Joe Tilson; and The Ivy shows the work of older British artists such as Howard Hodgkin and Allen Jones. Oliver Peyton's Atlantic Bar and Grill has shown such contemporary art stars as Peter Doig, Matt Collishaw, Douglas Gordon, the Chapman brothers, and - once more - Damien Hirst, who designed the wine bottles.

And in Green Street, the restaurant dining-club in Mayfair, the ex-owner Orlando Campbell revived the great Bohemian tradition of offering food and wine in exchange for art.

These all seem fairly amicable, and indeed, the restaurant can also be a place where a little light patronage can be safely indulged. Robert DeNiro wasted little time in showing the work of his painter dad, Bobby Senior, at the actor's TriBeCa Bar and Grill.

The most famous art restaurant is the Colombe d'Or in St Paul de Vence in the South of France, renowned for its prices as well as for its art collection, including works by Picasso and Matisse. Legend has it that the artists paid their bills with their work.

But a cautionary tale about the dangers of artist and restaurant collaborations dates from the late Fifties. One of the most celebrated of the Tate Gallery's Rothko paintings was to have been hung in a room in the famous Four Seasons restaurant in New York's Seagram Building. Rothko was not a decorator, and alarm bells began to ring as he painted, he says: "After I had been at work for some time, I became very much influenced by the Michelangelo walls in the staircase of the Medici library in Florence."

His series became gloomier and gloomier, and after the management expressed their dissatisfaction Rothko decided to withhold his paintings, for the reported reason that he did not want them to be a "background for the eating of the privileged".

In Hollywood, they say you should never work with children and animals. Perhaps restaurateurs should institute a new maxim: never work with artists. Or anyone else with as big an ego as yourself, for that matter.