I train my chefs with a blindfold. I'll get my sous chef and myself to cook a dish. The young chef would have to sit down and eat it with a blindfold. If they can't identify the flavor, they shouldn't be cooking the dish.

It's very hard when you eat out every day for a living, and a new restaurant comes along and you haven't got that same vigour that you had 10 years ago.

It's quite weird knocking that out of them and telling them to forget cooking for chefs; forget what chefs say about your food.

Making pasta, cooking pasta and baking bread are two essential ideas to create a little bit of excitement, and you learn the basic, and then evolve it. Flavor the bread, flavor the pasta, go to a fish, go to a meat sauce and take it to another level.

The thing is, I can teach. I can teach bloody well. So few chefs have that level of generosity. I demand a lot, a f***ing hell of a lot, but I give a lot back.

Put your head down and work hard. Never wait for things to happen, make them happen for yourself through hard graft and not giving up.

Chefs don't do ponytails and we shouldn't do them because I guarantee that whenever there's a discovery of hair in the food, it's guaranteed it's from the chef's ponytail.