If a chef says to you that he sits down and eats dinner before service, then it's bulls***. And if they do, then I'd tell them that they are a fat f***! You shouldn't indulge, because you need to keep your palate on edge, and keeping it on edge is all about small attention to detail and tweaking along the way.

I'm a big lover of fish. Cooking fish is so much more difficult than cooking protein meats, because there are no temperatures in the medium, rare, well done cooking a stunning sea bass or a scallop.

There's a bond among a kitchen staff, I think. You spend more time with your chef in the kitchen than you do with your own family.

Bake some bread. Make a focaccia bread or bake a whole mill loaf. Do something creative, and then put the labor of love into it in the beginning. When you take that bread out of the oven and you eat it an hour- and- a- half, two- hours later, you start to appreciate it more and then you eat less because you worked so hard to make it, you appreciate it in a much better way.

In any situation, location is crucial.

It's learning your craft and understanding what it takes to survive in this industry. On the back of exposure from TV to books to Rachel Ray to Martha Stewart, the customer's integrity is far greater than every before. As a nation, just like the U.K., we don't complain enough. The more we complain in this country the better our restaurants will be.

I'm not trying to take New York by storm. I just want to sneak in there, keep my head down, batten down the hatches and cook.