When you're cooking in the premier league of restaurants, when things go down, it has to be sorted immediately.

[I spend a] lot [time travelling]. Between the restaurants, filming for TV, producing MasterChef, seeing the kids... it's pretty constant.

The pressure on young chefs today is far greater than ever before in terms of social skills, marketing skills, cooking skills, personality and, more importantly, delivering on the plate. So you need to be strong. Physically fit. So my chefs get weighed every time they come into the kitchen.

The kids now, on "Junior," we educate the parents and it's quite a fascinating turnaround. You can just see the parents thinking, "S - , 10 years ago I was eating so bad, and now I'm seeing it through the eyes of my kids at 9, 10 years of age." There is an upside to that side of reality TV. It's not all negative.

To have 95% of the ingredients sourced, food and wine, within 100 miles radius, that's a dream come true for any chef.

I don't think it's a good advert for any restaurant, a fat chef, and secondly, who wants to eat a dessert when the chef's a fat pig.

No one saw the recession coming. The UK businesses were solid as a rock, but the issues we had were in Paris, New York and LA. For every pound we were making here we were losing two pounds abroad.