A great cook is made from having a great sense of hospitality and trying to make people happy. Then there's natural talent. Perhaps you have a feel for ingredients, the pots, the pans and stoves, that type of thing.

Part of being a great restaurant chef is having an ability to bring all those people together, rather like a captain on a rugby field or a coach. It's also being a great teacher, because I'm only one person in a kitchen of 10 and I need to be able to bring all those people together and to teach them. I need to be able to communicate my thoughts and my process to them.

Being a sport star and a chef both require passion, commitment, work and natural ability.

Some people who see cooking as a job. They got into cooking at some stage and they're sort of ticking along trying to get the money together to buy the car to impress the girlfriend and you know they're doing their job, but some of these people one day, all of a sudden it becomes wonderfully exciting to them. They find this love of what they're doing and they're away.

Sometimes I think you can lose the joy in what you do. It becomes a sense of 'I've got to beat him, I've got to beat him,' and you lose your own sense of joy.

I wrote a mad, passionate letter to the best restaurant in the UK, Le Gavroche in London, and asked if I could work for them. They gave me a job as a dishwasher (Colin laughs). For me that was a joy because I had a foot in the door of this world class restaurant. Just being around the buzz and the pots and pans and the wonderful food and all this produce that was coming in, that was the start of Paul Rankin the chef.

This is wonderful for a young person, no matter what profession they're in. When you can see something and you can feel this attraction to it, then it becomes less of me trying to teach them as they teach themselves. They've got it and bang off they go.