We [chefs] are competitive, although I think you need to be careful with competitiveness as it can become quite negative.

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.

It depends as there's many different types of chefs, some who cook for awards and others who cook to make their restaurant a great business. There are those who cook for a lifestyle, they'll have come through pubs and they like to have the connection to the farmers and the chickens and the natural produce. So for each chef it'll be slightly different.

You need good energy and you need to be fit because it's very tiring. A lot of the work is quite heavy and quite smelly. That's why girls drift out of the kitchen because they get fed up smelling like fish and vegetables and things like that.

There's a layer of satisfaction that I get from cooking that is more than the work itself. I think when you're too competitive sometimes you can lose the joy of what you do.

There are many different types of people that end up coming to me and saying 'Yeah I want to cook.' Some of them successful, some not. There's no one formula, but if I get someone coming through the backdoor who knows that they want to get into the cooking field, they feel this inside-out love for it, this attraction to it, that person is an awful lot easier to work with.

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.