I'm a bit of a glutton - I eat too much of all that is good to eat.

Cooking, I mean, food, cooking foods is just everything that I do from morning to night. It's how I choose to live my life: through cooking, people that are in food culture. And I love it.

If you see someone in the kitchen that has good hands and a quick brain, then you need that person to be in the front of everything.

That's how people make sense of a meeting: they eat something. If they were in a sad moment it would be the same thing, they'd be eating something. It's what makes life fun. We don't need it to be delicious or great or all these things if we're just to survive. But it's one of those things that makes life fun, livable. And the more I submerge myself in it, the more fun I seem to have.

Summer's the same, autumn is even more extreme. Then winter is when you sort of condense all of your ideas. You process all these things and you try to look for new concepts. In that sense, your intuition is in hibernation. What you fill up is your imagination; you fill up your memories there.

I had turned down other head chef jobs. I didn't want to take over someone else's cuisine. I wanted to start from scratch.

The drive for working comes from everyday moments - the thrill of experiencing a young cook succeeding in what they thought was an impossible job, as well as guests being happy. I also love the unknown - discovering new things and trying to make sense of them.