it with its own liver and the foie gras, and when I looked at it I thought, yes ok people have done that kind of thing before – Heston with his sea bed – but it was my interpretation of it and my interpretation of what was real to me. It was my quails, my forest floor. It actually gave me a lot of confidence to say actually I can go and cook with the best.
Had you lacked that confidence before?
I remember saying to my dad that I wanted to go on the competition and my dad’s quite a pessimistic person; he’ll say things like, “Don’t spend your money; don’t buy any hotels; just go and work for somebody and earn your money and go home.” So when I said I wanted to do Great British Menu, he said, “Don’t do that; you’re gonna put your cock on the block there.” But I said, “No, I want to see how good I am; I want to see what I’m like.”
I’d been buried away in my kitchen for six years and I thought that I’d worked my bollocks off trying to get recipes and making sure everything was really consistent and the food tasting really good and getting the culture into the kitchen, making sure that everything was really consistent. 
My kitchen was very much like a laboratory in that everything was so precise it was unreal, because I was scared of change; I was scared of putting too much salt in something; I’d worked too hard for someone just to say, “Yeah just throw a pinch in.”
We had a risk analysis for everything which made it very stress free in the kitchen and service just a piece of cake. So I thought, yeah I’m just gonna do this and see what happens, and when it tuned out in my favour it was great for business; the phone was ringing; more customers came; we could afford more chefs which gave me time to do more research and development.
Then I did Great British Menu again and got to the finals again and did my tomato gazpacho which turned out really well and we just got busier. The busier you get the more you can invest and we’ve been very lucky to be able to do that.
