What’s your favourite dish to cook at home?
I don’t really have one; I just like the cooking process. Every time I cook something I go back to it with fresh eyes and think, ‘right, how can I get the best out of this?’ If you’re going to cook really well you need to have fresh enthusiasm for something every time you do it. You can never do a perfect dish, you can only try and get as close to possible.

Do you like to be adventurous with your recipes?
I think invention in the kitchen is really important. People say to me ‘I hope you don’t mind but I changed your recipe’ and I don’t mind at all. I like the way that recipes used to be called receipts, like they were a list of ingredients that you bought for the recipe, because that’s all they are really – it’s just a recording of how you can do something, but you could change it all tomorrow if you thought you could do it better. However, it’s important not to be over-imaginative and spoil it by going too far, I think you’ve got to know the boundaries.

You’ve cooked for some highly eminent people, was there anyone you were particularly nervous about?
The Queen! If you’re going to cook for the Queen they give you a list of foods she shouldn’t eat, such as pasta and seafood. It’s designed to protect her but also to avoid embarrassment. Can you imagine the terrible diplomatic nightmare if she got food poisoning? Thankfully it went really well and I met her afterwards and she said ‘Oh you’re the cook!’ which I loved, she’s got a great sense of humour.

What’s been your favourite culinary experience?
Every now and then you get a wonderful experience in a restaurant, it can happen in the most unusual places. I remember this seafood bar in Spain, we sat down and they bought over these huge, fresh spider crabs that had only been boiled in seawater, and local Aborina wine. The whole thing just clicked. If you are a restaurateur you need to have moments like that.

Your first foray into the media was Taste of The Sea in 1995, how did you find that experience?
I wasn’t looking to get into the media at all – it was actually the director David Pritchard’s girlfriend that was convinced I could do it, so I found it quite daunting and difficult. Every time I did a camera test it was rubbish, I was too worried about cooking everything perfectly and not looking like an idiot. Finally, after a night of drinking, they said we’ll just do one more and I stopped caring, the alcohol had deadened my shyness and I cracked it. I watch those early programmes and it looks like I haven’t got a care in the world. You have to relax and enjoy it, which I do now.

When was Chalky’s debut?
We were filming on the sofa at my home and Chalky was sitting watching, then he noticed the fluffy microphone above me and no doubt thinking it was some kind of rat hanging in the air he went bananas trying to leap up and bite it, while in all the chaos I was asking David whether he wanted me to carry on, which just made it even funnier! It was one of those wonderful moments that you can’t replicate, and from then on David wanted him in everything we did.

You’ve cooked in some precarious locations for your television series’, including cliff-tops and canal boats – have you had any disasters?
All the time! I’m very clumsy so I’m always having accidents. Usually everyone else, including David, can see what’s going to happen but they let me walk into it for amusement value.

You’re credited as one of the first chefs to inspire a new generation of home cooks and television chefs, did you ever imagine the affect your programmes might have?
When I started making the programmes I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about, but by the end of the first series I realised it was because it was a genuine account of my life as a chef in a small Cornish fishing village. I think the truthfulness appealed to viewers as well, there was nothing contrived about what we were saying, we were stressing the quality of local produce because we believed in it. It was just a wonderful side effect that the programmes seemed to help kick off a general feeling that we need to be more aware of what quality ingredients we’ve got in this country. I’ve always felt that British food is really special and we need to feel a bit more proud about it.

You’ve travelled through France, the Mediterranean and now the Far East on a quest to understand their food cultures, what would be your next ideal foodie adventure?
Definitely Spain. I’ve wanted to do it for ages because my first memory of a foreign holiday is Spain and food was a large part of it. David and I are talking to the BBC about a programme focusing on ‘hidden Spain’, the fact that you can go to somewhere like Benidorm, and within half a mile of all these frightful flats and hotels you’ll find lovely Spanish food. Spanish food has got this gritty integrity about it, which I think we can discover.

In our now celebrity-obsessed society, how do you feel about being called a ‘celebrity chef’?
It makes me cringe because the whole concept of being a celebrity has now come to be a bit demeaning. The fact is everybody wants to be noticed, so if you can find some way of being noticed, good for you. What you choose to do with it is what separates people that make something of it and people that make loads of money and do nothing with it. I like to think I’m using the celebrity side to enthuse people about food.