A moment with Marco

His enthusiasm is awfully infectious. if I were an investor I'd write him a cheque immediately. For this, surely, is Marco Pierre White's talent. He tells me at length about his plans. "I'm going to open another restaurant like my Drones Club in Mayfair. I love that place - it's members only and it works because people feel all schmoozed there. It's full of interesting people. So many places now are all show, all about the look of the food and not the content. Where's the fun, the glamour, the romance? Most of these Michelin-starred chefs don't even work in the kitchen.

When I had my stars, I didn't step out of the kitchen! I wasn't on television. I didn' t write books. I cooked! And I got exhausted and so I stopped cooking."

Mind you, it's hard to believe he ever gets tired. During the time I spend with him, his mobile rings incessantly. Someone he knows seems to be setting up a lucrative venture in Venezuela. Another wants some advice on starting a restaurant.

"These new chefs," he says, rolling his eyes. "This is why I got out of it. It's changed. When I trained up north [at the Box Tree hotel in Ilkley], I felt lucky to be there. When Albert Roux interviewed me to work at Le Gavroche I felt honoured. Now everyone wants to be a head chef at 20. I want nothing to do with it."

His difficulties have been well-documented. His Italian mother, Maria Rosa, died when he was just six, leaving him and his three brothers (baby Craig was only 13 days old when Maria Rosa died of a brain haemorrhage) with his father, Frank White, a former chef and catering manager.

"My father was from Yorkshire," says Marco. "He was a hard man. I spent a lot of my life trying to impress him. I only really grew up when I realised I wasn't like him at all but like my mother. Then I became myself."

Before that, which he says happened in his mid-thirties when he realised he should stop trying to impress everyone, he was the enfant terrible of the gastroworld. He burst onto the scene in the mid-Eighties - glamorous, thin as a rake, a crazy man with crazy hair. His reputation as an irascible maverick grew when, in his twenties, he married model Lisa Butcher and then divorced her four months later on the grounds that he didn't like her wedding dress.

"Everything was mad back then," he says. "I was cooking like something possessed, chasing those three stars. It was so exciting; I was the only British chef to have them. I was desperate to hold on to them." In the end, though, he became disillusioned. He seemed to turn on those he had once loved. In the past he had called Albert Roux his "surrogate father" but, years later, he dismissed him.

And it wasn't just Roux he fell out with. He started up the ill-fated Canteen restaurant in Chelsea Wharf with Michael Caine, and they apparently fell out when that went belly up. Then he and Damien Hirst nearly ended up in court after their once cosy relationship soured when Marco replaced Hirst's paintings in Quo Vadis with his own.

Then he and Oliver Peyton had a spat when Peyton claimed Marco's Titanic was ruining trade for Peyton's own Atlantic Bar and Grill next door. It almost got to court but Peyton backed off, as did Tony Allen of Fish! whom Marco took to court when Allen accused him, falsely, of substituting pen ink into a female journalist's squid-ink risotto.

"I know people think I am litigious," says Marco, "but you have to knock these rumours down. The New York Times once accused me of going on a drink and drugs binge. I have never taken drugs. I didn't even drink until four years ago because I have a stomach ulcer."

But controversy will not leave him alone. After the Butcher fiasco, he quickly met Matilde Conejero, a Spanish beauty working at one of his restaurants. They have been together for 12 years, married for four, and have three children: Luciano, 10, Marco, eight, and Mirabelle, three. Despite the fact that Conejero has been credited with having calmed him down, in September last year Marco was linked romantically to banker Robin Saunders, the 42-year-old American dubbed the "Claudia Schiffer" of the Square Mile, and worth an estimated £25 million. Apparently, the two of them had met through business associates and become close.

"I'm not going to fan this flame," he says. "We were good friends, of course we were. But she has children and so do I and everyone concerned decided to say nothing about it because nothing happened and that was that. It was the best thing to do, to be quiet. I am a man of principle. I had no intention of dragging her family or my family into some kind of media feeding frenzy and that is all I will say."

He is, rather oddly for a man who revolutionised the restaurant industry, pretty old-fashioned. He says he doesn't cook any more. "Mati is a wonderful cook," he says. "Her mother is even better!" His children have a beautifully bucolic lifestyle; the older two are at boarding school in Oxfordshire. And he spends his free time hunting, fishing and staring contentedly at nature. "When I grew up, although I lived on a council estate, it was next to the Harewood estate - I used to play there all the time. Sometimes I'd see deer. I'd sit and watch them because I thought they were so beautiful."

He is now also rather happy to stalk them and has bought the shooting rights to the Clovelly estate in Devon. "It's so glorious with the fields, woods and the sea. The countryside always got me through difficulties as a child. I like to contemplate and see the truth in things, to learn what is right."

What, then, is the definition of right for Marco Pierre White? "I never walk away from a friend," he says. "I may cut them dead but that doesn't mean I have lost the love for them. My mother brought me up to know what being a man really is - it just took me a long time to realise it. I have had to learn self control. When I was young I got caught up with my ego. Now I know that ego is destructive, as is arrogance. I have learned to control myself. I do, however," he says, breaking into a smile, "find it hard sometimes!"

And with that enigmatic statement, he kisses my hand, says I must come with my partner and have dinner at his expense, and disappears. But, as I leave in what should be the middle of a busy lunch hour, I realise the restaurant is completely empty. If I hadn't have been so caught up in Marco's world, I would have asked him why. Then again, I don't suppose it would bother him one jot. He's got plenty more fish to fry.