'British women can't cook'

Yes, well, and it may be precisely for this reason that he's been selected. "Oh," he says, laughing finally. "You mean for the ladies! I lerrrve ladies. I lerrrve English ladies. I'd never marry someone French. They are so, so difficult, French women. They are all full of ... they want this and they want that ... and they don't eat. They wave their forks near their lips and that's it. But women here love to eat. Mind you, they are terrible cooks, terrible. In fact, British women can't cook."

"Yes they can," I say rather hotly, as I count myself as a perfectly good cook. Who does he think spends their lives producing endless amounts of meals for their children? "That is not cooking!" he says. "That's just putting whatever things Jamie talks about in the oven. My mother, who lives in France and who is old, lerves Jamie. She calls him James. Anyway, it's men who cook the proper food in this country."

I imagine he's going to have to try harder to win over the female quotient of the viewers. Then again, it might not be that difficult because, although he comes out with some unintentional clangers, he obviously loves women. "Oh yes, I lerrrve women," he says.

"They are so honest. I'd much rather have employed women than men. Look at what happened to me! I was ripped off, you see." By whom? He rolls his eyes dramatically. "Everyone! Especially the men who worked for me. I am convinced they took everything from me."

At the end of the Nineties, Novelli's life crashed and burned. He had come over to the UK from northern France, from a working-class family - his father laid electronic cables and his mother was a seamstress - as a young man. "I was working as a private chef for the Rothschilds," he says, "and I was supposed to follow them to America but I fell in love with this country."

But what did he love about a country that served chips everywhere? "I could just see the potential," he says. "With hard work, I thought anything could happen. I had had nothing much in my life before. I hated school and was put in the remedial class because I was so naughty."

Maybe he's always been a bit compulsive, I say. After all, making all those omelettes, why? "I love things to be perfect." His talent was spotted by Rick Stein, Jonathan Meades, Marco Pierre White and Keith Floyd, who employed him at the Maltsters Arms in Devon.

During the mid- to late-Nineties, his empire grew, and included Maison Novelli in Clerkenwell as well as Novelli W8 and Les Saveurs in Mayfair. But, within a few years, it all went belly up. "I was catastrophically in debt," he says. "I was doing it all by myself - financing the business, running it, training people. I was smoking 40 a day and drinking too much. I had grown wild. I was barely able to speak."

Eventually, the doors closed on one after another of his restaurants. By 1999, he was left with only Maison Novelli. "It was crazy," he says. "The baliffs were at the front of the restaurant and I was ushering people in and out of the back door." His friend Marco Pierre White offered to bail him out but to no avail. "I lost everything," he says. "Even my marriage."

At the time he was married to his second wife, a South African model called Anzelle Visser. "She was a lovely girl," he says. "But I had nothing to offer."

He's certainly on the rise now. His restaurants are doing well, he says. But the main thing that has changed his life is his burgeoning relationship with his 19-year-old daughter, Christina, whose mother is his first wife, Tina. "I always saw Christina," he says, "but the relationship with her mother got, er, tricky."

It turned out that, eight years after they married, the first Mrs Novelli had an affair. "I was working long hours," says Novelli. They divorced but, when he came to divorce his second wife, it turned out he was never technically divorced from his first wife as he'd never signed the decree absolute.

This "forgetfulness" is not surprising. "I was hopeless," he says. "I never looked at anything apart from my business. Do I look like a bigamist!" But it's all turned out well because Christina now works with him when she's not being a musician. Novelli is immensely proud. "She is an angel! A delight! So talented!"

What's happening in his love life now? Will there be a third Mrs Novelli? He looks very uncomfortable. "What do you mean by that?" he says. I say he's been linked with a whole host of glamorous women. "Oh, for goodness' sake! I talk to someone at a party and ... it's not sex, you know. But I am looking for love!" he laughs. "I'd like a son. I want him to play football for France or represent England in the Olympics. Either will do. I am French and English, you see."

I imagine he is tricky to live with even though he has now swapped the madness of his life in London for a country idyll near Brocket Hall. It's because he's so driven. "I always push myself," he says. "I am proud of that. When my life looked in tatters did I give up? No. I started up again and I cleaned my life up. Now I will be on television. I've always wanted to do it but in the past it would make me sullen and worried. But I'm not like that now."

That doesn't explain why he was so unenthusiastic at the start of our interview. "My 'ead was full of stuff," he says. "I was worrying about that prawn." What was wrong with it? "Nothing. I just wanted to understand the taste of it, the feel of it. Detail is so important, you see."

He then kisses me on both cheeks and I realise he can be rather delicious. The public's going to lap him up, I say. "I 'ope so," he says, then he winks and disappears, leaving me feeling rather deflated.

Hell's Kitchen begins on ITV1 on Monday 18 April at 9pm followed by Hell's Kitchen Extra Portions on ITV2 at 10.30pm. For details of the cookery school go to www.jeanchristophenovelli.com.