Gordon's leading lady

She has only good things to say about her mentor. She says she's never experienced sexism, even though he says women chefs are rubbish and that one week out of four they can't work. "Whatever the brashness on TV, he's very kind. But if anyone crosses the line, he cuts the cord."

She hasn't cooked with him for years and says she only recently realised the enormity of his fame when she saw him at the Good Food Show at the NEC. "He was mobbed like a superstar. I've never seen anything like it." Although she's just recorded a reality TV cooking show with John Burton-Race, she freely scoffs at celebrity chefdom. "The British love nonsense on TV," she says.

The cookbook is her first venture between hard covers. Cucina: Three Generations of Italian Cooking is uncompromising about the simple Italian food she loves. Although sumptuously designed (by the team responsible for Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries), the majority of the recipes are startlingly plain: Saltimbocca, Roast Leg of Lamb, Spaghetti alle Vongole. She thinks there's sufficient complexity in the book for experienced cooks - a complicated stuffed pasta, Anolini, from Emilia-Romagna, that looks like a whole days work.

But it is approachable for beginners. She never likes more than five ingredients on a plate and her food is nothing like as showboaty as Ramsay's. "We (women) concentrate on the natural ingredients rather than trying to do too much to it."

When she took over at The Connaught (closed for renovations until November), she encountered crusty opposition from regulars. "It was a huge problem, because lots of them didn't like change or women." A few refused to be served by women waiters. "Hopefully they're dead now," she smiles. She soon won everyone over. Now she loves the customers and the restaurant has never been so popular.

It's a huge management job. She's delivering food to a 110-seat dining room and a series of private dining rooms catering for 85. Then there's breakfast, afternoon tea, room service ... She has to manage 120 staff.

Until she met Ramsay, Hartnett never planned to scale such starry heights. "I just wanted to do a little local Italian." She cites Arancia in Southwark Park Road as an example. "It's tiny, but run by one woman and a guy. It's very cheap - £20 for three courses. That's what I always wanted."

Ramsay changed all that. "He drove it into you that if you're going to do this job - and you are going to work 18 hours a day and you are going to sacrifice a lot - what's the point of not having standards? Hit for the top." So she did, knowing there are few women doing the same. She's aiming for a second star. As a shareholder in Ramsay's company, she is, to that extent, her own boss, too, which she also wanted. "All my relatives ran businesses, they weren't millionaires, but they all managed to buy a house and go on holiday."

The Italian side of her family came from Bardi, a small town in Emilia-Romagna, emigrating first to Wales to open fish-and-chip shops, then to Kent and Essex. As we consult the fishy menu at Scott's, we both puzzle over a garnish: Barba di Frate. Friar's Beard. We can't figure it out. A marine vegetable, says a waiter. In fact, it turns out, on checking the books, to be Opposite Leaved Saltwort, a little like samphire. But Hartnett is the last person to mind not knowing such culinary arcana. At home she only ever cooks from Marcella Hazan and "I do love Elizabeth David".

There's a fashion now in cookery books to provide nostalgia, a backdrop of a dreamy family life which the food will somehow restore to us. For Hartnett, it's real. Her cookbook has pictures of her family - black-and-whites of her grandparents in Italy, recent snaps of her mother, aunties, sister, brother and nephews - because family life is everything to her.

"It was my grandmother's influence. We all kept close. My father died young - I was seven - so you veered towards your mother's side of the family." She has never known a time when the family did not eat together, she says. Her beloved Nonna, who died when she was at Aubergine, is the presiding spirit of the book.

Angela shares a Georgian house in Spitalfields with her sister, Anne, having bought out her brother, Michael, who has moved to New York. Currently, her mum's staying and driving her mad by moving things around. She has also become the best customer in Jeannette Winterson's fabulously pricey delicatessen nearby. Her daughter knows why: "They go, ker-ching! ker-ching!"

Hartnett loves the area. "I've never felt more at home in London. It's a lovely community." St John Food and Wine is a favourite and she likes Broadway Market in Hackney, less thronged than Borough. She's trying not to eat big meals late and not to drink in the week. "But I'm surrounded by food, how the hell do I do it?" She's always hungry, she says. Though she orders modest salads of asparagus and artichoke with goat's cheese, she succumbs to a glass of sauvignon, after first refusing.

She knows her mother would like to see her married with children. "My mother sees me single and friends of mine married, but she doesn't see a generation of women my age that are single. She thinks it is because I'm working these hours, but I know people who work nine to five who haven't met anyone. It's a different age from when Mum met my father."

Not that she ever supposed she'd ever end up at home, looking after children. "My friends have done it - but I'd like a bit more." And a bit more is what she has done.

Cucina: Three Generations of Italian Cooking, is published by Ebury Press, £25.

THE LEADING LADIES OF LONDON'S KITCHENS

JULIET PESTON

Co-chef to Alastair Little, Peston helped him launch the Modern British Cooking phenomenon in the mid-Eighties. Some, including Little himself, thought that she never got the recognition that was her due there. She moved on to Lola's in Islington, The Cow in Notting Hill and the Coach and Horses in Clerkenwell before returning to the AL empire - she's now head chef at the eponymous Frith Street restaurant.

SAM CLARKE

She had no formal training beyond 18 months' cooking at The Eagle when her career was launched by a stint at The River CafÈ - where she met her husband, Sam Clark. Her easy way with earthy, robust flavours have made Moro's Spanish-Moorish fusions a huge hit - the restaurant won the BBC Good Food award for Best New Restaurant in 1998.

ROSE GRAY AND RUTH ROGERS

These brilliant and prolific chefs were pioneers when they launched the River CafÈ in Hammersmith 20 years ago. Six months' cooking at Nell's nightclub in New York was the only professional cooking experience Rose had, while Ruth had only entertained at home, but they earned a Michelin star within the first 10 years. These days they are grande dames of the scene, sometimes accused of being overly well-connected, and their riverside restaurant of being a salon for the New Labour and media in-crowd, but nobody dares deny their prowess in the kitchen and their mastery over elegant Italian flavours.

HELENA PUOLAKKA

She spent a year in Paris working for Pierre Gagnaire, and was subsequently head chef at La Tante Claire working for Pierre Koffmann - both reputed to be rather gruelling kitchens. But for the past two years she's presided as executive chef at Harvey Nichols' Fifth Floor Restaurant, and has been credited with putting it back on the gastro-map, with inventive dishes from her native Finland in the mix.

KATARINA TODOSIJEVIC

This Swedish-born chef is tipped as up and coming by Fay Maschler, among others. Her training was largely within the Conran empire, where she developed confidence with traditional British fare and simple, stylish dishes. Katarina has been running the kitchen at the restaurant in the National Portrait Gallery for over a year.