The long Rhodes to success

Would he be embarrassed to watch them now? "I think so, yes. Particularly the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang thing. What came over me? I mean, it was a superb experience. I'm car mad anyway and that car was actually in the movie. If somebody offers you the chance to drive that, you don't say no. But then to dress up like Biggles! And why did I have that funny tash? And why was I speaking in that funny old voice? It had nothing to do with the food at all. I can't even remember what I was cooking. I lost the plot. I admit that. I had to wake up and realise what I really loved was my food and my cooking."

Are he and Delia still friends? "I think Delia is a great lady. She's an institution," he says, which he always says for he never bad-mouths his rival TV cooks. Ninety-nine per cent of them, he claims, are his friends, and I presume the hundredth broadcasts on something like Granada Wine, Women and Song and he hasn't met her yet.

What about Jamie Oliver, the Naked Chef, who has inherited his Mr Zany mantle? "I was like that when I started so why shouldn't he be?" And the goddess Nigella? "A great writer," he says - which from anyone else would sound damningly like faint praise. I tell him Antony Worrall Thompson, whom Delia also savaged, said that in a contest between the three of them, Rhodes would win. Gary calls that high praise from a "great chef", but says there is no way to judge, an attitude he'll have to lose later this year when he succeeds Loyd Grossman as Masterchef presenter.

It's remarkable that the state school kid from a broken home in Rainham in Kent is even a contender. He was 14 when his mother went back to work and asked him to cook his younger sister's dinners. He enjoyed it so much he lobbied for a place at catering college in Broadstairs. He had always wanted to make something of himself but his ambition focused when he heard that a neighbour's daughter had left that same college as student of the year. "I thought, 'Can you imagine that? I'd love that. I want that.'" Three years later he was student of the year.

He started work as a junior chef in the Hilton in Amsterdam and was promptly run down by a tram. He underwent brain surgery, recovered, proposed to his college girlfriend and eventually returned here to work at the Capital Hotel in SW3. Jenny and he finally married in 1989 and he says he doubts if he would be where he is today without her stabilising influence. She could be seen sitting next to him on his BBC Christmas Special: plump, pretty, with hair down to her bum.

Generally, however, she remains deeply in the background at their home in Orpington, looking after their sons, Sam, 11, and George, 10, who attend a private school and see not nearly enough of their workaholic father, who rises each morning at 4.30am, drives to London in his Porsche in order to be in the kitchen by 7am and is rarely home before 11pm. He boasts about spending Christmas with them as if it were a great feat for a father.

His own father, Gordon, a school caretaker, left the family when Gary was six. (He died two years ago, the two still not very close.) He was brought up by his mother, Jean, and her second husband, John, a builder who, he says, inspired him to work hard and put others first. Later he fell under the spell of two other charismatic father-figures: David Levin, owner of the Capital Hotel, and Kit Chapman, owner of the Castle in Taunton, to which Rhodes moved in 1986, winning a Michelin star. It is Chapman who claims credit for Rhodes's "Pauline conversion" to English cuisine, although Rhodes points out that by then he had worked at Winston's and the Reform Club, "and goodness me, you can't get more British than that".

But there is a difference between being a British chef and being a traditional British chef. In fact, some would say that if he is in danger of losing the plot now it is not because of his presentation but because of what he cooks, so different from the humble recipes he concocted on breakfast TV in the early Nineties. Featured in the current series are Smoked Haddock Scotch Eggs with Curried Mayonnaise, Pigeon and Red Onion Pasty, and Onion Soup with Steak and Kidney Sausage Dumplings. "We are," one food writer concluded privately, "in fried-goldfish-and-meringue territory."

Aren't the steak-and-kidney dump-lings a little far-fetched, I ask. "Far-fetched? Why would you say that? Steak and kidney with onions is very, very classic. And there is nothing wrong with putting a dumpling in a soup. That's quite a classic idea. Why not add a little extra touch? Why not be inventive?"

But his deeper message is not so much what you cook but how. His cry is: attend to detail. As a result his recipes are a fiddle. In my random test, however, they do work - although I fear my guests would say his Smoked Haddock Shepherd's Pie is good rather than great. The question is whether the detail can possibly extend to every out-post of his empire. You won't see Rhodes grilling steak at the Rhodes and Co brasseries in Manchester and Edinburgh, nor will you hear him apologise for serving frozen chips at them. He embarks on an elaborate analogy between gradations of restaurants and gradations of clothing, Mr Byrite to Armani. The comparison simmers for a while, receives a lot of garnish, then reduces to "you get what you pays for".

Except, I say, that at Rhodes and Co the punters are also paying for the cachet of a designer label. "But as far as I'm concerned a label will never last unless the product comes up with the quality."

And so we come back to the brand, and the vertical-hairdo logo. My impression is that they make him money but cost him credibility. The critic who came up with the "fried gold-fish" joke, for instance, thinks Rhodes is "a sweetie but incredibly thick with hundreds of strategies for getting round it". A former colleague assured me he could not actually be the author of his cookbooks, because "he can't write two sentences in a row".

So I make a major boo-boo and ask who really writes them. "Oh dear, you don't know how much you've just upset me," he says, mortified. "I have to tell you I write every single page. I write every single word by hand, not on computers or anything else. I've got them all hand-written in pencil."

So when he quotes Shakespeare's Henry VIII in the introduction? "I have to tell you it is all me. Any quote."

Thane Prince, for many years the Telegraph's weekend cook, believes he is greatly under-rated. "He is not seen as an intellectual chef like Rowley Leigh or Rick Stein, but he is hugely respected by them. If you asked me who was the best chef in London I would have to say he was. He is the most inventive."

Having spent time in his kitchens, she concludes he is also a thoroughly nice man, not one of the tyrant chefs. "He can be strict but that is different from being bad-tempered. He is not grand. He cleans fridges out. He'll wash a knife himself."

She forces herself to ask if there is a downside. She concludes he is too thin - and she is not alone in noticing. A third food writer I talked to called him "the colour of chewing gum and the size of a pipe cleaner". When you meet him, his slimness - at 5ft 10in, he's 10 stone - is, in fact, so striking it's not an option not to ask about his eating habits. He says he leaves home every morning without breakfasting, but, having exercised, nibbles all day on bread and drinks bottomless cups of coffee. He never eats the meals he prepares: "You lose your appetite when you're cooking all day."

He doesn't, does he, think it's an eating disorder? "Yes, of course, it's an eating - no, eating disorder's the wrong way of putting it. It's not an eating disorder because at weekends I make up for it big time. I pig out. And this Christmas, goodness me!"

Yet his relationship to food is a little dysfunctional, Monday to Friday? "But I'm not thinking, 'Ooh, I mustn't eat.' It's a question of routine. I'm tasting all day."

Tasting, not eating? "Exactly." So this is Gary Rhodes: the inventor of fantastical dumplings who is Pizza Express's most conservative customer (he always chooses the Giardinera); the family man who does not see his children from one end of the week to the next; the culinary Nigel Kennedy who wishes people would forget the haircut; the supposed ignoramus who quotes the Bard at his most obscure; the John the Baptist of the six-course feast, who looks anorexic. I'd say he's a pretty normal guy. For a chef.

Gary Rhodes at the Table, Tuesdays, 8pm, BBC2. His book of the same name is published by the BBC at £18.99.
Buy Gary's book from Amazon.co.uk