I don't think it's a good advert for any restaurant, a fat chef, and secondly, who wants to eat a dessert when the chef's a fat pig.
I was a naturally aggressive left-back, a cut-throat tackler.
When you're a chef, you graze. You never get a chance to sit down and eat. They don't actually sit down and eat before you cook. So when I finish work, the first thing I'll do, and especially when I'm in New York, I'll go for a run. And I'll run 10 or 15k on my - and I run to gain my appetite.
You know how arrogant the French are - extraordinary.
Cooking is about passion, so it may look slightly temperamental in a way that it's too assertive to the naked eye.
I've never been a hands-on dad. I'm not ashamed to admit it, but you can't run a restaurant and be home for tea at 4:30 and bath and change nappies.
The pressure on young chefs today is far greater than ever before in terms of social skills, marketing skills, cooking skills, personality and, more importantly, delivering on the plate. So you need to be strong. Physically fit. So my chefs get weighed every time they come into the kitchen.
Swearing is industry language. For as long as we're alive it's not going to change. You've got to be boisterous to get results.
There's a bond among a kitchen staff, I think. You spend more time with your chef in the kitchen than you do with your own family.
I am the most unselfish chef in Britain today.
They say cats have nine lives. I've had 12 already and I don't know how many more I'll have.
I think every chef, not just in America, but across the world, has a double-edged sword - two jackets, one that's driven, a self-confessed perfectionist, thoroughbred, hate incompetence and switch off the stove, take off the jacket and become a family man.
I train my chefs completely different to anyone else. My young girls and guys, when they come to the kitchen, the first thing they get is a blindfold. They get blindfolded and they get sat down at the chef's table... Unless they can identify what they're tasting, they don't get to cook it.
As a soccer player, I wanted an FA Cup winner's medal. As an actor you want an Oscar. As a chef it's three-Michelin's stars, there's no greater than that. So pushing yourself to the extreme creates a lot of pressure and a lot of excitement, and more importantly, it shows on the plate.
I am a chef who happens to appear on the telly, that's it.
If you want to become a great chef, you have to work with great chefs. And that's exactly what I did.
Chefs are nutters. They're all self-obsessed, delicate, dainty, insecure little souls and absolute psychopaths. Every last one of them.
The minute you start compromising for the sake of massaging somebody's ego, that's it, game over.
I still love football, though, and I think cooking is like football. It's not a job, it's a passion. When you become good at it, it's a dream job and financially you need never to worry. Ever.
Cooking today is a young man's game, I don't give a bollocks what anyone says.
