The food writer Jane Grigson termed George Perry-Smith and Elizabeth David “the two most important people behind the revolution of interest in good food as we now enjoy it in Britain”. The chef and food writer Simon Hopkinson has called him “an English god and the king of postwar chefs”.

Perry-Smith was the first to bring fine eating to the provinces after the war. When he started the Hole in the Wall restaurant in Bath in the early 1950s, only Francis Coulson at Sharrow Bay could be considered as influential and innovative a cook. Perry-Smith’s legacy was to reawaken the English to a love of and pride in their own cooking while inspiring their delight in ideas from France, Spain and Italy.

In the 1950s, when a typical provincial restaurant menu featured perhaps two choices per course and included brown Windsor soup and boiled beef among its offerings, Perry-Smith offered lengthy menus of ten choices per course plus a cold buffet and several cheeses at a time when rationing was still in force. “Beginnings”, as he called them, included caviar and blinis, paté en croute, koulibiac and kedgeree. Main dishes included Hungarian goulash, tripe and onions, jugged hare and chilli con carne. With no formal training, Perry-Smith was inspired by writers such as Elizabeth David and André Simon.

He refined recipes on the spot. As he said: “From 1952 nothing seemed to stop us. We learnt from our customers and they learnt from us.” His staff included Joyce Molyneaux, who later became his partner at the Carved Angel. Girls from wealthy families worked as waitresses, and were hired not for their expertise but for their attitude to food and people. Perry-Smith’s menus were described as an eclectic raid on the traditions of many nations, but classical and even conservative when it came to a dish that worked.

One that worked supremely well for him, and became his signature dish, was salmon in pastry with ginger and currants. This was taken up by another Perry-Smith disciple, Stephen Marwicks, and is still served at Marwicks in Bristol. Other memorable creations were his salmon and mushroom cutlets served with Hollandaise or herb cream sauce. Later, at his restaurant-with-rooms, the Riverside at Helford in Cornwall, the daily menu was created from the freshest produce available along with vegetables from his kitchen garden.

The food writer Tasmin Day-Lewis recalls breakfasts on the terrace here of freshly made croissants and bowls of oranges and strawberries, afternoon teas with chocolate Tia Maria ice cream with hazelnut meringues and dinner dishes of lobster tart, fish soup with rouille, dark lemony walnut treacle tart and a cold table with pies, patés, terrines, rillettes, potted meats and salads. When ordering tarragon chicken, a whole bird came to the table with second helpings offered — all in a time of nouvelle cuisine.

The Hole in the Wall was always booked out; guests travelled from London for dinner when, as his wife Heather remembers, “the trains ran on time”. Notable guests included Alistair Cooke, the painter Annigoni and Rex Harrison. Raymond Postgate’s praise in the Good Food Guide initially put Perry-Smith on the culinary map and by 1972 the Guide celebrated the Hole’s twentieth year of inclusion, calling it “probably the best restaurant in the provinces”. This was the year Perry-Smith decided to retire and the Guide’s editor Christopher Driver wrote: “Your news was greeted with a wail around the office as though Troy had fallen.”

In spite of the adulation, Perry-Smith disliked personal publicity. “We were there to cook,” he said. “Not to become famous, just to cook.” He never gave interviews, never wrote a cookery book, retired when cooking became fashionable and disliked the TV chef cult.

George Perry-Smith was an orphan at the age of 12 and was looked after by two sets of guardians. One inspired him with a love of cooking, the other was so chaotic that Perry-Smith had to prepare most meals himself. He went to Cambridge to read modern languages, earning a first in French at the end of his first year.

The war began and Perry-Smith, a conscientious objector, joined the Friends Ambulance Service. They needed a cook, so he did a crash course and found himself in charge of catering for a training camp in Somerset. He worked with his first wife’s cookery book, and the lucky camp lived well off delights such as savarins.

After the war, he returned to Cambridge to read German, missed finals through hay fever but was given a degree. He took an education diploma and worked for a year as an exchange teacher at the Paris Lycée St Louis on Boulevard Saint-Michel. He delighted in the area’s cafés and determined to set up something similar in England.

Borrowing from his wife, he returned home with £2,000 and the proceeds of selling their Bristol home. He took the lease of the run-down Hole in the Wall in Bath. With no real culinary training or business experience, the washer-up gave him six months. Twenty years later he wanted to retire to France and so toured the country in a red, open-top Alvis looking for suitable properties.

Yet he came back to England, saw and bought the Riverside at Helford and the Carved Angel at Dartmouth. He ran the Riverside until 1986 and lived near it until his death.

Remembered as a gentle, cultured man, Perry-Smith’s self-effacement led to lack of recognition and awards although in 1986, Egon Ronay, as President of the British Academy of Gastronomes, made him a British Chef Laureate. Perry-Smith was married four times and is survived by his fourth wife Heather, who started work at the Hole in the Wall in 1958 and married him in 1990. He had three children and two adopted children.

George Perry-Smith, restaurateur, was born on October 10, 1922. He died on October 1, 2003, aged 80.