There are two things you have to be prepared for during an encounter with Ramsay: the first is that he never ceases to take the mickey; the second is that he is always, always late. We meet up a handful of times and he is an hour late for almost every single one of them, but always armed with an effusive apology, so you forgive him instantly. Of course, he does have good cause to be late, tending, as he has to these days, to the rapidly expanding Ramsay empire, with restaurants inhabiting the more salubrious parts of London, Scotland and Dubai. Bogged down by so many concerns, it's amazing he makes it anywhere at all.

And of course the critics' knives, no pun intended, are all out for him - Gordon is spreading himself too thinly; Gordon is trying to do too much; Gordon is in for a nasty fall. And he loves it.

'Everyone's expecting me to fall on my face,' he says, 'which is why I've got to get this right. People think the bigger you become, the more diluted you become, but that's not necessarily true. I love being judged and I love having reviews, because everyone still thinks I'm a bad boy.' And isn't he? 'Well,not so much now.'

But everyone loves a bad boy (a group of Japanese women, spying Gordon in the Claridge's foyer, almost have a collective seizure) and particularly a bad boy with presence - a quality Ramsay has by the bucketload. In photos, he can occasionally look puggish, but in the flesh his features are much softer, his body lean and muscular.

Yet nowadays he seems a touch embarrassed by his bad-boy status. Mention of the fly-on-the-wall documentary Boiling Point, which showed Ramsay in all his gloriously free-falling rage, causes him to squirm visibly, but he's canny enough to realise you have to give the public what they want. Thus he will wheel out insults should the mood take him (Sir Terence Conran is 'a pleb' and you can take your pick with Antony Worrall Thompson, although 'He makes my sh-- itch' is perhaps his best). But compared with the undiluted brilliance of his fury in Boiling Point (he once berated a chef with: 'Are your brains in your f---ing arse, Fatso?'), it all seems rather half-hearted. Is Ramsay going soft?

Even his feud with the Sunday Times restaurant critic A A Gill is at an end, and although four years ago Ramsay ejected Gill and his friend Joan Collins from his Chelsea restaurant, and despite the fact that Ramsay was champing at the bit at a recent offer to fight Gill in a celebrity boxing match for charity, á la Ricky Gervais and Grant Bovey (Gill was not so keen), now he says: 'Of course I'd have Adrian back in. What's done is done and his reviews of my restaurants recently have been fair and not at all vindictive.'

Clearly, the man is going through some kind of transitional phase. It helps, of course, that last July he paid off the £2.8m loan on his restaurants in Royal Hospital Road (the only restaurant in London to have three Michelin stars) and in Mayfair (his restaurant Petrus has Gordon's best friend, Marcus Wareing, as chef-patron). 'And paying that off,' says Ramsay, 'made me feel a lot more comfortable.' But in case it was all becoming too easy, Ramsay, who can't seem to pass a posh hotel these days without sticking a restaurant in it, is also installing Marcus as chef-patron at the Savoy Grill, planning a move for Petrus into the Berkeley Hotel in Knightsbridge, looking to open a restaurant in New York, and looking after Gordon Ramsay at Claridge's, Gordon Ramsay (Chelsea), and overseeing Petrus, the Connaught, Amaryllis in Glasgow, and Verre at the Hilton Dubai Creek. Which is all very nice, but is he happy? 'Erm,' he says, 'I'm nervous because everything is going so well. But for some bizarre reason, I don't think I deserve this happiness.

I know chefs who have worked longer than me, have done the same training but are still struggling to find a head chef's job. I'm thinking, 'Why me?'

The obvious answer is, he's worked exceptionally hard for it. Most people know that as a teenager, Ramsay had harboured dreams of being a professional football player and that when injury put paid to his desire to play for Glasgow Rangers, he was determined never to fail again and turned to cooking as the arena in which he could excel. His father, also called Gordon, had approved of his footballing career but not of his cooking, thinking it was 'for poofs'. When his father, a violent drinker, hospitalised his mother after an attack, his son disowned him - the need for approval from his father suddenly not so important any more.

And then it all started to happen for him. After catering college, Ramsay moved to London, where he trained for two years with Marco Pierre White at Harvey's restaurant in southwest London, working 17-hour days. After that, he moved to Le Gavroche to work alongside Albert Roux, then he spent three years in France, in the kitchens of Guy Savoy and Joel Robuchon. At 26 he became the personal chef on the yacht of the Australian TV mogul Reg Grundy before returning to London to become part-owner of Aubergine, where he won two Michelin stars within three years of opening. After falling out with his backers, Ramsay was sued for £1m and, although the matter ended in a settlement, he was landed with huge legal bills. In the middle of all this, he bought the former Michelin-starred La Tante Claire, reopened it in just three weeks and renamed it Gordon Ramsay. He hasn't looked back.

Ramsay and his father had a rapprochement of sorts before Ramsay Sr died four years ago, although the resentments remain in his son, whether he chooses to acknowledge them or not. He denies that part of the ferocious ambition to prove himself 'is still about Dad' (probably because he doesn't want to come across 'as a sad git'), yet in the next breath will tell you that he is writing a book provisionally titled Mummy's Boy. Detailing his formative years, it is his attempt to, if not exorcise his past, then certainly clarify it.

'My dad's biggest dream was of becoming a musician,' says Ramsay, 'but he never made it. He harboured dreams of becoming like Eric Clapton, but he never had the sense to let go of the dream and go on to something less ambitious, and as he got older he could see he was losing his children's respect [Ramsay has an older sister, Diane, a younger sister, Yvonne, and a younger brother, Ronnie]. I can't say I'm clever because I'm not, but I was wise enough when I failed at Rangers to pursue something else, but he wasn't and put me through a load of sh-- because of it. It was almost as if... well, despised is a strong word, but he was almost jealous of his children. It's a horrible word, but maybe there was slight hatred there too.'