My first meal in a three-Michelin-starred restaurant was like a smack round the face. I’d never experienced anything like it. I was 15, and it was the start of my obsession with food. Growing up in London in the 1960s and ’70s, the range of ingredients you could buy was minimal — only chemists sold olive oil, and an avocado was the absolute height of luxury. My mum’s a good cook — she’d make beef stroganoff, chicken à la king — 1970s classics. But we hardly ever ate out. Perhaps the occasional Berni Inn or a Chinese restaurant. That was exotic.

We usually went on holiday to Cornwall, but one year, because my old man’s office-equipment business had done all right, we went to Provence. My father had read about this restaurant with three Michelin stars near where we were, so he decided we’d give it a try. Even my parents had never been anywhere like that. If I’d grown up eating oysters and lobster, that meal wouldn’t have had the same impact. It was like being shown a whole extra colour.

The entire experience was stunning. The restaurant was in a medieval village at the foot of a bauxite cliff, and we sat under olive trees, with fountains in the background. I still remember the sounds of chinking glasses, cutlery on crockery, the crunch of the waiters’ feet on the gravel. They were carving legs of lamb at the tables, pouring sauces into soufflés. The sommelier had a handlebar moustache and a leather apron, and the cheese trolley — well, the way I remember it, it was the size of a room. I was awestruck. I chose red mullet with a sauce vierge, lamb in puff pastry, and crêpes baumanière.

I remember thinking: “This is it!”

After that, I was bitten. I’d buy French recipe books and translate them with a dictionary, word by word — I hadn’t done French at school — then I’d work my way through the recipes. I started taking several chefs’ books and looking at, say, ice cream, I’d find tiny differences between each version — five more grams of sugar in this one, more egg yolk in that. It really annoyed me — there was no explanation for it. I’d try all the variations — with milk, whipping cream, double cream, I’d experiment with the egg levels. I was just doing it in my parents’ kitchen — not for dinner parties, just to see which was best.

After a few years of experimenting with all these recipes that told you what to do without ever telling you why, I found some books that explained the science behind cooking — why ice cream needs a particular fat content to freeze well, for instance. After the ice creams, I started looking at other dishes and getting to understand the reasons for things. And once I understood why this ingredient, that method, had a certain effect, I started experimenting. For instance, I worked out a technique for triple-cooked chips, which I still use.

I did hopelessly badly in my A-levels. I got one, in art, and that was a fluke. I left school, worked as a photocopier salesman and a bailiff for a couple of years. Then I did a basic accounting course and went to work for my father. But I was still spending my evenings and weekends cooking.

It was obsessive, really. I met my wife, Zanna, when I was 20, and her support has been the single greatest reason for the success of The Fat Duck. I woke her up at 2am once, with four different crème brûlées I’d made. That put her off crème brûlée for quite a while. And every year we’d save up and go eating around Europe — touring round farmers, wine-makers, cheesemongers, restaurants… One year we even sold our car so we could go to France and eat.

Eventually, in 1995, I borrowed some money from my old man, sold the cottage we were living in, and moved back in with my parents so I could open The Fat Duck. I started off in a state of complete naivety — I was an accountant, with three or four weeks of work experience in kitchens! My first paid job as a chef was in my own restaurant. And that was the beginning of almost a decade of sleep deprivation and financial insecurity. If I’d known how hard it would be, I’d never have started. Zanna would be at home every night on her own with the kids, and I’d be at work. She’d married an accountant, not a chef! Our second child, Jessie, was born the year the restaurant opened. I couldn’t be there for her birth.

When I’m asked what I’d be doing if I wasn’t cooking, it’s like being asked to answer a question in Mandarin. I don’t know what to say. I want the people who eat my food to get the experience I had in Provence. I don’t have a spectacular setting in Bray, so I have to bring other things into play with the food — multi-sensory effects, surprising tastes, a bit of theatre at the table. Even if I’d staved off opening a restaurant until I was 40, I’d still have eventually had to give it a good old go. From the age of 15, from that meal on, there was no option.

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