You may not know his name, but Jason Atherton is part of Britain’s cheffy inner sanctum. When we meet in the bar at Maze, the Mayfair restaurant of which he is executive head chef, Gordon Ramsay pops in to say hello.

Atherton is a key member of the Ramsay posse and the man behind some of the most inventive food in the country. He describes his cooking style as “very London, very design-driven”, although dishes such as Cornish crab with avocado and sweetcorn sorbet have a globetrotting flavour.

“I like to be considered a trendsetter, not a follower,” Atherton says. He was one of the first chefs in Britain to offer small tasting dishes to showcase the scope of his kitchen’s virtuosity. Earlier this month, he pulled off another coup, with the opening of Maze Grill, where rare-breed meat and New York-style steaks are cooked over coal, then seared at 600C in the UK’s first high-temperature broiler.

Having passed through some of the world’s greatest kitchens, including Ferran Adria’s El Bulli, in Spain, Atherton’s sights are set high. “My dream is a three-star restaurant,” he says. “It’s the ultimate obsession, burning away all the time: the desire to know how good you really are.”

His first cookbook proves he knows how to do simple, as well as show-stopping. Alongside 30 signature recipes from Maze, there are 50 more straightforward dishes – crab on toast and beetroot soup with goat’s cheese – that make use of the same basic ingredients.

“The starting point was the idea of using things up,” he says. “At home, my wife shops and cooks during the week, then at the weekend, I’ll cook three or four meals using what’s left in the fridge. I open the door and I think, ‘Okay, what’s in here?’ ” It’s an acknowledgement that cooking at home is different to in a restaurant. “I’ve seen it when I’m invited to dinner,” says Atherton. “If people know a chef is coming to eat, everything starts getting complicated, with all these fancy garnishes. What I wanted to do with the book was to make dishes for people to prepare at home using the same ingredients I use at Maze. Cooking is all about confidence. You don’t have to get fancy if you don’t want to.”

Extracted and adapted from Maze: The Cookbook by Jason Atherton, with photographs by Ditte Isager (Quadrille £25). To order for the special price of £22.50 (inc p&p), call The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

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