What is it that seriously tempts some people to enter such a demanding and tiring occupation as that of a restaurateur? Let alone the desire to be a chef-proprietor, with its myriad of seemingly small worries calling for considerable intelligence and shrewdness to resolve. For both there are the staff’s ceaseless human problems, constant late nights, often no Sundays or home life to speak of and the long uncertainty of financial success.

Then later comes the eternal pining of every ex-restaurateur to get back to business, which is comparable only to every ex-actor desperately wanting to get back on the stage. I feel the same way, though I sold my last restaurant decades ago.

As for youngsters, it is mostly a passion for cooking that drives them into this difficult existence.

Take John Burton Race, the chef-proprietor of the top-rate New Angel in Dartmouth, who vividly recalls the impression made on him by “a big, fat cook”, one of many in the well-to-do Singapore home of his father, a famous mathematician and a big shot in the Far East of those days. “Cooking,” says Burton Race, “can rise from the craft stage into the realm of art.” Which happens extremely rarely, I have to add.

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Blumenthal will go down in history as the greatest culinary innovator whose brain matched his palate, and he's only 41

Egon Ronay

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After his long apprenticeship in France and over here, and trying to run his own, always excellent but financially less successful restaurant, Burton Race achieved great fame as chef-proprietor of L’Ortolan in Berkshire. But he “struggled” to make ends meet. Why this struggle when his unsurpassed cuisine was among the best in this country? His earnestly meant but funny reply is that “Truly great cooking is an art, but money gets in the way.” In fact, it was only his television programme French Leave, about his year in France, that made money, and half a million books sold in 13 countries. Yet his passionately expressed advice to aspiring chef-proprietors remains: “Have a dream, don’t listen to others. Do completely what you want and follow it doggedly through.” Clearly, a passion for cooking, not money is his priority.

Passion has also been the driving force behind Adam Byatt, 33, of Trinity Restaurant in Clapham, South London, the recent winner of Time Out’s best neighbourhood restaurant category. His mother – “a passionate cook” - was behind his resolve from an early age: “I have always wanted to cook,” he says.

Luck came early: his first job was at Claridges for four and a half years, starting as an apprentice and gradually rising to other posts. Though he has been in his present role as chef/joint-proprietor for only one year he is surely a contender for great gastronomic fame (particularly if he makes his currently excellent dishes a little less complicated). His advice: ‘You have to enjoy pleasing people, to like extremely hard work and love cooking passionately.”

It can only have been passion for cooking that made Ruth Rogers (and her business partner Rose Gray) open the River Café as they had no need for fame and financial success. Ruth, who is the wife of Lord Rogers, our foremost architect, and Rose, are both without a catering background. They had a most unusual incentive to open a restaurant: when Lord Rogers turned some docks buildings near Hammersmith Bridge into his offices, it left a large empty space which the two ladies decided to fill with a restaurant overlooking the river. Lord Rogers’ family is Italian and both Ruth and Rose love Italian food above all others (and I sympathise), not just to eat but to cook. They take cooking - from varying Italian regions - in turn, although they have 15 chefs. “Please don’t ring tomorrow,” she says “I am cooking.”

The famous Raymond Blanc drifted into being a chef, without any kitchen experience, after he came to England to learn the language. Through jobs such as cleaning and washing glasses in a hotel, he found himself being first a junior waiter just carrying trays to and from the kitchen, then being used in the kitchen where eventually his talent and passion for cooking became evident.

It led to his taking the tiniest premises in a shopping arcade in Oxford for his first venture with an unbelievably tiny kitchen of 12 square metres - so Raymond says. I can well recall his quite outstanding food served in a miniature dining room, the Quat’ Saisons.

In a very different Quat’ Saisons, now one of our most respected restaurants and hotels, he commands a staff of 180. From washing up glasses to choosing the best of aspiring chef-proprietors on his popular television series The Restaurant, is a unique achievement. His exceptional passion for cooking is evident when he becomes visibly carried away in a big way talking, for example, about his own ways with the modest sauce Hollandaise. Interestingly, he was the first chef to explore what he calls “molecular” cooking (many years before Heston Blumenthal). His forays were prompted by the culinary interest of the late Nicholas Kurti, a professor of biochemistry at Oxford University and a gourmet with whom Raymond explored what happens chemically in cooking.

The last and truest word on the subject is that of Michel Roux senior, of the Waterside Inn, in Bray, Berkshire, in my view our greatest chef: “Competent cooking is not enough for opening a successful restaurant. A great chef also has to have a good palate – a different matter – and has to be a gourmet as well as a cook.”

Mashed potatoes can be good but, he rightly says, still far from the great Joel Robuchon’s famed potato purée in Paris (which I never fail to order).

Just before opening the epoch-making Gavroche with his brother Albert in London, he had been chef for six years in the formidably gourmet-conscious Rothschild household in Paris. Mlle Rothschild, sister of the Baron, was in charge and possessed a penetrating knowledge and an unerring feel for culinary excellence. She unhesitatingly told Michel, the morning after a dinner party, that the pan in which an omelette had been cooked must have been a little more heated than necessary before using it (Michel told me she was right). I wonder how many hostesses would know the difference, let alone tell the great Michel Roux how to cook an omelette!

© Egon Ronay

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