“It’s got lots of lemon juice in it. From lemons grown on my own estate in Turkey,” Mehmet Murat says as he pours a small taste of lentil soup for me to try from a battered old thermos flask.

He’s right. The soup, made by his wife, is sharp, creamy and entirely delicious. Mehmet’s passion for food is obvious as he licks his lips and returns to our original conversation. The fact we are having this conversation whilst perched on stools at the rear of a small electrical supply shop in Clerkenwell, London, makes the conversation all the more unusual.

But then Embassy Electrical Supplies is no ordinary shop and Mehmet Murat no ordinary food hero.

Mehmet moved to the UK as a child in 1955 when his father swapped a job selling donkeys to the British Army in Cyprus for one cutting hair in the back of a Jewish sweet shop in Waltham Cross.

Over the years Mehmet had many different careers, including owning a Turkish restaurant. More recently he concentrated on his small electrical retail business until the death of his father and his subsequent inheritance of 500 olive trees back in Cyprus which pushed him in a new direction in 2002.

The taste of a poor but expensive present of Spanish oil convinced him that the olive oil he was already bringing back to London for his own use deserved a wider audience. Hence, he released his first batch in 2004, sold in sterilised beer bottles and plastic milk containers.

Word of mouth meant that he soon had a legion of loyal customers, further fuelled by a glowing testimonial written by a visiting American journalist from New York Magazine who frequented his store in search of a light bulb but left with two bottles of olive oil which she later penned to be "England's best".

Since then, Mehmet's sideline business has gone from strength to strength. He recently purchased another 45 acres of land in south west Turkey and now imports over a ton of olives and a thousand litres of oil a year.

To this he has added new products including wild oregano, sweet paprika dried in the sun on the terraces of his estate and lemons preserved in salt and garlic. But, it is the olive oil, which remains the star — smooth, bright and fruity with a length of taste that any winemaker would kill for.

At the end of our conversation, Mehmet pressed into my hands a bag containing samples of his range of products to taste at home “if you are going to write about them, you have to try them” he said confirming the generosity of spirit which seeps from the pores of all true food heroes.

I put Mehmet’s products to work in a classic Cypriot dish of “thieves lamb” where the preserved lemons, oregano, paprika and oil combine with garlic and salt to marinate a leg of lamb or mutton before it is slow cooked until the meat falls from the bone and fills the air with wafts of deeply aromatic, savoury steam.

All of Mehmet’s products are available at his website or even better at the shop, where, when you visit, he will insist you taste everything before you buy and will regale you with hilarious stories as you do.

Buy Mehmet's olive oil at Embassy Electrical Supplies, 76 Compton Street, London, EC1V 0BN or at www.planetmem.com

Read Simon Majumdar's food blog here

Times Recommends

• Britain's Top 20 seaside fish and chip shops
• Ice cream makers: the scoop of the century
• British berries make super sorbets