If I had come to see him two years ago, says Jean-Christophe Novelli, I would have met a very different man. 'I was on a grill then,' he says. 'I'd been on that grill for maybe a year and a half, trying to survive, another turn or two and I'd have been well and truly finished. That grill is not a good place to be, believe me.'

Novelli, one of the handful of inspired chefs of his generation, is referring to what he calls the 'Allo 'Allo period of his career. These were the days in 1999 which culminated in the doors of his signature Clerkenwell restaurant being shut against bailiffs while he ushered loyal customers in and out of the back entrance, his mind everywhere but on his cooking, wondering mostly how he might escape. He had in the previous weeks been told that his chain of restaurants was losing many thousands of pounds a week, his latest accountant had left in tears along with most of his staff. He had not slept for months on end, his bank manager's own job was on the line, and his ex-wife was suing him for maintenance. If you were a historian of late twentieth century London, you might see something symbolic in Novelli's story: how, in the golden Restaurant Age of the Nineties, the years when the expense accounts of a booming City bankrolled the greatest expansion of lavish gastronomy the capital had ever seen, when cooking became a spectator sport and every chef seemed a celebrity, Novelli was the man who allowed himself to get too close to the barbecue pit. With his film-star looks (he was in 1998 nominated as the world's sexiest chef by the New York Times) and his renowned intensity, he was among the brightest stars in a curious firmament of household name cooks - and then the most visible casualty of a literal tightening of belts as the millennium turned.

Novelli's saviour, in this expensively appointed kitchen sink drama, was, appropriately, the man who set in motion the whole idea of London as a restaurant capital, the man who Novelli refers to as his greatest friend and as one of the 'very few inspired artists Britain has produced': Marco Pierre White. From the moment Novelli had been introduced to Marco (by the polymathic food critic Jonathan Meades many years ago) he had made him both his mentor and his inspiration. While Novelli was working wonders at a Geddes, a relatively low-rent place in Southampton, Marco was showing him some of the secrets of his kitchen at Harvey's in Wandsworth. When Novelli graduated to working for Keith Floyd, when he gained his first Michelin star in Lymington, when he took over at the Four Seasons in Mayfair aged 34, Marco remained his talisman. And when his dreams cracked and broke, Marco was there to rescue him, too.

They had not, at the time, been in touch with each other for many months. As the financial pressures on him had increased Novelli had stopped talking. 'It's not really something you want to shout about,' he says now. 'And it's not really what people want to hear: "I'm dying here, you know, come and collect your belongings and run as fast as you can." So I was silent, bottled up. I became very aggressive, too. I was not a human being any more, really. And I was not even speaking to Marco, my great friend, for six months probably.'

Eventually though, having spent a night surfing the internet overly excited about the prospect of buying a snowbound cafe in Canada, ('I had it all worked out'), Novelli responded for once to the March of the Valkyries ring tone of his mobile phone. It was, of course, Marco, first inviting him to his forthcoming wedding, second insisting that they talk about his problems. They met up that night, went out for a Chinese, talked until morning. 'I think,' says Novelli, 'at that point I had about a week left to live.'

He poured out everything to Marco; the size of his debts and liabilities, or at least his approximation of them, the fact that the ways in which in trying to do everything - to run his business, draw up half a dozen menus, fulfil contracts to write cookery books, do his own PR, open restaurants here and shops there, do a tour of America and expand his interests in South Africa, keep his head together - he was doing precisely nothing. Marco, he says, in reply, very measured, gave him some names of people who were once bankrupt and who were now successful. He reinforced just how much his friend had achieved. He told him that the name Novelli was something special and how no one could take that away from him, and he arrived in Clerkenwell the next day with his cheque book asking how much he needed to at least keep his flagship restaurant, Maison Novelli, afloat.

'I was so embarrassed,' says Novelli now, in his office above that restaurant, 'And so honoured that he wanted to help after the way I had behaved. I said to him "Take the fucking place". But he said it was my place, and that he didn't give a flying fuck what I thought, that I was going down and in no position to argue. And he signed me a cheque, much more than I expected or deserved. Later we worked out a partnership deal, which would allow me to do what I'm best at, cooking. And for a while I saw him every day. And I started again.'

The experience of starting over was certainly not a new one for Novelli, whose extraordinary career has always had something of a slash-and-burn quality. Square one is a place he is familiar with from childhood. He grew up in an industrial town in northern France. His father worked fixing electrical cables. His mother was a seamstress. Novelli did not eat in a restaurant until he was 17 but, as a child, he loved watching his mother in her cramped kitchen. She was, he says, a fantastic natural cook and occasionally he would sit still for a moment and let himself observe her go about the task of feeding the family of six. He'd go with her to the local market twice a week, and he has never forgotten how she would close her eyes and direct herself around the stalls with the smell. When she brought all of this produce back home, Novelli recalls how there was 'something that kept you looking at her. Something fabulous about that melodious process of cooking that kept my attention. And I have kept that sense somewhere for ever.'

Even when he got his first Michelin star, he says, he'd be calling his mother and asking for some habitual recipe, and he admits there are still tastes she can conjure with beef tomatoes and mince and cheese that he cannot replicate however hard he tries.

This sense of harmony was absent from all other areas of Novelli's childhood. He was hyperactive. At school they put him in a remedial class, doing manual work, and he was more distracted than ever. 'I have lots of scars on my face from that period, but I do not remember myself fighting. But I also had a sense that people liked to have me around.' Then one day, his regular teacher was ill, and he had a wonderful temporary woman who said something new to his class: I want you to write a story. No one had ever said that before.

'We had to find a subject we cared about,' he says, still excited by the idea. 'And describe it. Next to where I lived there was a bakery. I went past these big arched doors every day on my way to school and I loved the smell of this place and the way you could buy a little hot croissant there. So this morning I went there and I looked, and I wrote something. And my teacher was seriously impressed. After that the ambience of that place stayed with me, and I knew from that moment what I wanted to do. Shortly afterwards, I went back there, and got a job. But then sadly one of the pastry makers fell into a mixer and the place was closed. Instead, I got a job at another baker's on the other side of town, and I had to be there at 2.30 in the morning. I carried on at school during the day. I had no sleep at all, and I loved it. And I was appreciated at home because I'd bring all these cakes and gradually I stopped going to school and was working at the bakery. I was 14.'

By the time Novelli was 19 he had finished his national service and was working in Corsica, at an exclusive holiday village. He saw more action there than he did in the army. The reception of the hotel, owned by the Rothschild family, was blown up a couple of times by local terrorists while he was there, but also he was very lucky, 'because there was this little port and I got friendly with some fishing guys and got the best lobster, the best sea bass. And there was enough for me to try a lot and fuck up a lot. I was only doing 10 covers a day to start. By the end I was doing 60 covers, the star attraction.'

Novelli had seen this holiday job as a route into one of the hierarchical kitchens of a big Parisian hotel, and he duly landed a job as a commis, the lowest rung, but he was never born to be a porter and peeler. While he was there a request came in from a private kitchen for a temporary chef. The job would involve working mornings and afternoons and still doing his shifts at the hotel, but Novelli, never in need of much sleep, went along. He arrived at one of the great houses of Paris, a pavilion in the eighth arrondissement owned again by the Rothschild family. He had tea with Elie de Rothschild and then met the head chef and saw this extraordinary kitchen.

'Baskets of truffles! Foie gras! Goose! I was in heaven you know. I said, you don't have to pay me! The Queen had apparently been there the week before, we had Giscard d'Estaing the following week. I'd be there at six in the morning and drive to the great market on the eighth and all the greengrocers, butchers, fishmongers were there dealing with the cr¿me de la cr¿me chefs, Mitterrand, film stars, Donna Summer...And we'd all have a coffee in a particular cafe and share gossip from all these different worlds. I was like Alice in Wonderland, and it was all learning.'

He says his fear was never about cooking but his unworldliness. His energy struck a chord with his new patron. Elie de Rothschild took to advising him about his life, and he got the idea into his head that his brilliant young chef should go to England to learn English. 'I mean I was still struggling with French,' he recalls 'but I think he sensed it would give me some freedom, and some confidence.'

To start with, Novelli was in Southampton, just off the ferry, in a restaurant between a pub and a night club. One night Jonathan Meades came down, spoke to the young chef, wrote a rare glowing review, and chose his little restaurant as the best outside London. Better still, Meades introduced him to his Best Newcomer, Marco Pierre White. 'It was like I was in the fourth division fighting relegation, and somebody told me I should be playing for Manchester United. And I had a vision of who I could be. It was as if I had known all along.'

His route to where he could be led him a curious journey along the south coast. He fetched up in Falmouth, and soon after his marriage broke up (he had a six-year-old daughter), he was fired. He had no job and nowhere to stay, but another guardian angel appeared. 'Rick Stein called and said he'd heard about me, and that he couldn't take me on permanently but he would give me a bed for two months and a job for that time to allow me to find something else. He saw something in me, I think.'

This refuge was extended when Stein introduced Novelli to his friend Keith Floyd, who, his TV career having taken off, was looking for a new chef at his pub, The Maltsters Arms. He met Novelli for a lunch that went on until the early hours, trying to persuade him to work for him. Novelli was resistant at first because his goal was to get a Michelin star and that would not happen in a pub. 'I wanted that star as a passport if you like, as something no one could take away from me, something fixed in my life.' But because he liked Floyd and because they had drunk some good wine, he eventually said he'd give him three months. In return, Floyd gave him the keys to the restaurant, the keys to his house and a credit card which was to be his wages. And then he said: 'Right! I'm off!' and shortly disappeared to Australia.

As Novelli grew into his job, Floyd took to calling him 'prototype'. 'All the time Marco was showing me the Michelin scene. And good food, too, was becoming part of the culture, very much so. So I guess I stole some techniques from Marco and some of Keith's style, his way with customers, and all these influences from France or whatever, and slowly I developed my own way of cooking.' When he was ready to start on his own, he again let chance take over. He was visiting his daughter who was at school in Lymington. And on the way back, on a whim he stopped at a derelict restaurant that had been closed for years, wandered in to meet a man who was in the process of refurbishing it. They got talking, he took Novelli's number and that night the proprietor, Bill Stone, phoned him and said he remembered his cooking from Southampton and he offered him the job of chef-patron of the restaurant on the spot.

Within a year, the restaurant, Provence, was chosen by Michelin as one of the three best, along with Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons and Le Gavroche, and Novelli earned his first star. Better still, they were making good money, partly because they did everything themselves. Novelli was baking his own bread and smoking his own salmon. In the kitchen he began to work wonders with spun sugar. An extraordinary Jack in the Box cake with an edible spring won him 'sweet of the year', and he started making lacy swans to order, sugar birds so delicate that the only thing missing, one critic suggested, was that they could fly.

But as always with Novelli, his success seemed to bring with it more problems. 'When we got the star, it became a war between me and the proprietor,' he says. 'He wanted control, but I was getting all the attention, making everything happen. And one day I just said I'm off, walked out. And I went straight away to the Job Centre and signed on as a Michelin-starred chef.' But pretty soon he was back working as the head chef of a hotel, The Four Seasons.

For a couple of years, Novelli convinced himself he could be like one of the impresario chefs he had seen in Paris in his youth. 'I was like the king of the castle there. I would walk through the lounge and feel that I owned the place. Like a top chef in France. I was not coming to work. I was coming to perform.' But soon things he found things becoming very formal again. It was like driving a Bentley, very safe, very sedate. And also he felt he did not have much in common with his clientele. 'They were very grand,' he says, 'looking for a nice meal here then off to France, off to Canada, off to Brazil. They could not give a fuck about my cooking.'

Sensing this dissatisfaction in his friend, one night Marco Pierre White drove him to a little restaurant in a then not very fashionable part of London, on Clerkenwell Green. There was no one in the restaurant. The neighbourhood seemed dead. And Marco suggested he buy the place. 'I said, "Why the fuck you want me to come here?"' Marco told him he couldn't afford the West End. That a cook as good as he was could make people drive from the West End. He said he would attract custom from the cash-rich City. Novelli was persuaded.

The magic took a little time to work. Novelli had only enough money for the keys, some black and white paint, some old school tables and horrific chairs. He opened in June but in the first few months he was already nearly bankrupt: he could not afford to change the signs, so it was still called Cafe St Pierre. One day, one of his few customers left a paper on the table and he saw an advert for a loan company, and in desperation borrowed another £10,000. After that, he says, he was painting all night and cooking all day, selling Four Seasons food at a quarter of the price. Eventually people noticed. There were good reviews. The night Michelin came, he was painting the lavatories , but he got his star back, and suddenly there were more bookings than he knew what to do with. 'We had Rod Stewart, politicians, film stars,' he says. 'We kept running out of food. It was unreal. I felt so good.' From £3,000 when he started he was now taking £65,000 a week. It went to his head.

Looking back now, he can see many reasons for the crash that followed. Mainly he says, he was running his business like he was running the kitchen, with a lot of emotions. 'I was acting like the worst kind of chef, but then I was not cooking. And my sense of value had always all come from cooking.'

In 1998, in common with other suddenly fabled chefs, he started to expand his empire. 'I had to buy somewhere else,' he says, once again the hyperactive baker boy. 'I wanted to keep on giving. I just loved the excitement of that. Not the money.' He bought The Ark in Notting Hill, paid cash. And then straightaway he was trying to negotiate extending next door. He purchased Les Saveurs in Mayfair with Rocco Forte, opened a place in South Africa. One day on a whim, he bought a place in Normandy for his parents to retire to: 'I drove them there along these narrow roads and when they got there, this beautiful house, what I thought would be this wonderful surprise, they said: We don't want the bloody thing, we're happy where we are. So I drove them away, and I was stuck with it.'

He laughs wildly remembering how that all felt. 'I was getting out of control. For example, I remember one time I was driving back from France on the motorway and I looked down at the dial and I was travelling 145 miles per hour, and the scary thing was I thought I was doing 70 or 80. I was always trying to catch the impossible ferry or plane or whatever. Everything was going too fast, I was never a drinker but suddenly I was getting pissed all the time, and I was refusing to recognise my weakness, my compulsive behaviour.'

Spending less and less time in the kitchen he tried to replicate himself with other chefs. 'They were great cooks, but they were not me. It was like walking in the sun and having five shadows.' In order to try to keep a check on his finances he phoned the bank twice a day for to find out exactly what was going out and what was coming in. Then he discovered he owed £350,000 in VAT bills. He sacked the person he thought was responsible. 'And then I started sacking everyone. I was looking more for loyalty than any kind of knowledge.'

Still, he was striving for more. When his old sparring partner at Provence in Lymington, Bill Stone, offered to sell his old restaurant to him. 'We called the solicitors. We started to send people there for the big return: restaurant managers, chefs. We were taking bookings for the summer. I organised a launch with the Spice Girls, TV. But the day before I got married for the second time we were still negotiating. I took up smoking again on my wedding day.' Bill Stone came to the wedding. The next day the deal came through. Novelli lost the £80,000 he had already spent.'

By this time, Novelli suggests he was becoming a joke. The stress began to show itself in different ways. He was on TV one time thinking he was cooking sea bass when in fact it was chicken. In June 1999 Novelli was due to go to New York to promote his new recipe book. He was anxious every time there was a phone or a fax, because he knew his life was falling apart. A friend was suing him for unfair dismissal. His trusted restaurant manager had left. His father thought he was taking drugs. When he got back to England his accountant offered a tearful resignation. Novelli ended up having to face his creditors alone. Novelli ended up across a table from six or seven very angry people demanding immediate payment, suggesting he was a crook. And then Michelin took his star away.

It was about this time that Novelli started to think of his snow-hole in Canada. And it was then, of course, that Marco called. When, in the early hours, they had thrashed out their recovery plan, his friend suggested that above all he should not rush back to the pressures of the kitchen. To get his appetite back, Novelli decided to test himself in another arena. He entered himself for the London triathlon. The event, three months away, involved cycling 40km, running 10 km and swimming a mile in the Thames. At the time he entered the furthest he had swum in earnest was a breathless 25 metres. But he had a sense that by getting to the stage where he could survive this he would begin to learn about himself again, and find some discipline, so he started eating correctly, and stopped smoking, stopped drinking, and trained hard twice a day.

In the weeks before he was due to compete his brother invited him to Spain. And when he got there he found that by re-energising his body, some of the old excitement about his vocation was returning too. He went to restaurants, found some wonderful cheeses, some new simple taste combinations, visited vineyards and 'got the bite back'. He drove home from Malaga in 24 hours non stop, a big box of fresh produce on the roof of his car. And then he jumped into the Thames, near the Albert Bridge.

What Jean-Christophe Novelli found, when he came up for air, was something that he thought he had lost for ever: the capacity to surprise himself. He had planned to swim a mile in the freezing Thames in an ambitious 50 minutes. He did it in 32. F. Scott Fitzgerald in his account of his own crack-up at 40, describes the ways in which a man might, at that age, be subject to the 'sort of blow that comes from within - that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realise with finality that you will never be as good a man again.' Talking to Novelli you feel he has suffered just this kind of blow, but that he may yet escape his fate. He has got his energy back for cooking again. While we talk, as evening falls and our scheduled hour together edges towards six, he has his staff at Maison Novelli serve us little examples of his latest artistry, razor thin transparent vegetables, baked into flower petals. He talks about his plans for a relaunch of the restaurant, a simpler concept perhaps, using some of his Spanish experience. And he says that as a result of Marco's backing he feels as though finally he has found his perfect partnership. 'I've got no debts, now. Except in loyalty.'

One of the things he looked forward to, he says, when he was at his lowest point was to meet up in another life with some of the vultures who were then circling him. Now, he says, he has been granted that wish. In recent weeks he has been offered lots of propositions, by the same old people. 'Two guys came last week and said to me, "I want you to be a millionaire again".' He laughs. 'They spent £400 on lunch. And I sat there, and they ran through this thing, told me how Marco was ripping me off. And at the end I just got up and said, forget it, I'm happy here. I'm a chef and this is my home.' He pauses, smiles. 'And I've waited an awful long time to be able to say that.'