He catches me completely unawares. One minute Gary Rhodes is explaining how he discovered his on-screen persona, and the next it is right there in front me. He has turned into that Gary Rhodes. 'I realised I had to engage people,' he says. He turns away from me slightly, as if there's an entire studio audience just beside us hanging on his every word. 'Now watch this,' he says, lips fixed in a reassuring half grin, eyes twinkling. 'Here's what we're going to do.' It's the whole package: the grating cadences, the sugared enthusiasm, the puppyish charm. All of a sudden I am fighting a desperate urge to punch him.
And then, snap, that man has gone, and I unclench my fists. We're back to the contemplative chap with the buzz cut that I came to this Crawley hotel to see: the new Gary Rhodes; or perhaps just the Gary Rhodes who was always there but whom he never thought big enough or 'on' enough, for television. Either way he seems finally at peace and with good reason. Somehow the man who, in the Nineties, came to define the phrase 'TV chef', the one with the hair gel and the grin and the irritating turn of phrase, has in this decade emerged as the paterfamilias, the guy who really knows what he's doing.
While the post-Jamie BBC makes ever more desperate stabs at reinventing the TV cookery format with risible series like The Best, Rhodes has carried on doing what he always did: cooking food which, in its careful selection of ingredients, and its understanding of its British context, makes an awful lot of sense. His series of Masterchef, broadcast last year, was a critical success and regarded as a major leap forward from Loyd Grossman's cosy home economics class (even though, much to Rhodes's fury, the BBC then cancelled it).
His subsequent series, Gary Rhodes Cookery Year: Spring into Summer, was also well received. The tie-in book reached number three in the bestseller lists and the follow up, Autumn into Winter, which is published next month, is expected to do the same. In the notoriously fickle world of television and publishing this marks him out as a survivor, venerable enough to challenge Delia. Alongside that he has managed to oversee a set of brasseries plus two more sophisticated restaurants, each with a Michelin star, and he is shortly to open another of the same calibre. All carry his name. 'I'm a cook,' he says at one point as if he were one of his own dishes which needed to be pared down to the essentials. 'That's my job. That's my life.'
Today we are at the antiseptic Arora International Hotel near Gatwick Airport, where he has recently opened a Rhodes and Co brasserie. Like all his restaurants he operates it under contract for the French catering multi-national Sodexho. Every few months he swings in with a team of his head chefs from Manchester and London to change the menu. He invites me to watch as he takes the young brigade through the new dishes, showing them how they break down into the composite parts which must be reassembled at speed during service. This morning he's finishing off the new list of desserts. Out go the whisky rice pudding and the rhubarb cheesecake. In comes a white chocolate marquise and a French brioche toast with strawberries and ice cream.
He stands at the prep table, his back slightly curved, positioning pieces of brioche on a plate, watched by Sarah and David, the pastry chefs. It is exactly the same Rhodes we know from the small screen. He doesn't say 'now let's build the dish' or 'all we're going to do is...', those verbal ticks which he has still not managed to shake before the camera. But it's clear the televisual Rhodes is merely an extension of the one here in this kitchen. He even uses photocopied pages from his cook books - New British Classics and Rhodes about Britain - as the basis for the worksheets he will leave behind when he goes. 'I write these books for people at home,' he says as he calculates quantities, 'and that suits a brasserie environment.'
He experiments with positioning strawberries, which he says he wants 'spilling off the toast'. He adds some puréed raspberries to a bought-in strawberry coulis. 'It's a basic coulis we purchase from France,' he says. 'It's a great quality product and any chef who tells you they don't use it is lying.' What is most striking is the precision with which he works. It's like his very physical frame; there's no flab. 'Success in any walk of life lies in consistency,' he says at one point, with a certainty that suggests he has said it many times before. 'The recipe should be simple to achieve but identical every time. It's like Ronald McDonald. His hamburgers spread across America. That can't be bad.' Later he will qualify the statement: he will say that he has no desire to emulate McDonald's; that he does not see himself as that sort of impersonal brand, which is why he's here in Crawley overseeing the changes himself. It's just the reliability he's after.
Achieving it takes work. Or obsessiveness. He stayed at the hotel last night. He was up at 5am and did a few press ups. Usually, when he's at home in Kent, he gets up at 4.30am. 'I do my workout. Five-thirty I'm in the shower, 5.45 downstairs for the coffee. Six o'clock I'm gone.' And he doesn't eat, not proper meals. A nibble here. A taste there. 'I always point out to people that when they're cooking for a dinner party they don't want to eat either.' Yes, but most of us only do that every now and then, not every day. It can't be healthy. He admits only that he doesn't drink enough water.He makes up for it at weekends, he says, with big meals out with his wife and two boys.
Perhaps, but looking at him, particularly in the unforgivingly white light of this hotel atrium into which we have moved to chat, few would be surprised to learn he has appalling eating habits and doesn't get enough sleep. He's whippet-thin, and there is a worrying paleness to the skin, as if he were running a fever.
The Rhodes story is worth rehearsing because it's clear that his life has always been lived at this pace: he started cooking as a teenager growing up in Kent when his father moved out of the family home and his mother went back to work, leaving him in charge of his sister. Catering college in Thanet followed where he became both student and chef of the year. His first job was as a commis chef at the Amsterdam Hilton. There were stints at the Reform Club in Pall Mall and the Capital Hotel in Knightsbridge before he made it to head chef of the renowned Castle Hotel in Taunton when he was just 26.
It was there, with the encouragement of the Castle's Kit Chapman, that he first began to develop his mastery of solid British cooking: slow cooked faggots and braised cuts of beef, Welsh rarebit and steamed puddings. It was also during his time in Somerset that Glynn Christian, then TV-am's resident chef, asked him to do a few private cookery school demonstrations. 'For the first minute I was nervous,' Rhodes says. 'And then suddenly I thought "just get on with it". Glynn videoed what I did that day and he told me that I might have a future in it.'
Out of that came an appearance on a series called Hot Chefs. He also did some slots on the ill-fated BSB. By then it was the early Nineties and he had been poached by David Levin of the Greenhouse in Mayfair. 'Physically his image was already in place when he arrived,' says Joe Levin, David's son and now managing director of the restaurant. 'Certainly the hair was there. That was the Gary I met.' His first full series for the BBC, Rhodes About Britain, was broadcast in 1994. A second series followed a year later. 'The reason Gary's so good on TV is that it's what he cares about,' Joe Levin says. 'He's a teacher and absolutely rigorous about standards. In the early 1990s there were long periods when he wasn't at the restaurant but quality always stayed up.' Weren't his absences infuriating? 'Not at all. We were packed because of Gary. We used to sell his books by the cartload.'
Rhodes admits that those early television appearances were not all they could have been. 'It's easy to knock them,' he says. 'I do cringe at the length of the hair. I wonder why did I do this or that. But I did move on. I calmed. I matured.' Not that it happened quickly. For a period in the mid- to late-Nineties Rhodes and his hair were everywhere. He signed a huge deal to promote Tate & Lyle, the kings of refined sugar (although it did fit in with his unapologetic creation of syrupy British puddings). He went on the road, like a rock star, filling venues with his tricks at the stove. In 1996, just in his mid-thirties, he was featured on This Is Your Life. The chef as uber-celebrity had arrived. Speaking at the time David Levin was clearly appalled. 'I don't think he is a great chef,' he told a journalist. 'I think he's a very good chef but he's not relaxing. I hope he can work the showbiz bug out of his system. He's got to work it out of his system and then he can come home.'
Rhodes argues that the entertainer on the screen was just him; that he would often perform in the kitchen 'to get the brigade moving and to keep energy levels up. Sometimes when I was at the pass at the Greenhouse I'd tell the whole kitchen to stop and come and look at the dish I had finished. "Look," I'd say. "It can't go out. It's too good. We're too good." It was all about keeping everybody on their toes.' The irony is that, when the switch isn't flicked, he's thoroughly low-key: precise and thoughtful, perhaps even a little detached, hardly the life and soul. (The Observer's John Reardon, whose photographs of Britain's chefs for OFM have won awards, will tell me later that, uniquely, he found it very tough to get to grips with Rhodes as a subject.)
I ask him if he likes being a celebrity. 'I don't like the word celebrity because it's abused. The first thing I always read about me is celebrity chef, spiky-haired cheeky chappie Gary Rhodes. You're categorised like that.' Yes, but he does have spiky hair. Or did. Rhodes always claimed it would go when he was 40 but 18 months later it was still there. It didn't happen until he was signed up to take on Masterchef. The producer, Melanie Jappy (who started as a contestant on the programme), first raised the subject 'but not with him. It was too sensitive. I think it was his security blanket.' She put it to his agent but heard nothing back. 'At the very least I wanted to change his gel. I didn't think he was doing himself justice. People say he's the one with the hair, not he's the brilliantly talented chef. I think he's been battling between "should I be the populist Gary or should I be the great chef?" for a while.' He only turned up at the studios with the haircut - which, admittedly, holds more than an echo of what went before - on the day of rehearsals.
Today Jappy confesses that she wasn't enamoured of Rhodes at first, because she could get so little time with him. That changed the moment the series started shooting. 'I've never worked with anyone as professional as him. He was always prepared. He really did do his reading. He'd read up on all the recipes.' The result was a surprisingly forensic affair in which an intense Rhodes would pull dishes apart. 'It wasn't a question of being hard on contestants,' he says. 'It was a question of being honest.' He admits the cancellation of the series hit him hard. 'Obviously I was upset because I thought we were starting something new. It was the first thing that was pulled out from under me and having that happen does make you feel you've failed. Actually I'm still harassing the Beeb and saying let's give it another shot, because I'm being harassed by the public.'
And yet, for all that, he's keen to stress how little of his time the TV work takes. Thirteen episodes of Masterchef were dispatched in eight days he says, and then it was back to the kitchen. 'People don't know how often I'm in the kitchen,' he announces, perhaps a little desperately. 'People don't realise I'm a cook.' In 1996, while still at the Greenhouse, he was approached by Gardner Merchant, a contract catering company (owned in turn by Sodexho). They would open a set of restaurants which he would have the contract to run. He opened City Rhodes in 1997 and it won its Michelin star within 12 months. In 1998 he opened Rhodes in the Square, in Dolphin Square, Pimlico, which also won a Michelin star. The food at both is smart without being fancy or contrived. It's poached skate with fennel or lamb kidney sausage on bacon and onion bread. It's roast duck with asparagus and morels or glazed beef fillet with horseradish cream. Each restaurant has its own head chef - their names are on the menus - but Rhodes is a presiding presence, and often in the kitchen.
Two Rhodes & Co brasseries followed, one in Manchester and one in Edinburgh, although earlier this year he had to close the latter. 'That closure wasn't through failure,' he insists now. 'It was just through common sense. We had a nice little turnover but it was never enough.' This Crawley venture, which opened late last year is meant to replace it though Rhodes admits it has yet to find its feet. 'I wish we were down that end of the hotel,' he says, pointing towards the entrance some distance away. The idea was that the hotel would be full of airline staff with allowances to spend 'but it seems they might perhaps prefer to spend that money on light meals'. Whatever the reason, they are not yet spending the money with him. 'Yes, we have a bit of a challenge but I always say it will take 12 months. You have to build your daily custom.'
He mentions two other deals that he's working on in the meantime. He's in discussions with the Savoy Group, about taking over the restaurant of the Lygon Arms hotel in the Cotswolds and there are ongoing talks with the owners of the Cumberland Hotel at Marble Arch in London. Again, these would be contracts, although he says he can't say much about either venture while talks are under way.
Wouldn't he prefer to be the boss rather than the hired hand? 'I don't want to own restaurants. If I'd wanted to do that I could have done so a long time ago.' All right then. A different tack. Does he not sometimes wonder just how good a chef he could have been if he hadn't spread his interests so wide? 'I suppose I could have been that three-star chef,' he says, clearly intrigued by the thought. 'Should I have just had one operation, 50 covers and got those two or three stars? Yes I could have done that, but I'm very happy.' And then, as if remembering the reason, says 'I don't like having a diary that says the same thing every day. I like the total difference.'
To get a sense of that variety he suggests I come to see him at City Rhodes during a lunchtime service. They have 110 covers there and most days at lunchtime the place is heaving. He wants me to witness his Michelin-starred kitchen in full flight, with him on the pass sending out dishes, bang, bang, bang. Unfortunately, the only day he can manage happens to fall after a long bank holiday weekend. Business in the city is slack and they have only 40 or 50 people booked in. 'When the kitchen is quiet like this it's a nightmare,' he says, looking at the ranks of chefs, resting back on their stoves, gossiping. 'They're not primed.' It also means that Rhodes is superfluous to requirements. His head chef, Adam Gray, has everything under control.
Instead he talks about other business opportunities. The Lygon Arms deal will not now happen. 'I was very enthusiastic about going into business with them,' he says. 'But I realised I couldn't give it the time it would need. I'd be foolish to take on something outside London like that.' It would require too much travelling, which is dead time. Instead he has agreed a deal with the new owners of the Cumberland Hotel. He will oversee a huge new Rhodes & Co brasserie seating 220 - the first in London - plus a much smaller boutique restaurant seating just 55. That will be a class act.
Again he will be working via a contract with Sodexho, the massive French multi-national catering operation. It seems an oddly impersonal partner for Rhodes, whose whole business is based on the personal touch. Sodexho runs catering in prisons, and in some places even the prisons themselves. The contracts it has to run detention centres for asylum seekers in this country have attracted controversy. The contradiction between the chef and his backer is pointed up by the location of City Rhodes which, while attractive internally, occupies a space carved out of the company's anonymous London headquarters which are situated down a scruffy lane on the edge of the Square Mile.
Asked whether Sodexho suits Rhodes's image he says only 'We've got a company that will back us.' Pushed on the subject he says: 'The main thing is just to put your head down and get on with the business at hand.'
A few orders are now coming in to the kitchen and he turns to listen. One table has ordered the fillet of beef, well done. 'That's a shame,' he says. He discusses the order with the waiter. 'It's a six-year-old girl,' Rhodes tells me, 'so it's understandable.' Ten minutes later two more orders come in for well-done steaks. 'Now that does worry me,' Rhodes says, 'because they are certainly not six years old.' He thinks for a moment. 'But they are the customers aren't they? That's what they want. We are here to provide a service.'
That's what Gary Rhodes is about. Sure, he's played the nation's teacher. And at times he's played the nation's clown. But at base he's a restaurant chef. It's what he's been doing for the past two decades and he hasn't done badly out of it. Why stop now?
