According to Antony Worrall Thompson, restaurants are a whole lot of trouble. Get involved with one and, before you know it, everything else will have turned to so much dust. 'I've lost two wives to restaurants, and a fantastic Japanese American girl,' he says. 'I mean, some of it was my own fault - too much dabbling in other women. But it's like a drug: you finish work, you can't sleep because the adrenaline is rushing round, so you end up in a club. You're never at home. Things start to fall apart. It's a bit of a boys' club. It's quite lonely from the female sexual side. Chefs find it easy to get laid, but they can't seem to hold on to relationships.'

He pauses and lights a cigarette. He has been thinking about all this quite a lot because he is in the process of writing an autobiography, Raw, to be published in the summer. His wife, Jay, he tells me, feels he has been a little too honest in the book, but I get the distinct impression that, in merrily dishing up the dark meat as well as the white, he has somehow lightened his psychic load. And crikey, what a load it is - alcoholic mother, long separation from his estranged father, disfiguring accident, a string of disastrous-sounding love affairs, the departure of his two sons to Australia when they were babies. Listen to his story, and you wonder how he ever found the time to cook.

Worrall Thompson lives in a row of cottages in a hamlet just outside Henley. You may have seen the place on the telly because his kitchen doubles as a studio for the BBC's Food and Drink show, of which he is co-presenter. It's an amazing spot. The river is close by and,messing about in the five-acre garden, are his very own pigs and chickens. In fact, one of these pigs is already in the oven - a £32,000 affair so vast it might as well be the control deck of a nuclear submarine - ready for my lunch. 'Will there be crackling?' I ask, biting into a fat piece of fruit cake. 'Yes,' he says. 'Lots.' Oh,goody. I have a feeling that, in spite of his prickly reputation, me and AWT are going to get on just fine.

So, while the pig roasts, we talk about sex, of which Worrall Thompson seems to have had plenty, though it took him a while to get going (he was a virgin until the age of 22). When he was 16, he had a bad rugby accident. The doctors patched his face up but he was told that it could not be properly rebuilt until his bones had stopped growing several years later. 'So those formative years, when you're supposed to get laid...well, I didn't. I couldn't even look at a woman, let alone talk to her. I was very insecure. After the operation, I had a lot of catching up to do.' Even so, his mashed visage had a lasting effect on his confidence. His first two marriages only took place, he thinks now, because he was so stupidly thrilled to discover that someone actually fancied him.

His first wife was going out with the head waiter of the restaurant where he was then working; she was 17, he was 22. 'That was immaturity. That was me saying, "wow, I'm never going to get a woman this beautiful again - I'd better marry her". We were married for about four or five years, not very happily. She ended it. I had a job where they wanted me to employ beautiful waitresses and, of course, the wife wasn't very impressed. She didn't believe I was being faithful because I was staying at work later and later, knowing things were going wrong. I understood where she was coming from,but I was totally innocent at the time.'

There then followed a seven-year gap, during which he seems to have bashed his way through a series of women like so many meringues. In the early Eighties, when he was running his restaurant, Menage à Trois, in London, he met his second wife. 'I'd opened Menage with some help from a rich lover, and it was a huge success, though we lost a fortune to start with. But it was a very, very angry time on the relationship front. She thought all the publicity was based on me, and she hated the customers fawning over me. Then, I wasn't so good at spotting women's needs - for being pampered and reassured. I wasn't very nice.I was enjoying myself and ignoring her.'

His second wife was Australian. 'She was bubbly, I fell in love with her naivety. I finished with the girlfriend in May, got married in December. It was rebound stuff, wasn't it? Stupid. We were together for four years, very happily until our first son was born. Then it started falling apart.' The couple had another son but, when the boys were still tiny, his wife decided to return to Australia. 'I was sad, but I was in love with another girl. I minded that they were leaving, but I wasn't a great baby father. My mother said: "Stop her going, for God's sake." But I relied on my friendly lawyer, and he said: "No,let her go." We get on now, but when we were sorting out the finances...it was very expensive. I feel bitter about that.'

Not unexpectedly, his relationship with his teenage sons is somewhat distant, though he seems relatively untroubled by this fact. 'I've grown to love them, but I can't say absence makes the heart grow fonder. Some people might admire me for staying in contact; you see polls that show that most men don't.I think I've done OK. I've paid regularly, I've been over there. Done my bit. No, I shouldn't have had an affair, but I hadn't grown up. I was still in my broken-face state of mind. I shouldn't have married anyone until I met Jay. You think you love people at the time, but you look back and it's all lust. Forty is the right age for a man to settle down. Before that, he's just a hunter.'

Next up, the Japanese American. When she ended their relationship, there were dramatic scenes at LA airport: Worrall Thompson managed to push his way through a door he shouldn't have, dashed down the runway and was promptly arrested. He wanted to be crushed by a jumbo jet; what he got was a tearful encounter with a sympathetic cop. So, he returned to London, where he had opened 190 Queensgate, and set about seducing yet more girls. Unfortunately, the thrill of the chase was beginning to pall. 'It was getting boring, people leaving in the morning. You get sexual satisfaction - briefly - but it's not that exciting.'

At this point, Jay, who is 14 years his junior,came into his life - though how she endured his deliberately rude and pig-like behaviour in the early days, I have no idea. Jay had been a waitress at Stringfellow's and, because Peter Stringfellow is a good friend of AWT, the old so-and-so had spent many an evening ogling her. A while later, bored of her job, Jay decided to train as a cook and began working as a commis chef at 190. 'I had a game plan by then,' he says. 'I looked her up and down, said "hi" and just walked away. I always gave her a hard time in the kitchen. This was a woman who had everyone falling for her. She'd turned down several major Hollywood stars. I knew that if I went after her, she'd walk all over me. I thought: I've got to make her interested in me.'

It wasn't until Jay handed in her notice that, shark-like, he made his first move, inviting her to help him do the food for one of Fay Maschler's birthday parties. At the end of the evening, as he gave her a lift home, she tried to kiss him, only to have him give her the brush-off. 'I was tempted,' he says. 'But I had to play her.' The same thing happened a few nights later. Finally, on her last ditch attempt to get him to press his whiskery face to hers, he gave in. They have now been together for eight years, and have two children, Toby-Jack and Billie-Lara. 'I liked the fact she could stand up to me, that she was her own person, full of confidence. She's calmed me down, made me nicer, given me the strength to believe in myself.'

He tells me that they never row - well, only enough to keep things interesting - and he seems genuinely content with their lot: the country life, the children, the animals. Two nights a week, she helps him out in his restaurant, Notting Grill. 'We have an easy, loving relationship,' he says. 'We're as happy now as when we started. It's amazing.' Later, Jay who is warm and witty and very beautiful - tells me that he is always booking secret mini-breaks, or turning up with flowers for her and all her friends when they're lunching together. She blows cigar smoke at him across the remains of our roast pork. 'You're quite romantic, aren't you?' she says, in her lovely Irish lilt. Aah.I hardly know where to look.

Antony Worrall Thompson grew up in Kent and Berkshire, the only child of two actors (his godfather was Richard Burton, who had been his father's understudy at the RSC). 'I had a posh sort of family, in a way,' he says. 'My grandmother had servants and my uncle often used to have dinner with Princess Elizabeth at the palace during the war.It was my mother that was the black sheep.' An alcoholic and distinctly inattentive parent, she packed Antony off at the age of three to boarding school, where he was punished for sleepwalking by being shut in a coal hole. At around the same time, she kicked her husband out and his son did not see him again until he was 21.

'She was like that, very stubborn. Afterwards, she kept me away from him, though I can remember writing to him once, begging for some money. I was at King's School, Canterbury and he was once acting at the cathedral - which was only about 110 yards away - and even then he didn't get in contact. He was scared of what my mother would say - he explained that later. When I was about to get married for the first time, I went and knocked on his door. He said: "Yes,can I help you?" When I explained who I was, he went very white, but he asked me in. It felt good because I discovered that he was a nice guy, very gentle, nothing like the way my mother had described him. After that, we had quite a good relationship. I saw him about four times a year.'

While his father overcame his addiction to booze, his mother did not. 'She always hated me turning up at the house because I'd find her and she'd get angry. She'd blame me and harangue me and tell me she was lonely. I learnt not to care too much. At sports day, she would always turn up after my race. On Sundays, when parents arrived at eight, she would get there at about one. I didn't understand it because all the other parents made an effort.She did love me,but not to my face.' He quickly turned into a very naughty child. 'I was a nightmare at school. I pushed a teacher's car into a paddling pool; I ran away with a tramp; I was beaten all the time. I was like a little Jack Russell, very competitive. I'm still like that now, even on Ready Steady Cook.'

He started cooking as a tiny boy, for two reasons. First, an au pair girl gave him a raw bacon sandwich for his lunch - presumably she mistook best back for parma ham - and he realised the only way he was ever going to get properly fed was if he did the job himself. Second,he took to giving his mother breakfast in bed. 'I was desperate to please her,' he says. 'One of the reasons why I enjoy cooking is that I love to be complimented. I was never complimented by my mother ... when a table likes its food, it really lifts you.' His early culinary experiments included butterscotch Angel Delight and duck à l'orange (aged seven, he canoed out onto the Thames and nabbed the bird himself - or so he insists).

After A-levels, he decided to train as a chef but, unfortunately, this didn't go down too well with mater - too downmarket. So he did a hotel management degree instead. 'The most boring three years of my life,' he says, rolling his eyes. 'I just did not care about broadloom carpets.' Thereafter, he had a series of fairly horrible-sounding jobs in kitchens, beginning in Brentwood, Essex, where he was chef-manager of a carvery, and ending up, finally, in Covent Garden. If he didn't know how to perform a particular task, he simply instructed someone else to do it and then kept his beady eye on them. Inevitably, though, every job would end with him punching his boss on the nose and storming out.

He decided to open his own place - Menage à Trois, where the menu consisted entirely of starters and puddings. 'I'd taken a lot of women out to dinner,' he says. 'I'd noticed that they always wanted two starters. I'd also noticed that if you saw two women eating together, they'd always be stuck by the loo or the kitchens, like second class citizens. They were getting a rough deal. So Menage was a restaurant for women - and, of course, it helped a lot when the Princess of Wales started eating there.' Worrall Thompson sold the concept all over the world - Washington, Bombay, Melbourne - though he was too overawed by his sudden success to make any money out of these franchises.'Everyone thought I had all this money. But I didn't. By the time I met Jay, I was broke, basically. I owed a fortune in maintenance payments.'

Since then, he has opened and closed a string of establishments, some successful (Dell'Ugo,190 Queensgate) some a disaster (Woz, his short-lived delicatessen). His fame, however, has just gone on growing, particularly since he started doing Food and Drink and Ready Steady Cook. It helps, of course, that he seems always to be involved in a spat of one kind or another with his culinary colleagues. There was Delia, who described him as 'dreadful, just repulsive' (he replied by calling her 'the coldest woman on television', though the pair have since made up), and, more famously, Gordon Ramsay, whose pet names for AWT include 'the squashed Bee Gee' and 'Ready Steady twat'.

'I wasn't too worried when he called me the squashed Bee Gee,' he says, though given what he has told me about his face, I suspect the jibe did hurt him more than he is willing to let on. 'But when he started saying I can't cook, he went below the belt. I could have sued him, but I thought:no, you're on telly, you've got to take it. He criticises celebrity chefs by insisting he isn't one. Bollocks. We had the same agent for ages: I know how many auditions he's been to - and didn't get. Still, I saw him the other evening and he was quite nice.' His closest friend in cookery is Brian Turner; run through the massed ranks of all the other chefs in Britain, however, and he'll tell you EXACTLY what he thinks.

Not that he considers himself to be invincible. 'I'm aware that I have a shelf life,' he says. To prepare for the arrival of this sell-by date, he is busily expanding his range of organic products and continues to toy with the idea of trying to get selected as a Tory MP - though these days,his support for the party seems a little more halfhearted than of old. 'I met IDS on the countryside march. He said we must talk, but it hasn't happened yet. If Boris [Johnson, the MP for Henley] resigned, I'd love to be the local MP. The trouble is, I doubt I'm popular enough with the blue rinse brigade.' He is also patron of Forest, the pro-smoking campaign group - a role he would cherish even if he gave up cigarettes himself.

If you ask me, he is a rather happy 52-year-old, for all that he is still occasionally insecure. He is self-aware, in love with his wife, on top of his media game and - best of all - not remotely grand; nothing seems to embarrass him. I liked him. Now his bed-hopping days are behind him, he enjoys women for all the right reasons - and,as a result, he is really good at talking. 'Women like to talk,' he says. 'So if you're no good at that, well, it's hopeless, isn't it?' Over lunch, he gives me some excellent relationship advice - though his own rules about when a girl is allowed to call the object of her lust are the strictest I have ever encountered.

The question is: can he cook, or is Gordon Ramsay right about his culinary skills? Well, Worrall Thompson may not be a spinner of sugar or maker of elaborate mousses and gelées, but our roast is heaven - the cabbage, Jerusalem artichokes and carrots done to perfection, the crackling the best I have ever tasted (as Nigella would say, fat is so good for the skin). I leave his corner of Oxfordshire feeling very full indeed. What I want to know is,how on earth does the lovely Jay manage to keep herself so whippet-thin?

· Antony Worrall Thompson dishes up ...

Marco Pierre White:
'The Godfather. He's my undoubted hero, but we fall out all the time. He's very difficult, fixated with his childhood. He's got a way of taking people on in real fast hits and then panicking because he likes to keep everyone at a distance. He's one of the very few geniuses this country has produced, and with geniuses come problems.'

Jamie Oliver:
'I'm Jamie's dad - our approach is the same. He's a natural cook and I admire what he's doing with those kids very much.'

Nigella Lawson:
'First series: very fresh, buzzy. Second series: seen it all before, over-scripted, over-choreographed.'

Gordon Ramsay:
'I think his TV series did a great disservice to our industry. What mother would let their son go into the kitchen after seeing that? I'm very anti his sexism. When he said women could only work three weeks of every month, I thought that was outrageous. He's a great chef, I just wish he'd own up to wanting to be a celebrity.'

· Anthony Worrall Thompson's autobiography will be out in June 2003, published by Transworld.