I am sitting in a restaurant waiting for John Burton Race, and I am not looking forward to seeing him again. The last time was a year ago, in Manchester, where we were taking part in a live cookery show for ITV, and our evening had ended with me shouting at him. The night before the broadcast, a group of us from the production had holed up in the hotel bar where Burton-Race drained his glass and dominated the conversation. I had been warned about his talent for the controversial and he didn't disappoint. There were long speeches about the evil that women do, the incompetences of fellow chefs and his attitudes to the local people he lived alongside in Africa when he was a child; views that weren't likely to make him many friends within Britain's black community any day soon.
Eventually I'd had enough. I told him - barked at him - that his comments were unacceptable, that I would not let him sit there talking like that and be allowed to think it was OK. He hesitated for a moment, before changing the subject and wittering on. A few minutes later I pleaded fatigue and retired for the night, fizzing with anger.
And now I have to share supper with him in a London restaurant. I have chosen the venue carefully, even checking with Will Smith, co-owner of the Michelin-starred Wild Honey in Mayfair that neither he nor the chef Anthony Demetre have ever had rows with my interviewee. With Burton-Race it's always best to check. He attracts dramas and intrigues the way dogs attract fleas. Although he came to public prominence as the devoted family man on the series French Leave and the sequel, Return of the Chef, in which his wife Kim and six of the eight kids they have between them featured heavily, he turned out to be rather less devoted to that particular family than many thought. In March 2007 he left for his lover Suzi Ward, his agent's one-time personal assistant, and their then two-year-old son Pip, his fifth child, of whom Kim knew nothing.
A long and very public battle over assets between ex-husband and wife ensued which culminated with Kim closing their restaurant, the New Angel in Dartmouth, while Burton-Race was deep in the Australian jungle as a contestant on I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here. He knew nothing of it until he was evicted by public vote.
So the man has history. I am reassured, however, that he has no particular history with tonight's restaurant. I settle into our booth and await his arrival, from yet another television shoot. And then he is there, grinning, apparently pleased to see me. If he recalls our last exchange he doesn't show it - though, in time, I will discover that he does, and in detail.
He is an unlikely-looking figure for television fame, the big domed forehead, prominent teeth and sunken eyes lending him a cadaverous air, but it doesn't seem to hold him back. As well as French Leave, Burton-Race, now 50, has appeared with Angela Hartnett in Kitchen Criminals for BBC2 and fronts ITV's Britain's Best Dish. Tonight, officially, he is here to promote his new book, Flavour First, to be published next month, though he talks about it with a distracted air.
'It's my favourite ingredients,' he says, 'seasonal and around the world. Inasmuch as don't buy a fucking raspberry unless it's in season - though your season might be earlier than mine.' The Ramsay-esque drop of the expletive is a feature of his conversation, even when he is not particularly focused, as now. He's scanning the wood-panelled room, fingering the stem of his empty glass, glancing at the menu. So we get him wine and order braised pig's head followed by veal and lamb, bourgeois French food of the sort that he used to cook.
The suspicion is that the book feels like a part of the old Burton-Race, the career chef known and respected in the industry rather than beyond it. For years he was the chef-proprietor at L'ortolan near Reading, where he won two Michelin stars for dishes like snails wrapped in foie gras mousseline or guinea fowl with Madeira and black truffle sauce - though he never boasted the profile of some of his peers. The only time he achieved any notoriety, giving a taste of what was to come, was in 1995 when an undercover camera crew caught one of his senior chefs bullying a junior. In 2000 he moved the restaurant into London's Landmark Hotel, where he once again won two stars but went bust doing so.
We talk politely about the book for a while, but it's clear he wants to talk about other stuff. The controversial stuff. So, I ask, what happened between him and his wife over the New Angel in Dartmouth? Now he looks at me. 'I got shafted when I went to Australia, that's what happened,' he says. 'My ex-wife and I were business partners. When we started doing well I bought the freehold and put it in a trust giving her equal voting rights.' Which meant she had the full power to close the business and sack all the staff. 'There's no rationale to a woman who shuts a place down that she's drawing a salary from. I mean, I understand a woman scorned and all that, but it doesn't make sense.' I ask him how much his trip to the jungle cost him. 'I'd say about half a million quid.' He got paid £65,000 for appearing on I'm A Celebrity of which, after agent's fees and tax, he saw around £35,000. Not really worth it then? 'No, not really worth it.'
Where did everything go wrong? He first points at the move into London. 'I'm not a city person. I'm a country bumpkin really. And doing a restaurant in London, that's telephone numbers.' He believes money was at the heart of the problems in his marriage. 'Materially Kim was far more ambitious than I was,' he says. 'I couldn't sustain her appetite for money. I was never going to earn enough for a lady like that.' They met in 1996 on a Caribbean island, where he was on holiday with his first wife and their two kids. Kim had four children by a previous marriage and together they would have another two. It was, he concedes, a good marriage at first. The first four years, he describes as blissful. It was only much later, in 2002, when the London restaurant had failed and he accepted the commission from Channel Four for French Leave, that he realised there was a problem.
The idea was that Burton-Race should move the whole tribe to south-west France, give up the daily-chef grind and reconnect with his love of food. Although the show gave the impression that this was a family getting to know each other, the truth was rather different. 'Kim and I were all right when I was living a chef's life in that I got up before everyone else and came back when they were all in bed. Suddenly in France we were living like a married couple and I realised that we had nothing in common.' So why did he do it? He shrugs. 'I hadn't done it before. I wanted to see if I could. I've always liked an enormous challenge.' And he discovered he wasn't up to it. He also discovered he didn't like south-west France that much either. 'It's always duck, duck, fucking duck.'
Instead, every other weekend, he went to Barcelona, where the food was 'wonderful'. Did he take Kim on these trips? 'Er, no. I went alone. I have to come clean. She doesn't have the appreciation of food and wine. It was never going to work. I go at 100 miles an hour. I wear people down. I'm a bit of a basket case. A 12-year-old.'
I suggest to him that the main problem is that he's temperamentally unsuited to family life. 'That's true. I am.' But he has had a lot of families. 'So give me credit for trying hard.' The following year he moved the whole family back to Dartmouth where he purchased the renowned Carved Angel, opened by foodie pioneers Joyce Molyneaux and Tom Jaine in the mid-Seventies, and renamed it the New Angel. The Return of the Chef again followed the everyday dramas of the Burton-Race family as they struggled to get the restaurant on its feet, though left out one vital part of the story because nobody knew: the chef had met and fallen in love with another woman, Suzi Ward. 'I lived a lie,' he says now. 'It was a double life for the best part of four years.'
When did he decide Suzi was the woman for him? 'The first day I met her. She's not interested in money. She's got a brain. She likes food. She likes wine. I can sit and bore the shit out of her by talking about food and wine. It's just so nice. Because she's so strong and independent I get the feeling she doesn't need me at all. Sometimes I feel like a little boy looking for his mother's approval.' We are, for what it's worth, at the bottom of the first bottle by now, though Burton-Race's enthusiasm doesn't appear to be alcohol-dependent. He is gushing, enthused, alight for the first time.
And yet he stayed with Kim, despite the fact that he had fathered a child with Suzi. He nods. 'Because of the guilt, the kids, the usual stuff.' Eventually, courtesy of a text message, Kim found out about the affair and threw him out of the house. She followed that by giving a series of interviews in which she accused him of drunkenness, abusive behaviour and, on one occasion, firing a shotgun. The police took no action. In one interview Burton-Race denied that he had fired the shotgun. I remind him of that and he shakes his head. 'I don't think I've ever confirmed or denied that.' He then describes a situation involving one of his eldest stepdaughters and her boyfriend and behaviour he considered unreasonable. 'What's a man to do? I am an emotional person.' He leans into me. 'I'm not a fucking love rat. I've had less shags than any man I know. I'm not a rat or a dog. The important thing is that I know I love Suzi and I know I love Pip. I know I love all my kids.' He rattles off their many names.
I accept his fatherly instincts but point out that, as a result of his behaviour, his children have suffered. He agrees. 'I've failed as a father and as a family man. So... try again.' He has another drink. 'Anyway, kids are pretty robust. I was.' His was a curious, peripatetic childhood, lived out both at boarding schools and in far-flung corners of the world where the man he called Dad was the United Nations' director of development planning for the Far East. Except he wasn't his natural father. 'I didn't even meet my natural father until I was 42.'
He admits that throughout his childhood the thought of the man who had fathered him caused him endless distress. 'I loved him. I hated him. Felt rejected by him. I felt a need to prove something to him.' But this, he swears, made him stronger. 'I've talked to hugely successful businessmen and all of them are successful because they are insecure. You can track it back to a fucked-up childhood and it's the same for me. I had everything to prove because of an absent father.' Is that how he rationalises the way his kids have suffered because of his behaviour? 'In a way, yes. I do think it will make them stronger.' Then he denies they have suffered at all, pointing out that his son has recently won a scholarship to his school. 'He wouldn't have managed that if he was unhappy would he?' Perhaps. Then again, maybe the striving for academic success was how he dealt with it. 'What? Like burying yourself in your work? I hadn't thought of it that way.'
At various times he has been accused of not keeping in contact with his kids. He counters that his ex-wives have made it difficult for him to do so, and talks about the legal wranglings with which he's been involved. 'The women I've been with know my weaknesses. First they attack my financial wellbeing. What can they do after that? They stop me seeing my children.' This is the cue for a long diatribe about the courts and the way they favour mothers over fathers. 'Women in this country flout court orders all the time and nothing happens to them. Nothing.'
He sounds like he regards himself as more sinned against than sinning. 'One hundred per cent. I've given everything and got nothing back.' Hang on a second. He did have an adulterous affair. He agrees. 'Not only did I shag someone else. I had a child. Absolutely no excuse. Outrageous behaviour. But that's me. Like it or lump it. I'm never boring.' Does he understand why his wife did what she did to the restaurant? 'Of course. Kim wants my total destruction. And to be honest do you blame her?'
He claims that she almost achieved her goal. The first he heard about the closure of the restaurant was from the paparazzi photographing him as he exited the jungle. 'I rang the restaurant number and there was no answer. I kept ringing around. Finally I got hold of the head chef and he confirmed it.' In what even Burton-Race acknowledges was a 'masterstroke', Kim redirected any inquiries to his mobile phone number, which she posted on the door of the closed restaurant. 'Yeah that was fucking brilliant wasn't it.'
His return to Britain was not good. 'I came back to an overdraft of £15,000, suppliers wanting to kill me, mentally, emotionally devastated. It was like losing a limb. It's the lowest place I've ever been in my career.' Just how low did he get? He runs a finger tip across his neck. 'I could have slit my own throat but I didn't have the guts to do it.' I wonder if he wasn't dissuaded by a sense of the people depending on him. He shakes his head. 'When you get that low you don't care.'
It seems obvious that he is the author of his own misfortunes. After all, I say, if a thought comes into his head he just seems to say it. I remind him of our exchange in Manchester. He says he remembers. 'But when you feel so strongly about something aren't you unable to stop yourself saying something even if it's unpopular? Look, someone like me who's completely off the wall, then fuelled with wine, can be insane. Sometimes to protect yourself and push people away it's easier to be rude.'
And that's what drives him? He says it is. 'Even my mother said I'm an adrenaline junkie. She said to me every time life's stable, halfway normal, you put a stick of dynamite in there and blow it up. So here I am, a bloke who craves security trying to destroy it when I get it. What's all that about?'
We are now less involved in an interview than a drink-fuelled psychotherapy session. I ask him what he thinks the explanation is. 'I asked Suzi and she just said I'm driven. I'm trying to learn to behave. Maybe I'm like one of those labradors that's untrainable.' Does that mean he could end up leaving Suzi too? 'No, no. I've found my soulmate. She would have to be the one to leave.'
Life, he says, is looking up. He has more television work than he knows what to do with and recently an old friend from L'ortolan days, an internet entrepreneur called Clive Jacobs, bought the New Angel from the receivers and reinstalled Burton-Race as chef again. He's a salary man now. That, he says, is the way it has to be until the divorce settlement from Kim is agreed. 'I'm back on the pass, taking on my own head chef who's years younger than me. That's the kind of man I am.' He's trying to live in the present tense, which is possibly the only safe place for a man like John Burton-Race to be.
John Burton-Race's fillet steaks with anchoide, capers and mustard
I first ate this in the south of France. Anchovies have a natural affinity with lamb, but I didn't believe they would work with beef. Trust me, they do...
Serves 4
4 beef fillet steaks, about 150g each, or rump steaks, about 175g
salt and pepper
vegetable oil, for frying
60g capers, rinsed and dried
2 tbs Dijon mustard
for the anchoide:
300g anchovy fillets, drained
8 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped
100ml olive oil
3 tbs chopped parsley
a few tarragon sprigs, blanched briefly in boiling water
3 tbs chives
First make the anchoide. Put the anchovies in a food processor with the garlic, olive oil, parsley, tarragon and chives and purée until smooth. Add 50ml boiling water and whizz to a paste.
Preheat the oven to 200°C/gas 6. Place an ovenproof skillet or heavy-based frying pan over a medium-high heat. Season each steak with a little salt. Add a tablespoon and a half of oil to the pan and when it is hot, add the steaks. Fry briefly to seal and brown on both sides.
Transfer the pan to the oven to finish cooking the steaks. Allow approximately five minutes for rare, or 7-8 minutes for medium, depending on thickness.
In the meantime, heat a 5cm depth of oil in a small, deep heavy-based pan. When hot, add the capers and deep-fry for 30 seconds until crispy. Drain on kitchen paper.
To serve, brush the top of each steak with a little Dijon mustard and place on warmed plates. Spoon over the anchovy sauce and scatter the crispy capers over the steaks and around the plate. Serve with a salad or warm fine beans and new potatoes.
· Taken from Flavour First (Quadrille, £20). To order a copy for £18 with free UK p&p go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0885
