It says much for how level-headed the winner of our Young Chef of the Year award is that, when I ask Stevie Parle whether the Dock Kitchen was part of some master plan, he looks at me, baffled. "What, that aged 25, I should have the dream restaurant?" He has a point. The Dock Kitchen, which occupies one floor of a glass-walled development overlooking the canal at London's Ladbroke Grove, is the kind of restaurant any chef would kill for. There's lots of room, a beautiful open kitchen, and the patronage of the renowned furniture designer Tom Dixon, who is based in the building and first invited Parle to rent the space.

It is the perfect showcase for his food which is big, bold and, as he himself admits, restless. "I don't do fusions within dishes, but the menu may roam a little." Indeed it may. On the menu the lunchtime I visited there were the fat thumbprints of India and Greece, Thailand, Iran, Spain, Mexico and Provence. Partridge came deep fried, in a light Asian batter with a chilli-boosted fish sauce; there was a crisp, dry fry of Indian-spiced chopped beetroot and curry leaves with the bitter tang of his own pickled lemons, followed by a stew of monkfish, scallops, red mullet and clams, the broth heavy with fresh fennel seeds. At the end, there was a palate-cleansing damson ice cream. It would be an accomplished meal from any cook, let alone from one loitering in his mid-20s.

Then again, Parle probably has more experience than chefs a decade older. "I was probably as young as it's possible to be when I first started," he says, after the lunch service. "It was cakes, that sort of thing." He grew up in Birmingham where there were few opportunities for eating out. No matter. His father, a doctor, was obsessed with food. "He was the one who first taught me to cook," he says. By 13 he and a pal were staging dinner parties for his parents' friends, and by 16, less than enamoured of school, he was plotting to make food his life. Asked about his early influences he recalls his parents' cookbook collection, volumes by the likes of Ken Hom, Madhur Jaffrey and Myrtle Allen, the matriarch of the family that founded the cookery school at Ballymaloe in Ireland.

He chose to go there for formal cookery lessons and the French classical ethos was a distance from his own interests. By then he'd already been off on a tour of south-east Asia, the beginnings of the food journeys which would become a part of his life; he has since spent time in India, Japan and Mexico, among other places. However Ballymaloe gave him a serious grounding. "At the end of the course Darina Allen, who ran it, asked me where I'd like to cook and I mentioned the River Café." Allen made the call. The River Café said he should come for a month. He stayed for more than three years.

Today Ruthie Rogers, who founded the restaurant with the late Rose Gray, admits they had never had anyone that young in the kitchen. "But he was really curious, really interested to learn." For his part Parle says the River Café's ingredient-led, seasonal approach suited him perfectly.

Later he would work at both Moro and with Skye Gyngell at Petersham Nurseries. What unites all these experiences, he says, is that the food is an extension of the domestic. "It isn't big cheffy restaurant food. If I'd had to join one of those Michelin brigades it wouldn't have worked for me." Sam Clark, one half of the husband and wife team behind Moro, agrees. "Stevie had this wonderfully ethereal way about him. He'd float about the kitchen, getting an enormous amount done." So what defines his cooking? "He has this way of seeing past a recipe and getting to the core of a dish. He gets under the skin of a culture."

In 2006 he and Joseph Trevelli, friend and fellow chef from the River Café, took over Petersham Nurseries, which was generally closed in the evenings, for a night. The Movable Kitchen, as the evenings became known, operated fewer than a dozen times around London, but captured the imagination of the media, which was just getting into the idea of pop-up restaurants. Finally came the offer of the Dock Kitchen. He opened a year ago, during London Design Week, to rave reviews. It has been a full-on 12 months since then. He's published his first cook book – My Kitchen: Real Food from Near and Far – married his girlfriend Nicky and three months ago, they became parents to Sam, who occasionally snoozes in his pram in the corner of the kitchen. Now he has two others to cook with him, a porter, and a steady stream of customers, who don't seem to mind his eclecticism. "I get away with it because it's always ingredients first," he says. "I like to make food that I imagine I'd get in the place the dish is from." He makes it sound simple, but it isn't. What it comes down to is an abundance of good taste, married to an immense ability to understand how a culinary tradition works.

So is there really no master plan? "Well I'd like to get to a position where I don't have to cook every service." He needs a little space in which to think about new dishes. "For now though, I'm just concentrating on this restaurant." Perhaps, but this will not be the end of his story. Remember Stevie Parle's name. Our Young Chef of the Year is going places.

The Dock Kitchen, Portobello Docks, 342/344 Ladbroke Grove, London W10; 020 8962 1610; dockkitchen.co.uk