I think when we opened in 2001, it was holy ground. There was nothing here. Back then, being on the Dubai Creek was an amazing position, and I would come one or two times a year, max. Now it's so different. The travel dilemma has disappeared and it is so easy to get to Dubai. What is it, seven hours from London? It's pretty easy.
Long Island for me, it's producing more chefs coming out of there than Paris.
I've never been a hands-on dad. I'm not ashamed to admit it, but you can't run a restaurant and be home for tea at 4:30 and bath and change nappies.
I cook for a living; I'm not a scheduler.
Given that level of responsibility with your 25-year old or 35-year-old chef, it's just quite nice to see how they handled that exposure. Not every chef deals with it properly; they get slightly excited, a little bit overconfident and then they miss out on the most important part.
My mum doesn't enjoy sometimes listening to me tell staff off, and I say to my mum, it's a kitchen, not a hair-dressing salon.
Can you imagine the headlines if I gave someone food poisoning? They'd hang me off Tower Bridge by my ballbag!
I want my kids to see me as Dad, for God's sake, not a television personality.
I'm not critic-proof, and I still take it personally, but I take it less personally now.
When you find a guy who is powerful, a big father figure, you latch onto him immediately.
I think pressure's healthy, and very few can handle it.
No one saw the recession coming. The UK businesses were solid as a rock, but the issues we had were in Paris, New York and LA. For every pound we were making here we were losing two pounds abroad.
I'm a big lover of fish. Cooking fish is so much more difficult than cooking protein meats, because there are no temperatures in the medium, rare, well done cooking a stunning sea bass or a scallop.
The kids now, on "Junior," we educate the parents and it's quite a fascinating turnaround. You can just see the parents thinking, "S - , 10 years ago I was eating so bad, and now I'm seeing it through the eyes of my kids at 9, 10 years of age." There is an upside to that side of reality TV. It's not all negative.
Cooking today is far greater than it ever was, and more importantly, a chef's role today has changed dramatically over the last decade.
Cooking today is a young man's game, I don't give a bollocks what anyone says.
To have 95% of the ingredients sourced, food and wine, within 100 miles radius, that's a dream come true for any chef.
From 16 to 26, no one really knows what they want to do for the rest of their life at that age. Latin's not f - ing one of them.
The parents are the issue, because it's not the kids' fault. They're the ones on the playground getting the s - and the jokes and the bullying, because of their size and they're obese. It's not the kids, it's the f - ing parents.
Jack, my 16 year old, was in knots a couple of months back, studying for Latin. I said, "Mate, you've got no interest in Latin. You don't want to go into it after, so drop it." He said, "No, I can't. I'm going to get bullied at school because all my mates are in there." There's a prime example of why no one cooks at school. You're studying Latin, you've got no interest.
I quite like that jeopardy, those up-against-the-wall odds. I don't like it when it's over-comfortable, too easy, something that can be done in two or three weeks. I like a challenge.
First of all, when you build a restaurant of that phenomenon-I really hate that word "set" and I hate the word "cast" -it is from the most amazing health and hygiene ... properly air conditioned, properly irrigated with hot and cold running water... Obviously, FOX is paying for it, so in terms of expenditure it's far more economical and on the back of the draw were 22,500 cast. Finding 30 chefs in that bunch wasn't difficult.
We're fragile, fragmented souls who are very sensitive to criticism.
Everything I learned and didn't do in New York I would put into place here in the London West Hollywood. It's fascinating, when you look at the critics' reviews, and we had a great one in the New York Observer and all that, and then the New York Times came and it was a devastation; two stars out of four. They said that I played safe because it wasn't fireworks. Then they judged the persona over the substance that was on the plate.
You can't depend on the exposure of a TV screen to keep your feet on the ground and your food tasting delicious. You've got to push yourself.
