roll in the toilets are neat: 'We don't fold the paper into a point like in a hotel because it's not our style. But I like a clean edge,' he says sheepishly. 'I once found a jagged edge on a piece and I went mental. I went f***ing mental. I'm fully aware that I probably come across as mad but the staff respect that... and they won't do it again.' He is not, though, a chef given to shouting like Gordon Ramsay, throwing tantrums like Marco Pierre White or allegedly branding his staff with red-hot palette knives like Tom Aikens. 'The best kitchens are the quietest and most efficient,' he says. 'With cooking like mine, that's product-driven and restrained, the chef is subservient to the ingredients' -- and to the recipe. He's just spent the morning refining a speckled endive salad with gingerbread, mint and orange, whose ingredients include '12 leaves of endive, 16 mint leaves and 12 bits of orange'. All the quantities he uses are as precise as this. I fear that it's going to make the cookery book he has planned for next year a struggle to follow, particularly as the ingredients he works with are a little esoteric. 'I'm currently devising a lentil dish, trying some with wheat beer and some with an aged tea that's ten years old so it's got a damp, mushroomy earthiness about it,' he says, rummaging around behind the bar to find me a sample to bury my nose in. Oddly