The restaurant business is about conviviality. Hospitality is a vocation, but it has always been frowned upon in this country as something that you go into if you fail at everything else. I hope that one of the consequences of the credit crisis will be a re-addressing of the aspirations of young people.

I came to England [from Ireland] in the early 1980s with no money and I only ever went into the nightclub business as a way to make money. It was the only thing available to me that I knew because at the time the banks were not lending money to young people.

I like the saying that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" because it is true. Whatever you do in your life, you get up in the morning and you try to do the best you can.

When I opened the Atlantic Bar & Grill there was a belief in London at the time that everything foreign was good and everything indigenous was bad. The Atlantic was indigenous to London and it wasn't like anywhere else in the world, but people did not have enough confidence in themselves, in the city or in the country to think that something good could emanate from London.

I try to do things other people haven't done before. I work for myself because I don't want to deal with others—I want to take my own counsel and feel proud of what I do. I can't feel proud if I copy somebody else.

Being in the restaurant business is like having a baby that never grows out of nappies. It needs nurturing all the time and the moment we move away from it, it falls apart.

If you're not in, you can't win—who gives a damn if you fail? Success generally comes through failure. I am smarter for failing than I would have been without failing.

Having a food culture enhances cultural identity and pride in your country. In France, Italy and Spain cultural identity is tied up with their food and I think in some ways that is happening in Britain now—pride is expressed through food.

I think the government does nothing at all to help the hospitality industry. It is one of the biggest revenue earners and job creators and there is no high-level college for it. It is a joke and the government should be embarrassed. We need a Harvard or an MIT for catering and hospitality, where people are truly trained to a high level and where they go back to be retrained to advance their skills.

Food labelling fascinates me. I think the Soil Association's organic stamps are twaddle. I don't understand how they can be used on products from faraway places.

Marks & Spencer penalises me for getting a plastic bag to carry my produce. It charges 5p and makes a profit out of it, but every piece of fruit and everything that it sells is triple-packaged in very bad things. The company tries to create this illusion of greenness.

It is a problem that our society is dependent on the City. Clearly it is the beating heart and soul of the country, but we need to have a balance. In the US, for better or worse, they make things, they produce things and they have a more balanced economy. We don't have that—we are a completely service-oriented economy.

If my children said they wanted to go and work in the City, I would feel my life is a failure. I won't discourage them, but I want them to pursue as many options as possible. We need a society where people want to go into hospitality, where people want to be engineers, or go into business. We need to get the brightest and best people creating wealth for the country.