What To Eat Now Autumn

A Warner no-no

“I've been interested in food since the first day my mum pushed a plastic spoon in my mouth,” admitted Valentine, but his master chef talents were not exactly apparent in his formative years. “When I was really young, I cooked them [his folks] something which I inexplicably called Australian Bundles. I have no idea why… I had never been to Australia. It was this kind of doughy pancake mess with biscuits. Horrible. But they ate it all,” recalled a light-hearted Valentine about an early failed venture into the kitchen.

The art of cooking

In his teens, Valentine was more preoccupied with becoming an artistic virtuoso than a culinary whiz. He skipped university to join the ranks of budding painters on an art foundation course in Bath, before heading to London to study as a portrait painter at the Byam Shaw School of Art. At the age of 23, realising he was spending most of his time experimenting with food in his kitchen rather than colouring canvases in his art studio, Warner found his calling to cook: “I just thought, ‘what am I doing, why not just put down the brush and pick up the spoon?’”

From fashionable dining to Mexican nosh

After spending several years job-hopping and acquiring valuable culinary knowledge from such cooking greats as Alastair Little, Valentine set up his shop as a private caterer. It was not long before he had cornered the fashion industry, serving sit-down suppers for 700 guests at Gucci and Yves Saint-Laurent functions. The success of the business allowed Valentine to sell his shares and fund a year of fishing in Mexico and Central America, during which time he fell in love with the local cuisine – so much so, that on his return to the UK he co-launched Taqueria, a Mexican-style restaurant in London’s fashionable Notting Hill.

Mr Fungus

Valentine’s taste for truffles (or "little black hard balls of glory" as he called them while sprinkling the treasured fungus over his sloppy scrambled eggs on ‘What to Eat Now’) has earned him the nickname ‘truffle head’. Not a bad a title for a TV cook, especially when you consider he could just as easily have been dubbed ‘mackerel man’ after declaring to ‘Radio Times’ magazine that if he could only eat one fish, it would be the oily king of the sea.

Cooking favourites

Warner’s hearty recipes and affable personality has quickly made him an odds-on-favourite to become the newest addition to TV’s celebrity chef collective – of which he has his own firm favourites. “Keith Floyd has always been a hero… I love the way he cooks exactly how he wants to… and the Two Fat Ladies because they made me laugh so much,” confessed Warner, who has some celebrity admirers of his own. During a recent wine-and-food-fuelled night out at Soho's trendy Quo Vadis restaurant, he received a 2am tap on the shoulder. "I turned around and it was Gordon Ramsay saying ‘Love your show’. I froze. I couldn't think of a thing to say," enthused a starstruck Valentine.

Neither celebrity nor chef

Valentine loves the land of TV cookery, but he is decidedly uncomfortable about being touted as a ‘celebrity chef’. "I find the whole celebrity chef thing infuriating as a concept. I don't care about celebrity at all and I don't call myself a chef because I didn't go down that route. I call myself a cook,” clarified Valentine.

Warner-isms

Every great TV chef has a personal quirk for which they become notorious. Gordon Ramsey swears like a trooper, Nigella Lawson likes to add a dash of saucy seduction to every dish… and Valentine likes to serve up a side order of whimsical prose with every feast. In fact, his catalogue of bizarre analogies, idioms and asides has become as much a trademark of his cuisine as casting his rod to catch a main course. “Treat the risotto like a demanding baby”, “cut the meat into tiny pieces, about the size of the small gobbets that eagle chicks are fed by their parents” and “eat with chopsticks, like a heron catching sticklebacks,” are but a few memorable sayings from Valentine’s wacky vernacular.

Eco cook

Proving his credentials as a modern, forward-thinking man of the kitchen, Valentine’s biggest bugbear is that food manufacturers pollute the natural environment he loves with thoughtless packaging. “I get terribly angry when I see tiny items displayed in oversized nonsense. Why is this still allowed to happen?” posed a defiant Warner when he was recently asked what, in human history, did he wish had never been invented.

Junk food blip

Growing up on a Dorset farm and taught to hunt and fish by his diplomat-turned-politician father, Valentine’s childhood memories are populated with hearty family meals derived from the sumptuous fruits of his surrounding countryside. But when he went to boarding school at the age of eight, he temporarily swapped fine cuts of meat and seasonal produce for a feast of fatty snacks. “At school I was called ‘Fat Val’. When other people were snogging at school dances, I would be sitting under my A-ha posters, clutching my rolls of fat and thinking, this is really unfair,” recalled Valentine about his less-than-healthy schooldays.

An ‘oh no’ gung-ho moment

Despite his no-nonsense approach to gunning down dinner and scrambling around in the great outdoors for tasty morsels, even Valentine has occasional rubbish hunter-gatherer moments.

Quizzed if there is any food he is squeamish about, he confessed: “When we were filming the trout tickling and I put my hand in a hole that did have a trout in, and it wriggled, I shrieked at the top of my voice. I thought I was going to coolly catch it, but instead I jumped back. I was deeply disappointed in myself for being such a terrible wuss.”