The view from the 24th floor of Tower 42, in the heart of London's financial district, is stunning. London isn't the most magically beautiful of cities, but it's so rare to have an uninterrupted view of it like this, through floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows, that it's difficult to stop looking. Across the table from me, Gary Rhodes is smiling; he's clearly used to the effect the view from this restaurant has on guests.
In the past, and particularly in his early days on television, Rhodes has seemed at times to be straining to be larger than life. He cultivated the aura of a cheeky Londoner, with a sparkle in his eye and a trademark gravity-defying haircut. But the passing of time has mellowed Rhodes, who is 46 now. As he looks out over the Thames, he is dressed in a dark and loosely cut pin-stripe suit and a cream open-necked shirt. He is a picture of elegant calm. But he remains all life - a smile is never far from his features, and it seems that he could talk forever about food.
Rhodes is one of the more quintessentially British of the UK's ever-growing band of celebrity chefs. In part it's the cheeky-chappy television persona, but it also goes to the heart of his cooking. Britain isn't generally renowned for its food, but Rhodes has done more than most to try to remedy that, by bringing a degree of flair (and the rigours of a training in French cuisine) to old-school dishes such as braised oxtail with mashed potato, or bread-and-butter pudding.
Next month he's opening Rhodes D7, on Capel Street. Is there a market for classic British dishes in a Dublin restaurant? Rhodes cautions against reading too much into his reputation for cooking British dishes and stresses that the crucial factor in his approach to food is to make the most of local ingredients and flavours. In his London restaurants, that means British ingredients and dishes. But elsewhere he's driven by the flavours and the recipes he finds at hand.
"One thing I've been absolutely sure of from the beginning is that what I'm not going to try to do is take a British restaurant to Dublin. I want to try to create an Irish restaurant. I have that British label hanging around my neck, but it's not as simple as that. I've always chosen British dishes that I've wanted to add to - a new twist, a new edge, the French influence. And that's exactly what I want to do in Rhodes D7. I want to work with the great old Irish flavours and ingredients, and add my personality to them.
"There are one or two dishes that will be Rhodes of old," he says, "but I want to make sure that even those take advantage of Irish flavours. For instance, one of the dishes will be smoked haddock topped with Welsh rarebit. It doesn't matter where I've been; anytime I've served it it's been a great success. It's very simple, but it's got great depth of flavour. And in Rhodes D7 I want to make sure that the cheddar we use is an Irish cheddar. I don't want to use a cheddar from the West Country.
"And I want to do something with Irish gammon, as well. So I want to find a farmer who can provide gammon that is just so sensational that we can feature it, and use the name of the place that we've sourced it from. I want people in Rhodes D7 to know that what they're eating has come from home soil. All I want to do is to add my personality to ingredients like that, to get the maximum from them and, hopefully, add a new twist."
Rhodes has been awarded five Michelin stars. He won his first when he was 26, at the Castle Hotel in Somerset; his most recent came last year, for Rhodes Twenty Four, his London flagship. At Rhodes D7 he won't be aiming for Michelin stars, nor for fine-dining exclusivity. But he'd clearly like it to become a Dublin classic, an old reliable. As he explains his vision for the restaurant, he mentions Langan's and the Ivy, in London, and Roly's Bistro in Dublin. He wants to guarantee consistently excellent food, but he wants homeliness, too, and hearty signature dishes that people will come back for again and again.
With his head chef Paul Hargreaves, Rhodes has done his research in Dublin and seems to think that there's untapped demand for greater value for money - for uncomplicated food that's prepared and served to the highest standards, but isn't priced exorbitantly. He suggests that's where the restaurant business is heading. "Overgarnished foods are going to become history very soon," he says. He recalls London 20 years ago, when the initial thrill of nouvelle cuisine had passed. "The food looked amazing," he says, "but there was so little of it, and you were charged a fortune for it. But I'm glad to say that the public soon realised it and became much more demanding. And you can see something similar is starting to happen in Dublin. People want to know what they're paying for. They want honesty."