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You know, for 300 years it's been kind of the same. There are restaurants in New Orleans that the menu hasn't changed in 125 years, so how is one going to change or evolve the food?

I had my first French meal and I never got over it. It was just marvelous. We had oysters and a lovely dry white wine. And then we had one of those lovely scalloped dishes and the lovely, creamery buttery sauce. Then we had a roast duck and I don't know what else.

At the end of the day, I love eating duck. It's the best thing you can eat on this earth, especially grilled with jalapenos and cream cheese.

In France today, people no longer eat as much heavy food and fat as they did 15 or 20 years ago. These days, French cooking, through the influence of 'grande cuisine,' has become a bit lighter. And we are beginning to discover the original flavors of our produce.

A lot of times on tour it's about, 'OK, where am I today? Wow, I'm in Costa Rica. What is their famous dish?' And it's about trying the food, and really experiencing it.

People eat duck and you think, well, we've got loads of chickens, leave the ducks alone!

Travelling to make television programmes means I have some unusual food memories. In Pasto, Colombia, I was taken to a restaurant where I chose my meat for the evening from a cage of white rats. It tasted perfectly good - like rabbit.

When France was the only reference for chefs to learn, you could go everywhere in the world, and they would copy dishes directly because they didn't have much expanded imagination or technique or knowledge.

I went to a restaurant that serves 'breakfast at any time'. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.

Hors d'oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me; they remind me of one's childhood that one goes through wondering what the next course is going to be like - and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oeuvres.