Kitchen no place for teddy bears

Simon Gault, the MasterChef NZ judge, said, when I phoned: "Are you going to be nice?" Is he? "I'm the cuddly one."

Yes, that's rather what I want to talk to him about. I saw him last in 2006, and I wouldn't have called him cuddly then. Somebody recently called him "the friendly teddy bear".

I'll concede that he has a growly bearish voice which resembles the noise you get when you push the stomach of a teddy bear, but let's not get carried away.

He is friendly enough, in his slightly guarded way.

He treats every question as though he was a brulee about to have a chef's blowtorch applied to his sugared top.He complained: "You could talk anything out of anyone."

Small chance. I'd just asked him how much money he had, but that was his own fault.

When I called his five-restaurant business an empire, he snorted: "I wouldn't call it an empire. Empires make lots of money and I'm not making lots of money."

So, of course, I asked how much.

"Not enough."

I wanted to see how cuddly he really is, so I asked what he thought about being sometimes described as "the ubiquitous Simon Gault".

This could either make him sound like a courgette or like a publicity-seeking egomaniac.

He can hand out a decent whack but, I'll give him this, he can take one. "Yeah, I've got an ego."

What size? "Ha, ha. Well, you know, I don't like coming second."

On publicity: "I think I somehow seem to generate it."

Which might be disingenuous. Then: "And I think you need to do it."

Which you can't fault for honesty. He says he's "limited to food", which is almost right.

The other thing he's limited to is aeroplanes.

"Hey! Why don't you do an article about my plane?" I said I had no interest in doing an article about his plane but that didn't stop him.

He has a Thunder Mustang, which is very special because "there are only 16 of them in the world and this is the only one out of the US . . . and it's the fastest piston-powered plane in the country".

He's odd about being interviewed, despite having given many.

Partly this is because he's used to being the one in control but also, I think, because he's not a reflective person and being asked about himself gives him the jitters.

But he's good at PR, in a blokey, bearish sort of way, and he doesn't turn down publicity.

Now he's on the telly, which he did partly because it's more good PR and might make more people go to his restaurants.

But also because he likes people who are passionate about food.

The show, he says, is just an extension of what he does in his kitchens: looking at what chefs make and either praising it or telling them it should be better.

He scoffs at the celebrity chef tag.

"I don't think I've ever written that I'm a celebrity chef. Doesn't interest me at all."

He has a celebrity agent, Sara Tetro, now (he didn't have an agent in 2006) but says that's because people ring him up all the time wanting him to do things and he needs somebody to organise that side of his life.

Anyway, good luck to her if her job involves attempting to manage or polish him.

He's very blokey, the blokiest of all three judges, according to me.

"You think? I'd have said no more than normal.

Yeah, I'm normal, aren't I?" Then, looking desperately at the photographer, a bloke, "She's bloody hard, isn't she?"In other words, I was asking more of my unfathomable questions.

He doesn't mind being thought arrogant. "Well, I'm sure some people perceive me as that."