Well, it certainly influences my manner of writing, because I always see Darwin as a model of the act of explanation and of argument; the morality, the ethics of explanation, maybe.

I think that I followed the influences of the people whose style and cooking I admired. When I went to Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in the early days, it was the best and the most exciting cooking in the UK at that time. Later on I worked with Thomas Keller and Alain Ducasse and eventually I chose to go to work in Le Louis XV because when I set foot in the kitchen, I just knew it was for me. I think you can see all of those influences in the techniques and the flavors that I use: there’s a real purity to the way that we cook and a real natural process here at my restaurant, Core, that always stayed with me from my time at Alain Ducasse.

It was a very important finding for us because we were involved in nucleic acids. There weren’t many people interested in nucleic acids. There weren’t many people who believed that was the way to find drugs. But when we found out the structure, and we began to understand what kind of bases could be incorporated, and which ones couldn’t, and where they could be incorporated, it put a whole new dimension on it. So it had a very significant effect.

Actually, I started falling in love with the films of Brian De Palma. He was the first filmmaker I ever loved, he always made genre films. They touched me more, they felt warm, and human, and unsettling. There was always his vision behind them.

He says that he has the job of his dreams, which is the greatest joy that I can feel, is to have my child say he has the job of his dreams.

I’m proud any time that I see a toxic chemical process, something that produces toxic waste or requires precious metals, which have to be mined at terrible environmental degradation costs — I’m proud when I see that replaced with a clean, efficient biological process that doesn’t produce those things. And we have to do that a million times over in order to move away from our addiction to this old-fashioned chemistry that we do.