It was international rugby union that lured one of London’s most famous adopted culinary sons, Frenchman Pierre Koffmann, to British soil in 1970. Having played the sport for Toulon back home (picking up a dodgy knee in the process), he wanted to see France challenge England at the home of English rugby, Twickenham. He expected to stay in the UK for six months at most, but months turned into years and he never went back.

In the UK, Koffmann’s reputation as a chef is unparalleled. His three-Michelin-star London restaurant La Tante Claire (closed over a decade ago, when he wanted to take a break from cooking) remains the stuff of legend, and his current restaurant – Koffmann’s, at London’s Berkeley hotel – is always buzzing. He has trained and influenced some of the biggest names on the UK dining scene: among them Gordon Ramsay, Jason Atherton and Tom Kitchin.

Born in Tarbes, Gascony, Koffmann absorbed a love and knowledge of food from his mother and maternal grandmother. Watching his grandmother, Camille, cook over an open fire in her farmhouse using produce from the surrounding land was particularly inspiring for him. In his own cooking he has always spotlighted the food traditions of Gascony and is famous for using every last bit of any produce he cooks with.

Surprisingly, Koffmann fell into cookery school at the age of 15 (he tried a number of other trades first). He then worked in France and Switzerland before crossing the English Channel to London, aged 22. Once there, he worked for the godfathers of British cuisine – the Roux brothers – before eventually opening La Tante Claire in 2003.

It’s his remarkable ability to extract flavour from any ingredient that diners crave – pig’s trotters are just one example. Customers still clamour for his signature dish of pig’s trotters with chicken mousseline, sweetbreads and morels, originally on the menu at La Tante Claire.

Nicknamed ‘the bear’ by his cheffing colleagues, Koffmann does little cooking at home these days, preferring to leave the kitchen to wife, Claire, whose roast pork he says, is ‘the best’. There’s little doubt, though, that he’s passed on his mother’s tip to ‘always cook for two extra people’ – just in case of unexpected visitors.

Secret Food Haunt

Clifton Greens, a greengrocer in London’s Maida Vale district. Known for the wide variety and ‘brilliant’ quality of fruit and vegetables that it sells.