Pack up your truffles in your old kit bag: Alyn Williams' CHEFstock 2016

It seems, then, that takeovers were at first purely exclusive and only at members clubs or institutions such at The Groucho Club. Outside of these playgrounds of the culinary elite things appeared to be quite competitive. Recipes were secrets and the way a chef ran their brigade remained firmly behind closed doors.

‘Back in those days it was quite a lot like that, very much a closed shop,’ Alyn recalls. ‘You would be protective of what you were doing. It seems stupid now as all you have to do is Google and you can find anyone’s recipe, so it's pointless being protective anymore. It’s almost gone full-circle, it’s quite liberating!

‘Over the last fifteen to twenty years or so we’ve become more of a community, and what we’ve found is that we’re all alright and we all get on,' he adds. 'And we all respect the hard work each of us has put in to get to where we are. You’re more inspired when you get to talk to other people about what they are doing. There’s no plagiarism, you just learn new techniques, and those are handed down anyway – there aren’t many people who are the pioneers of new cooking methods. What you do is take it and adapt it into your own thing.’

‘I know Marc Wilkinson quite well, I vaguely know Nigel Haworth – but I’ve known of and respected him for years. I did this Food on the Edge event in Ireland last autumn and I met Sasu Laukkonen there; we talked a lot and discussed our philosophies on food – he’s a very deep man.'

Pack up your truffles and your old kit bag – Alyn’s systematic approach to organisation is something he takes with him everywhere (a leaf he has no doubt taken from Gordon Ramsay’s book). His own first guest chef appearance was at The Artichoke with chef Laurie Gear, and he went into this challenge with all his ducks in a row.

'You have to up your game and be a little bit more switched on and aware,' he tells us. 'You have to impart what you need doing on their team – which hopefully goes down well as it means they get to learn something. I think Gordon was the expert of this. When we did charity dinners we would have everything done and ready before we got there. Everyone else would be running around like headless chickens and trying to find stuff and going crazy because they couldn't, then we turned up with our boxes and it was done. The guests were seated at 8pm and Gordon would rock up at ten to eight, take the piss out of everybody around him, put on his apron and dress the dishes with us and that was it. It was so straightforward. And it taught me a lot.'