Anyone who takes dining out seriously will have heard of L'Ecrivain. Having recently undergone a major rebuild and re-design, Derry Clarke's Baggot Street restaurant has been consistently in the forefront of fine dining. It's a restaurant that has garnered awards from all corners, but it's the lot of chefs to do their work unseen, so the man in charge of the kitchen isn't often the public face of the restaurant.

I sat with Derry at the baby grand piano that sits centre-stage in the downstairs bar and I wondered what path he had taken to get here. 'I started at the age of sixteen learning the business, and the first important influence on me was a French chef, Xavier Poupel, who instilled in me the discipline that you need to be consistent and do things properly. Then there was John Howard - and I worked with him for a long time - who taught me about the business end of running a restaurant as well as the cooking end. And then of course, eating out. You learn a lot from eating in other people's restaurants. You see what's in fashion, what's going out of fashion.'

He reminisced on the past few decades: the tall food of the eighties and nineties, the small portions, the emphasis on presentation. 'A lot of chefs never realised that the first thing you had to do was knock it all down before you could eat it.' Today his emphasis is on flavour and the combinations of them on the plate. As we discussed this I realised that I'm a little peculiar - or perhaps have inherited an Italian way of way of eating. I eat each part of a plateful separately, but Derry is right; most people mix the foods on each forkful. It's that style of eating for which he designs a course. 'Most people take a piece of meat and add a bit of carrot or a bit of potato and mix them for each mouthful. I try to ensure that all those flavours are in harmony.'

His belief in keeping things simple means that he has to use the best ingredients. If you want to cook a carrot simply, then it has to be a really good carrot. A watery, forced, tasteless root won't do, so everything is sourced to ensure that only the best goes into the kitchen. When the emphasis is on the ingredients, then you have to rely on the producer of those ingredients. 'Chefs like to think that they're the creators, the people who make a good meal happen, the progress-makers, but they couldn't do it without the raw ingredients. It's the producers of the ingredients that start the ball rolling. They're the horse and we're the cart.'

Which brought us to my next question. How does the creative process work in his case? What makes him put one dish on the menu but not another? 'It's back to the producers again. Someone arrives at the door and says 'Look at what I produce,' and if it's good I start to think 'how could I use that?' and then I come with a dish.' What defines Derry's food, if anything, is it's high quality both in preparation and presentation, but also its simplicity and honesty. 'I like honesty in food, and I like things to be clean. Clean, simple plates. When I think back to some of the dishes I used to produce I cringe. Chicken breast stuffed with a prawn puree, or a scallop wrapped up in bacon. Awful stuff. But you learn as you go along. Nowadays I'd do it differently. Scallops and bacon go well together, but really you have to cook them separately. A piece of grilled bacon laid on to of a flash-seared scallop would be fine, but back then it would have been too simple for me. But if were doing that dish today, that's how I'd do it.'

We spoke briefly of Gordon Ramsey, a man that Derry believes is on top of his game at the moment. Ramsey's idea of keeping starters and main courses essentially simple, but making the amuse bouches and the desserts a triumph of skill and hard work, appeals to Derry. Of course, when we say 'simple' here we're not saying basic - each dish is expertly crafted to achieve the illusion of simplicity.

So what encourages him? 'The strength of the team I have around me. With a hundred covers at each sitting you need to have a strong support system around you. I think I have that.'