Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1992,

and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a chef. Over the past 20 years he's built up a business which has made him one of the world's most successful restaurateurs and cookery writers.

The centre of his operations, a hotel and restaurant outside Oxford, is a temple to his art, perfect, delicious and expensive.

Not surprisingly, he is a Frenchman.

Unusually, however, he's never had a single cookery lesson in his life and he only started on his career when at the age of 20

he saw dinner being served as he looked through a restaurant window in his hometown of Bezon-Sant.

He is Raymond Blann Blen.

Riemann, can you tell me, do you still have that picture in your mind's eye of that dinner being served?

Very much so, very much so, actually it was not a window, it was much nicer than that.

It was a beautiful

and it looks very cliche and very romantic but that's the way it was I cannot I

I cannot apologize for that it was in the whole the center of my old city

Bazaons plus Victor which is basically a most beautiful city with

huge sanitary trees in the middle of that huge place, it was standing this fantastic

restaurant. And really what I saw really stern me very deeply.

What I saw was basically the diners were outside okay and you had this very old fashion

service where all the waiters were dressed dressed in black, you know, could be,

and there was lovely carving and flambying going on. It was really stunning.

And what I saw equally, that was disturbing, but mostly to see the enjoyment of the clientele, the very

sophisticated lady, the holding hands and so on the whole charms the whole

...