As television chefs go, John Burton Race is incredibly likeable, like a boy scout who has been let loose in the camp stores. Even so, I would not want to get on the wrong side of him, especially if he happened to be clutching a hot frying pan or a particularly heavy ladle. In anger, he resembles nothing so much as Mount St Helens, and even during moments of calm - which are few and far between in his world - he is still a manic blur, all scissoring arms and chilli pepper cheeks. 'Oh yeah,' he says, sucking so hard on a Benson & Hedges, I fear he may swallow it. 'I am f***ing mad. I'm a loud-mouthed, disagreeable, arrogant git, with anti-social and reclusive tendencies.' At one point, I ask him - ever so casually - if it is hard to find good staff these days. Boom! His party popper consonants turn to pure dynamite. I wish there was some cheese handy, to shove in my aching ears.

Until last year, only die-hard foodies had heard of Burton Race, formerly the chef at L'Ortolan, in Berkshire, where he was in possession of two Michelin stars. Then Channel 4 screened a series called French Leave, in which he and his family moved to rural France for a year, squabbled, ate an awful lot of duck fat and, finally, learnt to fall en amour with all things Français. Some three million people watched French Leave, and the book accompanying the series was the subject of a bidding war among publishers - the very same publishers who, just months before, had not even deigned to answer Burton Race's letters.

So now, well, quite a few people know who he is. Which is good news for his latest venture. Last May, he reopened the Carved Angel in Dartmouth, Devon (it is now known as the New Angel), once the home of the legendary cook Joyce Molyneux, and he has been packing them in ever since. In his first week of trading alone, he did 540 covers, and the restaurant received a Michelin star last month.

In spite of this, the restaurant, housed in a half-timbered building right on the quay, is a huge gamble. Television fame or not, the Burton Races - between them, he and his wife, Kim, have eight children - are up to their eyes in debt. 'I often wake up in the middle of the night going: "Oh f***!",' he says. Burton Race believes a man might more easily pass a camel through the eye of a needle than make money out of a small provincial restaurant, even in a place such as Dartmouth which, as he puts it, 'stinks' of filthy lucre (the place is largely populated by a combination of retired captains of industry and second homers). 'You can be the best chef in the world, but the man over there who has spent £100k on an ocean-going yacht will only spend 30 quid on dinner. When I worked in Oxfordshire, they'd say [he affects a Prince Charles drawl]: "I've just bought a new hunter." It cost 35k, they'd ride it about eight times a year, and they used to baulk at pending £17 on lunch at Le Petit Blanc, which had a Michelin star.' His face is a studied picture of disgust.

The New Angel opened too late to catch vital Easter trade, and then - as viewers of the fly-on-the-wall series about the enterprise have witnessed - operations were fraught with problems, with issues over pricing disastrously, Chef found he had been virtually giving away his lobsters, crabs and turbot) and its staff (the entire front-of-house team, which was English, 'lacked dedication' and had to be fired; the place is now run almost entirely by Frenchmen). Only now does he have the chance to catch his breath.

'I have completely changed things,' he says. 'I mean, there were drapes - curtains - and I got rid of them because why would you have this view [he looks out across the estuary, where hundreds of lights are already shimmering in the gloaming] and put curtains up? Yes, I've upset some locals.' Earlier in the season, during Dartmouth's annual regatta, diners watched agog as he threw out a drunken boatie. But still, he loves it here - the wealth of local ingredients, the hale simplicity of his new menu.

'My plan was to research the best, to use the smallholders: meet the nutters, in other words. I want the restaurant to be a shop window for their endeavours. And I want the menu to be seasonal: you can eat sea bass for four months of the year, but when an ingredient is gone, it's gone.' Burton Race would love the New Angel to be a success, and has not-very-secret plans to expand to Exeter.

But when you meet him, when you finally persuade him to sit down and take stock, it is obvious that he and restlessness are close companions. Ask him how long he thinks he will stay in Devon, and he makes it clear that his greatest fear is of being buried alive. 'If you're asking me if this is it now, it just can't be.' Why not? He twitches like a baby rabbit. 'Because that would mean I've got a terminal disease I don't know about.'

John Burton Race was born in Singapore in 1957. His father, or at least the man he came to call his father, worked for the United Nations, and John had attended nine different schools by the time he was 13; he did his O-levels by correspondence. 'I can't give you a sob story,' he says, 'because I haven't got one. I had a few things to deal with, a few things turned out to be a pack of lies. But I'm not saying I was beaten up, because I wasn't.' His voice is gruff. In fact, though his childhood was materially privileged - the family had servants - Burton Race grew up with a sense of what, after some pushing, he finally describes as 'rejection'.

His father was actually his stepfather, and his brother and two sisters were only half- iblings; his real father had apparently wanted nothing to do with his son. When his other remarried, Burton Race was adopted by her new husband, a man who came to mean 'everything' to him, and who died of bone marrow cancer, some years ago. 'It was a real pain. He died in screaming agony. But there you go.'

Burton Race only recently traced his real father, a move he now regrets. 'How was that? Honestly? Disappointing. Totally. Total waste of space. Don't ever do it. He was a geologist.' Was his mother happy for him to do this? 'No, totally disloyal, you know, and I'm terribly sorry I did actually.' What about his father? 'He was terribly pleased, and terribly tactile, which I found repugnant. When you're growing up, you imagine this guy on a huge white horse in shining armour. Then you go through puberty, you hate the planet, it's quite easy to imagine that things are someone else's fault. My father wasn't around, I never got a letter, he never gave me anything. It was easy to imagine it was my mother's fault.'

Is it all of this stuff that has made him so ravenously driven? 'I never used to try and deal with my chips until I looked inside myself. I think the chip is this: rejection. It's there, of course it is. Men and women fall in and out of love. That's all good and well, but I don't think you should have nothing to do with the children. That's a shame.'

After school, he longed to go off to art college, but this idea was not a great hit with his parents. He had always loved food - when the family was living in the Far East, Burton Race would help the family cook out - and as a boy he had one day espied a 'huge, fat pig in a tall, white hat' emerging from a restaurant kitchen and demanded of his mother what this man did for a living. This, he says, was 'the moment'. So he told them he wanted to train to be a chef.

'They hated it! Below stairs! But they called my bluff. My mother was in a rage. "I've had enough of you. You've been a thorn in my side ever since you were born! I have fixed up five interviews for you." The first one was this shitty hotel near Winchester. I thought: "Right, I'll get this bloody cow off my back. I'm going to say: 'Yes, I want that job."'

At first, he loathed it. 'I met these people... I didn't realise what a sheltered life I'd had: gays, lesbians, drugs. It took about a year before I thought: "This is mad, man! I'm going to enjoy this." But even if I hadn't, I could not go back to them with my tail between my legs. I could not do it. My parents were expecting and hoping, and hoping and expecting.'

He quickly realised he was good at the job, and began entering competitions, eyeing up the jobs of his superiors. Before long, he was working for Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons, and by the time he was 26 he was head chef at Le Petit Blanc in Oxford, where he won his first Michelin star. Finally, a regular customer helped him financially, and he opened L'Ortolan; he won another star in his fi rst year, and the double only 12 months later. It was at about this point that the critics began remarking that, if Marco Pierre White was the 'Jagger' of the kitchen, then Burton Race was its 'Dali'. Make of that what you will.

His last job was at the Landmark Hotel in Marylebone, but by this point, as he is the first to admit, he was reaching a kind of crisis point. He knew he was in a rut, that he had to get out, have a breather, but had no idea how to go about this. Then, one night, a regular customer, one who worked in television, offered to introduce him to a friend of his, Pat Llewellyn, the producer who 'invented' both the Two Fat Ladies and Jamie Oliver. Llewellyn, though Burton Race had no idea who she was, turned out to be his saviour. 'I told her I wanted to go to France, get back on the stove, start learning all over again. A week later, she came back and said she'd got someone interested. A week after that, she'd sold it. Boom! She's nutty, but I love her.' For her part, Llewellyn was intrigued by the idea that Burton Race had never cooked for his own children. 'I thought that was so weird,' she says. 'So I was looking for a "how to change your life show" with food in it. Once they were all out there, though, and I had this pissed off, miserable wife and children, I did think: "Oh, no! What have I done?"'

The Burton Races moved to a farmhouse in Montferrand, a remote village in the Aude. The nearest shop was 20 minutes away and, initially, things were stormy. Burton Race's wife, Kim, was lonely - purse strings tightened, she would sneak off to have a manicure in secret - and their six children felt isolated. 'The kids hated my guts,' says Burton Race. 'And it took my wife away from what she does best: shopping and theatre and girly nights out. She hinted we were divorcing. But I was going to carry on anyway. I had to.' Naturally, this made for great television. The rows! The tears! The phone bills home! Not to mention all that bloody confit de canard.

'John does divide people,' says Llewellyn. 'There's no doubt about that. His explosions can be quite shocking, but a bit of that is theatre. He laughs his head off when he looks at the tapes. That takes the sting out of it. He's always propelling forward in the most extraordinary way. He's in a hurry. The words "settling down" don't apply.'

Kim Burton Race, who designed the interiors at the New Angel, is John's second wife and, in some ways, the star of the show, at least on TV. She is quite bling. They met nine years ago on a Caribbean island they were visiting in honour of a mutual friend's birthday. At the time, both were married to other people. 'I never felt I was looking for anyone,' he says. 'I was completely wrapped up in my job. Then I saw this woman at the airport. I thought: "F***ing hell. Best thing since sliced bread." But I didn't make any advances. I was a good boy. I've never been good with women.' About a year later, they went to a party and 'for some obscure reason - I hadn't done anything at all - she kissed me'. The ensuing divorce from his first wife, who is French and with whom he had two children, was 'completely hostile'. Recently, his ex-wife and daughter turned p unexpectedly at the New Angel. 'Tell them I'm five minutes away,' he said to his restaurant manager on the telephone. By the time he'd got there, they had gone.

Kim has four children of her own, and she and John have had two together. The couple seem to have a tetchy but supportive relationship. When I ask her what it is like being married to John, she rolls her eyes and says: 'That's unprintable.' He is more forthright: 'Kim will spend night after night alone. It's difficult to make plans because when the kids are off school, that's my busiest period. I'm sure she's had enough of me at times. You're completely torn. Charles [his son] will phone and say: "Dad, I've got rugby on Sunday. Will you take lunch off ?", and I'll say: "No." It's the same with parties. I can get there for 11pm. It's not normal.'

He sighs. 'I've had a wife who's in the business, and that has its problems, and I've had a wife who isn't in the business, and that has its problems. I'm not saying chefs are better off alone. They need someone to care for them, too. But if you're attracted to the madness of a chef, the excitement of him, why spend all your life trying to mould him into being someone else? Get another bloke.'

It is obvious, even after only eight months, that the New Angel is, and will continue to be, a huge success (the Burton Races have now received planning permission to open a cookery school upstairs, which they think will boost business even further). The menu is so good - so deliciously unfussy - that it is almost impossible to choose (for the record, I had lobster lasagne with a mussel and saffron sauce). It was already in the Good Food Guide, but when the TV series began, the New Angel became a destination restaurant.

Still, Burton Race is not ready to embrace the moniker 'celebrity chef' just yet. 'I think it's great that food has got more profi le, but I do wonder sometimes about the content of it,' he says, in one fi nal rant. 'Something quick is usually something crap. Some chefs on TV, I wouldn't even give them a job as a commis. They haven't seen a kitchen for years. I've watched all these chefs shoot up to the skies like rockets on Guy Fawkes night, explode in a ray of colour, then go bankrupt and disappear. My nature isn't ploddy, but I've never wanted to do anything about self-publicity at all. I figured the best way was by word of mouth, slowly but surely. I thought the time for books was when you were coming up to retirement and burnt out, that was my attitude.'

With some regret, he adds: 'But chefs are getting younger all the time, and I'm not, and commercialism comes into it.' His 47-year-old bones ache, he tells me; at the stove, he feels every turn, every pirouette, like some old ballet dancer. For a second, he is still. Then he whips up, and the gale force shouting begins all over again. John Burton Race wants some good local crabs. And he wants them right now.

· The New Angel (01803 839425). Return of the Chef is on Channel 4 on Thursdays at 8.30pm. To order a copy of Coming Home (£20, Ebury Press) for £18.40 incl. free UK p&p call the Observer Book Service on 0870 8360885