Michele Hewitson Interview: Simon Gault

Simon Gault is the blokey - and cuddly - judge on <i>MasterChef NZ.</i> Photo / Brett Phibbs

Simon Gault, the MasterChef NZ judge, said, when I phoned: "Are you going to be nice?" Is he? "I'm the cuddly one."

Yes, that's rather what I want to talk to him about. I saw him last in 2006, and I wouldn't have called him cuddly then. Somebody recently called him "the friendly teddy bear". I'll concede that he has a growly bearish voice which resembles the noise you get when you push the stomach of a teddy bear, but let's not get carried away.

He is friendly enough, in his slightly guarded way. He treats every question as though he was a brulee about to have a chef's blowtorch applied to his sugared top.

He complained, "you could talk anything out of anyone".

Small chance. I'd just asked him how much money he had, but that was his own fault. When I called his five-restaurant business an empire, he snorted: "I wouldn't call it an empire. Empires make lots of money and I'm not making lots of money." So of course I asked how much. "Not enough."

He liked only one of my questions. He'd written about a pork supplier who played music to the pigs, which made the meat better, apparently. Did he really believe this? "That's a really good question! I guess the Japanese have done that for a long time with cattle ... so I would believe that until somebody could prove otherwise, I guess."

He enjoys being combative. We had a couple of ridiculous arguments. One was about what sort of music pigs might like: AC/DC or Vivaldi. Another about his herb rub range. Why not just use fresh herbs?

"Do you use them?" he said, which meant, "I bet you don't." I said, snootily, "Of course I do. Every day."

He said, even more snootily, "you clearly need to be doing my job".

When I suggested that he came from a comfortable, reasonably well-to-do background, because he does, he bristled, as though this might be some sort of insult. "I'm from a hard-working family that started with nothing and worked hard." I think he thought I was accusing him of having had it cushy, God forbid.

I wanted to see how cuddly he really is, so I asked what he thought about being sometimes described as "the ubiquitous Simon Gault". This could either make him sound like a courgette or like a publicity seeking egomaniac. He can hand out a decent whack but, I'll give him this, he can take one. "Yeah, I've got an ego." What size? "Ha, ha. Well, you know, I don't like coming second." On publicity: "I think I somehow seem to generate it." Which might be disingenuous. Then: "And I think you need to do it." Which you can't fault for honesty.

He says he's "limited to food", which is almost right. The other thing he's limited to is aeroplanes. "Hey! Why don't you do an article about my plane?" I said I had no interest in doing an article about his plane but that didn't stop him.

He has a Thunder Mustang, which is very special because "there are only 16 of them in the world and this is the only one out of the US ... and it's the fastest piston-powered plane in the country".

He said, "After this article comes out, I'll take you for a ride." Five minutes before, he'd said, "When does this come out? Will I be able to walk the streets? I can always hunt you down." He was joking, obviously. But I gave him a look and he said, hastily, "I can make you an omelette. Are you sure you don't want an omelette?" He would have made me an omelette, which was kind, but also would have given him an excuse to get away from my questions.

He's odd about being interviewed, despite having given many. Partly this is because he's used to being the one in control but also, I think, because he's not a reflective person and being asked about himself gives him the jitters. But he's good at PR, in a blokey, bearish sort of way, and he doesn't turn down publicity. Now he's on the telly, which he did partly because it's more good PR and might make more people go to his restaurants. But also because he likes people who are passionate about food. The show, he says, is just an extension of what he does in his kitchens: looking at what chefs make and either praising it or telling them it should be better.

He scoffs at the celebrity chef tag. "I don't think I've ever written that I'm a celebrity chef. Doesn't interest me at all." He has a celebrity agent, Sara Tetro, now (he didn't have an agent in 2006) but says that's because people ring him up all the time wanting him to do things and he needs somebody to organise that side of his life.

Anyway, good luck to her if her job involves attempting to manage or polish him. He's very blokey, the blokiest of all three judges, according to me. "You think? I'd have said no more than normal. Yeah, I'm normal, aren't I?" Then, looking desperately at the photographer, a bloke, "She's bloody hard, isn't she?"

In other words, I was asking more of my unfathomable questions. He does care what people think about him; almost everyone does. Perhaps he cares a little less than most people, but about as much as most very successful people. Ambition might override such sensitivities. When I asked how often he was in any of his five kitchens, he said, "You know, it will sound very arrogant, but probably Giorgio Armani doesn't sew every suit. And I can't cook everybody's meal".

He doesn't mind being thought arrogant. "Well, I'm sure some people perceive me as that." But would he worry about it if they did? "You know, I do worry. I wouldn't want to come across as arrogant and I would definitely not like to be assessed as arrogant, no."

But, "some people are going to love me, some people are going to hate me. That's the nature of the beast and I'll roll with the punches on that".

He can whack back, hard, when people don't love him. He once took out newspaper advertisements with a recipe for "critics' testicles". We have a disagreement about the details of this. I say it was because he was left off Metro magazine's "best of" list; he says it was because a reviewer said one of his restaurants served brown pears when they were actually pears with balsamic vinegar and because the magazine's editor sent out a press release: "To sell more magazines. Why isn't Simon Gault in the top 50 ... ?"

Now that did make me laugh. He has a genius for generating publicity himself, as that ad shows. It is also an example of his combative and competitive personality. "Ha. I think if you spoke to most people who know me, they wouldn't say I was like that." Then he said, perhaps combatively, "but I'm not going to roll over. But isn't that a good thing? It amazes me how so many people roll over and don't stand up for themselves".

He could, of course, be both combative and cuddly. I'm not so sure about the second bit. He didn't try to hug me, but I had already complained about all the hugging he does on the show. He insists that he's just being himself; that he has been known to give a hug in his kitchens. There is also a lot of blubbing on the show. I can't imagine that he had much time for crying in his kitchens. "Sometimes somebody might cry. But they can still get back up and start fighting again."

In his younger days - he had his first restaurant at 22 - he used to be a terrible shouter and horrible to his staff, according to me. He was certainly horrible to the really nice chef, Michael Meredith. "I was not." He was so. He used to shout at him. "Well, look how good he is now! And I bet he would thank me for doing it. You know, they all learned that second-best wasn't good enough."

He is one of those alpha people who bang on about being passionate all the time, which makes him perfect for a show like MasterChef, but which makes me feel like having a long lie down. He sounds as though he's read too many of those motivational books, but he hasn't. He only reads magazines about planes. I blame his great mate Kevin Roberts, the marketing man who came up with the Love Marks idea of brands. Gault is one of the only people I've met who owns up to having set out to make himself a brand. Perhaps, now he's cuddly, he's a Love Mark? He scowled at me in a not very cuddly way and went on to tell me, at length, how he'd learned about motivating people from Roberts.

He's a former King's College boy, who didn't do well academically. I said, "You were no good at school, were you?" He said, "I think that's a little unfair! I was uninterested in school. I'm very focused when I put my mind to something. I apply myself to something and go out to do it well and when I go out to do that, I bolt through." He was a bit miffed.

It amazes him "when I meet kids and say, 'What do you want to do when you leave school?' and they say, 'I have no idea.' And then there are people who have left school and still have no idea! I don't fathom that. I just don't work like that."

This is how he works: He is getting married later in the year and says the honeymoon is "under negotiation". This is possibly true. He seemed pretty taken with the idea of a tour of restaurants in Vegas. Is he bossy? "Sometimes, I suppose." Is he bossy at home? "Ha. Sometimes, I suppose."

I attempted at one point to ask him about whether his personality type - perfectionist, combative, wildly ambitious, obstreperous and so on - made him a chef. He laughed at me and said, "I guess I'll read what my personality type is shortly."

I'm sticking with all of the above. And, good try selling the nice, cuddly amendment to the list, but he's not that good at PR.