Time Out at 40

See all Time Out's 40th birthday London heroes

What’s the biggest thing that’s happened to you personally in London?
‘ "School dinners". That’s probably the biggest thing that will ever happen to me. Just an amazing, hard moment where the British public got as angry and irate as I was. When that happens, you can get what you like. I was using the medium of documentary-making to tell a story of the infrastructure that hadn’t been invested in, an army of dinner ladies who hadn’t been loved or cared for as they should and the third generation of young people getting fed cheap, crap junk food for 190 days a year from the age of four to 16. Not cool. Not cool when you know you’ve got a health crisis going on. Pretty dark for the two years filming it. Feature continues

'Thinking back, it was quite dark. Not quite the support I thought I’d get, a lot of the people who could really do with the help didn’t. Humans hate change anyway, and humans that are hard to reach might see it as an attack on their way of life when it wasn’t their way of life. We never got to the home, it was about the school. No matter what happens at home, if your kid has a breakfast club and a decent lunch a day, then we haven’t got problems. If they don’t, then we have. It was a big-picture thing.’

What’s the biggest thing that’s happened in your field in London in the past 40 years?
‘The past 15 to 20 years has seen the most aggressive change, and I was there at the change. I was at college when it was all nouvelle cuisine and the middle market and the bottom market were empty. We were very good at top end, even then, it was very French and tired. Past 15 to 17 years, London’s been an incredible place for being open-minded and trying anything. We’ve got more mixtures of cultures and restaurants now than just about any other city in the world. You have to really go some to find equivalent cities with culture mixes.

'When I went around Italy, I loved it – I’m an Italian boy, really, aren’t I? – but they won’t try anything new, let alone Moroccan, let alone French, let alone Asian, even 20 miles down the road they’ve got an issue with. They like what they like, and it stands still. Coming home to London, just driving back from the airport and I’m seeing half-decent sushi places, Turkish places, Indian, and I’m going: “You know, say what you like about the Brits, but they will try stuff.” My mum and dad are still trying, but my generation are like, “We’ll have a go”.'

See all Time Out's 40th birthday London heroes