Mr Stelios Haji-Ioannou, EasyJet chairman: "You know you've arrived as a company and brand when your competitors are afraid of you."

Stelios Haji-Ioannou, EasyJet's founder and scion of a Greek shipping family, is serving me airline food.

I had been craving moussaka, maybe even a platter of souvlaki, but the self-proclaimed inventor of no-frills travel has opted for a brie and tomato sandwich. No wine. No dessert. No waiters. Not even a lemon-scented serviette. I may as well have boarded a £69 EasyJet flight to Athens.

I am sitting at a cramped table at EasyEverything, the Internet cafe he recently opened near Victoria Station in central London, when he walks in with the splay-armed gait of a sumo wrestler. "Call me Stelios," he harrumphs, after Haji-Ioannou fails to roll off my tongue. "Everyone else does."

At 32, Stelios is worth about £187 million sterling (€283 million) and grew up in pampered surroundings in Athens worthy of a Greek prince. Yet he gives the impression of studied casualness that only the very rich can pull off. His doughy body is covered in a crumpled blue suit and his tieless shirt is open at the neck. The only sign of wealth is a phalanx of hangers-on.

"The brie and tomato sandwich is my favourite. I have it whenever I come here," he says. I also order freshly-squeezed orange juice - at £1, one of the most expensive items on the menu. He insists on paying the £3.50 bill, throwing in a bag of crisps - "on the house".

It does not take long to realise that Stelios brings the same informal approach to life as he does to business. "I don't have a secretary," he brags. His office consists of a £900 mobile phone which can send faxes, connect to the Internet and tell him instantly how many EasyJet seats have been sold and whether his flights are on time.

At EasyLand, the bright orange metal shed that serves as EasyJet's headquarters at Luton airport, he leads by example. Staff are instructed to dress casually and the chairman sits in the same nondescript open-plan office as everyone else.

"But I expect people to work long hours because I work long hours. I expect people to have paperless offices because I have a paperless office," he says.

Stelios works hard at cultivating his man of the people persona. He flies on EasyJet at least four days a week and has even helped work the phones selling tickets. "I love greeting passengers on the plane and saying, `Hi, I'm Stelios'," he says. "It's especially fun if they don't realise I'm the chairman."

But with his face splashed across magazines and his many appearances on television, there is a good chance they will.

And, sure enough, several customers drop by our table to say hello. One can't help thinking he craves a place in the pantheon of one-name celebrities such as Jesus, Gandhi or Cher. Even Richard is still Mr Branson.

Stelios has often been compared with Richard Branson and he admits: "I have been watching that guy for a long time." Both have come to personify the brands they founded. Both believe their businesses serve the public good. Both actively cultivate the image of being folk heroes for the underdog, yet own extravagant homes.

Stelios credits Branson with teaching him about branding and claims the Virgin chief's biography is one of his favourite books. But people who know both men say that Branson can be a cold fish in one-to-one encounters, while Stelios oozes charm.

I ask him about his first "big break", telling him that one critic had said it was when his mother's waters broke. His wide smile turns into a frown. "I could have spent my entire life on my yacht and my father would've been perfectly happy," he says. "My biggest paradigm shift was leaving the comfortable existence of being a ship-owner's son."

Stelios admits he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He was worth about £30 million before he ever set foot at Luton, and his father gave him the £5 million venture capital to start EasyJet.

But he clearly takes pride in the idea that it was a so-called spoiled rich kid from Athens who envisaged "bringing flying to the masses".

"It is true my father helped me. A start-up airline by a Greek in Luton trying to sell £25 seats to Scotland was not exactly a bankable proposition. But I left Greece to go to a place where no one knew my name - or could even pronounce it - and convinced people to fly with me, not my father."

Critics and fans alike praise Stelios for making EasyJet a household name. "Stelios's genius is taking a company that makes £1.50 profit per passenger and stamping its brand in the public mind," said one. Others point out that while Ryanair, its more profitable rival, was the first airline to bring budget flying to Britain, it is EasyJet that is usually given the credit.

Stelios says he wants to make the brand even bigger. There are plans for a flotation of the airline next year, an expansion of the EasyEverything Internet cafes, and a move into online banking and car rentals.

Why all this activity when he could spend his time living the idle life most of us would happily embrace? "I love a good fight," he growls, lobbing a crisp into his mouth. "I wouldn't have been happy just sitting around."

And then, like a 10-year-old who has just discovered a new way to torture the family cat, he launches into a tirade against his favourite opponent.

In 1996, Bob Ayling, British Airway's chief, approached Stelios, who was convinced that he wanted to buy EasyJet. Instead, after a three-month courtship, BA abandoned EasyJet and a year later launched Go, its own budget airline. Three years later, Stelios is still smarting from the incident. But he becomes a kid again when he explains how he got his revenge by buying several rows of seats on Go's first flight, commanding his staff to put on orange boiler jackets, and then boarding the aircraft like a group of merry pranksters.

"Barbara Cassani [chief executive of Go] was on the flight to welcome new passengers and when she saw me and my staff, she lapsed into stunned silence. It was terrific.

"You know you've arrived as a company and brand when your competitors are afraid of you."

In his latest slanging match with BA, Stelios has organised a competition on EasyJet's website in which the first 50 people who come closest to guessing Go's annual losses will be awarded free EasyJet tickets. He admits that such publicity stunts are calculated for maximum exposure.

When the Swiss government recently refused to allow EasyJet to fly from Geneva to Barcelona because Swissair has an monopoly over the route, he personally refunded passengers as they checked in and the flight went ahead as a private trip. And just in case the Swiss authorities didn't get the message, he emblazoned "No to Swiss Air monopoly" on the side of the aircraft.

"When you give people something for nothing, they love you," he says, revealing his favourite business strategy.

Suddenly, he becomes distracted when a middle-aged couple walk into the cafe looking conspicuously out of place among the 20-something web surfers. "I bet you they're British Airways spies here to steal my ideas and set up a chain of Internet cafes," he barks.

But before he can confront them, they come over to our table to say hello. "Call me Stelios," he says.