No prizes for guessing how Gary, Nigel, Marco, Rick and Delia earn their crust. Celebrity cooks are possibly unique for being known in the wider world by their first names alone. But Henry? Even the full name of Henry Harris draws a blank outside the select cabal of top chefs. But add another name - that of Harvey Nichols - and faces light up. Hotels have always spawned their share of famous restaurants but until the fifth floor of London's choicest shopping address was cleared of offices, department-store eating had all the romance of a Formula 1 pit stop. Henry Harris changed all that. Now fashion's Aladdin's cave is regularly by-passed by those who wouldn't know their Armani from their Kenzo, but who can detect the presence of a stock cube in their soup before it has reached the table.
Yet when the Harvey Nichols management approached Henry Harris to start up their new venture in 1991, he was only 28 and had been cooking for just six years and had worked under only one chef. A year at Prue Leith's cookery school was followed by a job with Simon Hopkinson at Hilaire, with whom he then moved to Conran's Bibendum. "I know that I moved through the ranks incredibly quickly. And there are classically trained chefs who say, "there is no way he can cook, he did it too quickly". But it's not about length of time. It's about attitude. The chefs I have in the kitchen - I employ them, not so much for their cooking skills, but when they come in for a day's trial whether I feel comfortable having them in the kitchen, and whether they enjoy food. And if they enjoy food, provided that they're not complete incompetents, I can train them up to do things my way. They might have worked in some of the best restaurants in the world and as much as they've come to learn from me, I make sure that I learn from them and pick their brains.
"I know that the chefs that do well in my kitchen are the ones who are bright. They're not a bunch of oiks, in spite of the tattoos."
The tattoo refers to one of the black and white cuisineverite photographs in Henry Harris's first cookery book: The Fifth Floor Cookbook where lip-smacking photographs of beautifully presented food are matched by behind-the-scenes nitty-gritty, from pans to a pig's head. Because - although reflecting the ethos of the restaurant (first-class ingredients and imagination) - the book is utterly practical, and the recipes have been chosen and written for domestic use. As the father of two small children - Georgia (five) and Noah (four) - Henry Harris knows only too well the constraints of cooking at home. "I think all chefs should have children. It brings you back in touch with reality. It's very easy to get stuck in the kitchen and to get completely lost up there and start making your own rules up. I cook at home a lot, and I don't have an industrial stove at home." All the recipes in the book were tested in a domestic environment.
Intimidation was not to be the name of the game, even down to the design of the front cover, a white plate bearing only the smears and traces of a meal. "I even left the logo off the plate on the cover, because in a subliminal sort of way if you put a restaurant identity on the food on the cover you immediately think - `Oh I won't be able to do anything in there'.
And there is a tumbler of wine, because that's the way I drink wine at home. I don't have time to go around polishing wine glasses. I drink it in a duralex glass." Because for all the Harvey Nichols Princess-Di-ate-here (bread and butter pudding with cream, actually) girly chic, Henry Harris is a bloke. A bloke who enjoys his food (as the waistline attests) but who hates washing up and doesn't believe in making extra work for himself. For six months, before the family dishwasher was plumbed in, he did most of the cooking on a gas-fired barbecue outside the back door. Then there's the microwave which he uses for softening butter, reheating baby food "and I still have a fondness for Marks & Spencer's Chicken Tikka Masala".
We meet for lunch in the restaurant which shares the fifth floor of Harvey Nichols with a cafe, bar and food market. The clientele of the cafe is predominately female, with tables frothing at the base with shiny shopping bags. But in the restaurant all vestiges of commerce are removed to the cloakroom. Women on the hop are replaced by ladies who lunch (in twos) and men networking (in threes). Sometimes as he surveys his kingdom from the vast round window that separates kitchen from the diningroom, Henry Harris catches sight of someone he knew at his old school and hides.
The rest of his contemporaries all went into the city, he tells me in shock-horror can-you-credit-it tones. It was what you did after being educated at Charterhouse, one of Britain's foremost public schools. What you didn't do was work as a waiter for two years then go on to become a chef.
Charterhouse was where he first became aware of how terrible food could be. "I once wrote to the chef who was ex-army catering corps, a letter of complaint about the sausages. And he gave me a whole roast chicken to shut me up." Although he also heads up the fifth floor cafe and the cafe in the basement, The Foundation, the restaurant is where he spends 90 per cent of his time. ("It's where my boys and girls are, and I love it.") He does seven shifts over five days a week. An average of 60 or so hours a week. ("Don't ask anyone to do what you don't do yourself.")
Henry Harris's food reflects the man: robust and gutsy. Don't expect him to go easy on the cream. As a main course he recommends I try the pot-roast pheasant with morels, because it's in the book. But to start with he suggests the ravioli of veal tail and butternut squash. Is that in the book? No. Why not? "Firstly because there's too much work involved. That's the type of dish that you have in a restaurant. There are a couple of days' work there. You've got to get the veal tails, marinate them, cook them, then you've got to leave them for a day to let the flavours develop. Then you serve the thick end like osso buco, then the day after that some poor bloke has got to shred down what's left and then and make the ravioli."
While there might be someone out there who would get a buzz from doing all that, he says, most people want to have something on the table within 45 minutes of opening the fridge door, and although there are a few recipes that take longer, that's the basic premise of the book. And secondly? I ask. Secondly, it was only thought of this morning. Not by him, he says but one of his chefs. The set lunch menu (£23.50 for three courses) is changed every day, thrashed out when the chefs meet at 8 a.m. every day. At its core, New British Cooking, as Henry Harris calls it, has quality of ingredients rather than adherence to either technique or mindset, which is why he believes its principles can easily be applied to home cooking. He has been clear about the difference between home cooking and restaurant food since he was a boy. Although the family owned a restaurant, it was simply a business venture of his father's.
His love of food comes from his mother, "a superb cook". And he includes two of her pudding recipes in the book, having resolved to avoid the "poncy puddings" he says that dominate restaurant cooking. ("Puddings I eat in restaurants are puddings I wouldn't trouble to make at home.") His mother was entirely self-taught, through Elizabeth David and the Cordon Blue partworks that were about the only antidote to the 100-best-cakes style of cookery publishing that dominated the 1960s and 1970s.
The Harrises lived in the South Downs, just behind Brighton. "I think that my understanding of what's right came from when I was small. Our milkman had his own Jersey cows. In the summer you had to take a teaspoon to break through the crust of cream. I used to get up early to nick the cream, to put it on my cornflakes. We used to have a fish man, and you had fish on Friday which was when the van came, and my mother went to the local butchers' and you could buy through the hedge from local farms in the village. You could taste the produce and it wasn't sprayed, it was grown just naturally. You didn't get tomatoes in the winter, and it didn't occur to you to want them. Then summer came and it was, `Oh good, tomatoes'."
Over two hours of lunch, we talked food, food and food. Not because that's what I was there for - an hour would have covered that - but because Henry Harris just loves everything to do with it. He regales me with stories about disasters - the lobster he had to buy from an arrogant French restaurant because he ran out, told with full range of comic accents. His run-in with the Italian chinaware Mafia in culinary jaunt to Apullia
where they had six kinds of rabbit stew and carpaccio of donkey and omelette made from plankton. "Everything was incredibly politically incorrect," he remembers. He put on ten pounds in a week.
He has a hatred of the "fascist food police" who demand rocket and parmesan salad, with lemon juice and no salt. What's wrong with good-old watercress? he says. The restaurant gets through three boxes a day. And organic eggs ("Sunday night's scrambled eggs on toast is my desert-island dish.")
"So much of the charm of food," he writes in the book, "lies in the circumstances - the people, the atmosphere, the conversations, or at times, lack of it." The charm of cookery books is equally hard to pin down. However, in his breezy debunking of the mystery of cooking combined with recipes where love of food outweighs political correctness, few would disagree that in this sumptuous, yet practical book, Henry Harris has got the balance just right. But mind those scales.
Harvey Nichols: The Fifth Floor Cookbook by Henry Harris with Hugo Arnold, £25 in UK