If you want to become a top chef be prepared for a "dirty, sweaty" job working up to 100 hours a week.

That was the advice of celebrity chef Marco Pierre White to budding young gastronomists when he visited his two restaurants in Dover.

He told Kent Online: "I'd only recommend it to people who really wanted it.

"If you were 22 and told me you had a passion for food and you're very happy to work up to 100 hours a week and you had a dream I'd say follow that dream but apply a strategy.

"Strategy will compensate for talent but talent never compensates for strategy.

"When I was a young man I did everything in five-year blocks. Where do I want to be at 21, where do I want to be at 26?

"It tell a young person to put their career into the right person's hands.

Because if you put your career into the wrong hands, they teach you all the wrong ways and you've fallen at the first before you begin.

"I enjoy my work but it's a job at the end of the day and a it's very dirty and sweaty job."

Mr White, 58, was visiting his two restaurants, Mr White's English Chophouse and Wheelers Fish and Chips just after the first anniversary of their openings.

These are at the Best Western Plus Dover Marina Hotel and Spa at Waterloo Crescent.

He was hosting special pre-booked evening where local people got the chance to dine with him and hve copeis of his book, White Heat 25, autographed.

Mr White said he became a chef by chance as his father was one in hotels in his native Yorkshire.

He said: "The truth is I never wanted to be a chef. My father was a chef, my grandfather was a chef.

" I came from very humble beginnings. When you came from those beginnings in the Seventies you tended to follow your father's footsteps. If your father was a miner your went down the pit."

As for the success he achieved, he said he followed his own path and never felt he was in competition with other chefs.

He explained: "I've always done my own thing. I've never tried to be anyone else.

"Success is born out of luck, luck is being given the opportunity.

"It's awareness that takes advantage of that opportunity."

His two restaurants opened on November 15, 2018 but he revealed that he came to Dover many times as a child to cross the Channel.

This was for family visits to his mother's native Italy.

He said: "I used to come every year to Dover. I'd come down from Yorkshire to London, London to Dover and then take the ferry to Calais and the train all the way to Italy and end up in Genoa.

"I remember as a little boy with my mother looking at the White Cliffs of Dover.

"So I have very fond memories of Dover and I become moved when I see the cliffs."

He said of the two restaurants: "They are doing very well. They create a service, for the hotel and for people who visit Dover."

He also agreed restaurants should use more local seasonal foods to reduce food miles.

He said: "I think seasonal food is beautiful. When I was a boy it was always seasonal. The grouse came in August, the game in December, the salmon in the spring. I'm a great believer in the four seasons."

Mr White was asked about the recent sudden death of fellow celebrity chef Gary Rhodes.

He had died on November 26, aged 59, from a subdural hemotoma, bleeding in the brain.

He said Mr Rhodes achieved "enormous amounts" for gastronomy in Britain: "It's very sad. We're only here for a limited amount of time.

"He contributed a tremendous amount to British cuisine and focused his life there.

"He won a Michelin star. Lots of chefs dream of winning that but very few achieve it."

He said Mr Rhodes would best be remembered: "For what he put on the plate - that simple."

Mr White has been dubbed the first celebrity chef and is particularly known for being the head chef in the ITV show Hell's Kitchen in the late 2000s.

In 1984, aged 32, he became the youngest chef to be awarded three Michelin stars, the top award from the famed Michelin restaurant guides.

He retired from the directly working in the kitchen in 1999 and then became a restauraneur.

He said; "I spent 22 years of my life in the kitchen. Winning a star is very exciting. By the time you win three you've got this massive infrastructure.

"You're like a Rolls-Royce, you just cruise down the road. It;s boring and what you're doing is defending your reputation not trying to create it.

"That's why so many big chefs are no longer in the kitchen.

But he added: "Gastronomy is the greatest form of therapy any misfit could be exposed to and I was that perfect misfit.

"Anyone who is functional would not want to work in a kitchen, not work 100 hours a week."

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