When it comes to grub, Italian chef Gennaro Contaldo admits there’s nowhere he’d rather be than the UK. Ahead of his visit to Jimmy’s Farm, the Greedy Italian reveals his love of Lancashire hotpot to GEORGINA WROE and tells her how he taught Essex chef Jamie Oliver (almost) everything he knows:

HE is widely acknowledged as having taught Essex’s most famous chef how to cook.

Back in the Nineties, when a fresh-faced Jamie Oliver knocked on the door of London’s Neal Street Restaurant, Gennaro was the chef in charge.

As well as a becoming the younger man’s mentor, the two chefs struck up a life-long friendship. Jamie reputedly put up a reward for information when Gennaro’s restaurant, Passione, was burgled in 2003.

Even now, Gennaro is in charge of creating the menu and training new chefs for Jamie’s Italian restaurant chain.

Gennaro said: “I remember when Jamie was a young boy he said to me ‘I’m going to open my own restaurant and one day you can work for me’. I laughed.

“His vision was always to be able to help young people to get jobs like I’d helped him.”

Anglophile Gennaro was born in a small village on the Amalfi coast in 1949. His love of food started early, hunting and foraging alongside his father and picking herbs with his mother. At only eight years old he began helping out in local restaurants.

Gennaro moved to London in the late Sixties and, after a brief flirtation with the antiques business, he returned to cooking. After working as a chef at fellow Greedy Italian Antonio Carluccio's Neal Street Restaurant, he opened his own Italian restaurant, Passione, in Charlotte Street, in 1999.

Now Gennaro calls his adopted city the “food capital of the world”, but it was a different story when he first arrived 40 years ago.

He said: “You could get vegetables like spinach, onions and carrots but there were no ripe tomatoes or herbs like basil. It was hard to get hold of nice garlic; you had to buy it from Frenchmen on bicycles.

“There was no such thing as good olive oil; people used fat or butter to cook with. There wasn't much pasta variety either, I remember the only pasta I could find was macaroni to make macaroni cheese! Now you just pick up the phone and you can get anything you want.”

The award-winning chef ,who has countless cook books and television series to his name, including Two Greedy Italians with Carluccio, admits the UK has influenced his culinary style.

He said: “I have learnt quite a lot from England. I’m an Italian chef but when I came here, I had to learn how to cook English cuisine and in the beginning I didn’t know what to make of it. “But then I fell in love. The English can cook and I was lucky to be taught how to make proper English cuisine. Lancashire hotpot! It’s my favourite dish.”

Jimmy is demonstrating his skills for the public this weekend on a return visit to Jimmy’s Farm, just over the Essex border in Suffolk.

He said: “I can’t wait to return – Suffolk has some amazing produce. I can’t wait to get my teeth into it.”

 See Gennaro’s cookery demonstration at at Jimmy’s Farm, near Ipswich, on Saturday.Other chefs appearing include Will Torrent and Jon Gay as well as Essex turkey breeder Paul Kelly. For more details visit www.jimmysfarm.com