The 55-year-old puffs on cigarettes and wanders the grounds, building the place like he's tossing ingredients together - some fencing here, some stonework there, a bridge in position over a pond that hasn't yet been dug.

He's put in a dovecote, he tells me, so the local raptors have something to eat that isn't his songbirds.

There are wild pigs in the woods, and huge worms in the ground.

He doesn't want to add spa facilities, he says "because I hate the sight of people wandering around in white bathrobes".

The hotel restaurant doesn't open for lunch, so we head down the hill to a nearby village where Mother and Wild serves sourdough pizzas to tables in various nooks. On their website they grumpily assert that "we cook food that we love, we're not into pretentious swipes, foams or any of that rubbish, just hearty food with robust flavours".

You get the feeling they've been talking to Marco.

Marco Pierre White.

The original and best celebrity chef. Youngest, and first British chef to win three Michelin stars. Student of the French masters, mentor to Gordon Ramsay, Curtis Stone and others, and a terror to his employees (he is said to have reduced Ramsay to tears in the kitchen on his last day) and his customers (he is said to have thrown out unappreciative patrons).

A shagging, shouting celebrity of the '80s and '90s, he entertained readers of the trashiest tabloids and the snootiest broadsheet food features.

His tagliatelle of oysters was a marvel of the age.

He cooked his last professional meal at the end of the 20th century, handed back his stars, and went on to a series of business ventures, restaurants with his name on them, and plenty of reality TV (in Australia, of course, with Masterchef and Hell's Kitchen).

Over our entree of arancini, a salami platter "to play with" and a plate of scallops (he turns it around 180 degrees before I'm allowed to eat it, for a reason that he considers obvious, but which I can't fathom), we size each other up.

The conversation starts with a series of small tasting dishes, jumping from topic to topic.

He tells me that my wife would hate him, because she's an academic and academics "look at me as being a Neanderthal" because "I have no qualifications but I've achieved way more than most of them".

He tells me he sleeps only three or four hours a night.

He tells me that women in New York are aggressive and he doesn't like that.

That he has no time for chefs that produce "f------ dribbles on a plate".

I have a glass of wine, which he picks out, and then he orders a diet coke.

Despite his low opinion of academics, White likes theories. He loves them. Over the two hours we spend on lunch he comes out with dozens.

For example: "Strategy can compensate for talent, but talent never compensates for strategy."

And: "We live in a world of refinement, not invention."

He illustrates this with Eminem lyrics, and Coleridge, because poets take time to refine their poems.

"My whole approach to food is philosophical," he says.

He takes hours every day just to "process my thoughts", he says, in a space where he won't be interrupted, and he doodles with pen and paper. "I might write the same word 200 times."

I ask a follow-up question that boils down to "huh?"

"It's for me to release what's in my subconscious. It's the subconscious that controls us. This happens to me a lot. I'm sitting on a river bank fishing, and it suddenly comes to me - something someone said three weeks earlier."

Before he goes to bed, at the end of every day since he was a teenager, he does a similar thing - processing the day, deconstructing it.

"I ask myself did I earn my money today."

Our conversation at this point is a bit of a mess. If it was a food order, White would hate it.

White is a fan of structure. He thinks a plate of food needs to be built so that it lasts from start to finish, with all elements in balance so that you can still enjoy an ideal forkful at the end. It's not a good dish if it's a mess by the time you're halfway done.

And while we are on complaints, White has no time for meals of 18+ courses.

"They're taking canapes, it's very easy to make them look pretty, they all look pretty. Put them on little plates and give you 18 plates of them. It's production line cuisine. You've got a table of four, you each get one little scallop, the waiter puts it down and tells you what it is and how to eat it and 30 seconds later you're finished. No, it should be about the eating.

"You see chefs with their little pincers, putting herbs on hot food - so that's more important, that micro-herb, than food served hot? I don't get it.

"Chefs are putting presentation before the eating."

And don't get him started on non-classic flavour combinations.

Ingredients must "make sense", he says. He's still annoyed by a "sea urchin blancmange with lobster and caviar". He's had salmon with licorice, "it didn't do anything for the salmon".

"When chefs are young they tend to overwork things, to force things, overcomplicate things. The biggest mistake they make is they don't sit down and eat their food."

He admits he did the same himself.

"When you're given so much technical ability you feel like you should use it. But you've got to grow out of it."

White says he was never ambitious as a young man, because he lacked confidence.

"To be truly ambitious you have to have confidence. I was ruled by my fears, fears of failure, fears of being sacked, fears of being sent home to tell my father I no longer had a job."

Creativity is "the release of pain", he says. "Whether it's food, writing, music, painting, it's a release of pain. Without that internal pain you'll never be truly great. Because it's cathartic. People in pain are their most creative. It takes you into yourself."

And then you add discipline, he says.

"What discipline does is it gives you consistency, whether it's as a cook or a writer or whatever.

"Some days you've just got to push on through. It's easy to not give a f---, to throw something in a pan or scribble something down. But no matter how tired you are, even if you're ill, you've got to have that same focus."

After a cigarette break on a table outside, the mains arrive - we're both having pizzas. They're simply tasty, with absolutely no sign of micro-herbs or weird ingredients.

White encourages me to have another glass of wine - the Bardolino, an Italian red blend. He doesn't have another Diet Coke, he's fine with water.

We meander through politics for a while. He is fascinated by Donald Trump, not in an admiring way, but not entirely not, either. This leads into a chat about nuclear war. Then Vladimir Putin. Then we talk about offshore tax havens.

He tells me he "never really sees the money" from his various ventures.

"It goes to my accountants. I don't really care. I'm ruled by romance and by being idealistic. As long as I have an income that pays for my daughter to go to school, that pays for our lifestyle, that's all OK. If I made ??100,000 today I'd go and spend it on Rudloe [his hotel]."

We also talk about kids, but he asks that it's off the record (it's a touchy subject with him - his son had a well-publicised drug problem as a teenager, and only this year managed to kick the habit by moving to Rudloe).

We eventually find our way back to food, and its connection to the emotions.

White tells me a story of when he was about 12 years old, and he was fishing on a river wharf when he noticed a particular scent in the air. He used to love fishing as a boy - he'd spend entire days on the riverbank daydreaming, he says.

"I enter this field and there's this smell. All I know is I recognise it. This scent reminds me of my mother. She'd been dead six, seven years. I look around and I find this plant. I look at it. I don't know what it means to me.

"I'm now 25 years old and my girlfriend says to me 'Marco would you like camomile tea?' She brings me the camomile tea. That was the smell, I'd found wild camomile. My mother obviously drank camomile. It took me another 12 years to answer the emotional impact it had on me."

Here the story seems to stop. But it has a coda.

"A story is more important than a recipe," he says. "Way more important. A story can inspire you. A recipe can confuse you. Stories are the most important."

White doesn't dine out often these days, because he just wants to be left alone, he says. When he does dine out he'll sit with his back to the room.

And anyway, he doesn't find it relaxing.

"When you go to a restaurant with your dear wife you go to enjoy yourself, don't you? I can't do that. It's a disaster. I have to dissect and inspect and process.

"So I'll have a dozen oysters. I'll have a grilled fish. I'll have a steak. I go to restaurants that serve that sort of food. Very simple, all the energy is going into the food, not trying to make it look pretty.

"The presentation is in the generosity."

In the taxi on the way back to the hotel, he has a long and entertaining complaint about lawyers.

Marco Pierre White in Conversation
2 pm, Saturday October 7, 2017
Hilton Sydney - 488 George St, Sydney NSW 2000, Australia
Tickets $49 - $199 per person
goodfoodmonth.com.au