

Michel Roux has one word for foul-mouthed TV chefs ... Pah! His Waterside Inn has retained three Michelin stars for 19 years without resorting to such antics. So what's the food like? Don't ask Rachel Cooke - she just got sandwiches

Some days, it is so hard to get out of bed. The morning I am due to meet Michel Roux, owner of the esteemed Waterside Inn at Bray in Berkshire, is one of these days. The alarm goes off. Reluctantly, I creep out from beneath my duvet and approach the bedroom window. Through a tiny gap in the curtains, I peer at the street. It is as I feared. The sky has the appearance of smudged mascara on pallid skin. The plane trees are bent over like old ladies. A woman walks by. She is wearing floral wellies. On her head is a sou'wester. I put the radio on. 'There are flood warnings across south east England,' says a voice, ominously. 'If you are planning on going anywhere at all, drive with extreme caution.'

For a second, I consider slinking straight back into my cosy pit. Then, with a flash of inner sunshine, I remember. Today, I will be lunching at the most decorated restaurant in Britain - an establishment so brilliant it has been in possession of three Michelin stars for an unbroken period of 19 years (and not even Gordon Ramsay can compete with that). Ah, the delights ahead!

Who cares about a spot of stormy weather when the Waterside Inn's swoon-inducing à la carte menu (from £220 for two) is yours for the taking. Anyone for pan-fried lobster medallions with a white port sauce and ginger-flavoured vegetable julienne? Yes, me, please - unless, of course, the roasted challandais duck is on the list, in which case ...

So, off I set and two very long, very wet hours later, I arrive. The Waterside Inn is a former pub and it sits, low on its haunches, beside the Thames, a whitewashed building complete with outside terrace and its very own mooring. The car park is, I notice, full of machines far grander than my own, but the good news is that valet parking (and a man with an umbrella to see you to the door) is available to all, even those who arrive in dirty Polos. Inside, all is chintz. The dining room, which I am already sizing up beadily, has green upholstered banquettes and a patterned carpet. It is oddly old-fashioned - very Sloane Square circa 1984 - but comfy all the same. The clientele is pretty chintzy too. Their hair is like spun sugar (the men and the women), and their faces are shiny with smug expectation.

Speaking of smug, when the woman in reception tells me that I am to be taken to the summerhouse where, in the fullness of time, M. Roux will join me, the smile that creeps over my face must be truly sickening to see. It is as wide and as greasy as a cheap croissant. Alas, pride comes before a fall. We tiptoe through the restaurant, out of a French door into the still-driving rain, and there it is: the summerhouse. Pathetically, I had imagined an ornate Victorian affair straight out of Kew Gardens. This, however, is one of those pointy-topped, wooden, octagonal things you see at the end of the gardens of suburban solicitors. They are called gazebos, usually, and they are very, very small.

Ducking down, I step inside. The summerhouse is about five feet wide. Certainly, a man could not lie prone on its floor. It has deep, plum walls, floral candelabras and a narrow bench laden with plump cushions. It is a little bit Marie Antoinette, and quite a lot Hyacinth Bucket. A heater noisily blasts hot air in my face. After a while, a waiter arrives. In one quite amazingly deft movement he too contrives to wiggle into the minute room. On the tiny coffee table before me, he then places a bottle of Evian, two glasses, a plate of puff-pastry nibbles and a tray of sandwiches. These are made of white toast with their crusts cut off, and are filled with smoked salmon and prawn mayonnaise. Oh dear. No rolled loin of lamb with grain mustard, crisp pancetta and girolle mushrooms for me, then.

Three-quarters of an hour later, Michel Roux joins me. Yes, bizarrely, the interview is to take place here, in the summerhouse, where the two of us now perch like a couple of gnomes. All we need to complete the look is a pair of red bobble hats and, for Monsieur Roux, a little fishing rod. Still, never mind. He is devilishly attractive, in a patrician, French sort of a way. His eyes, which are palest aquamarine, are steely, his nose is strong, and he smells all clean and peppery. And then there is the accent. Honestly, he sounds like Baudelaire - even when he's only going on about rabbit stew. 'I love ze souffle,' he says, at one point. 'Eet's naughty, but eet reminds me of ze boobs of ze woman. If it's beautifully cooked ... I feel like kissing eet!'

If Roux carries with him an air of grandeur - and I do detect just a whiff - well, perhaps he can be forgiven for it. After all, along with his brother Albert, formerly the chef-patron at Le Gavroche in Mayfair, Michel has every right to be considered the godfather of the culinary revolution that has taken place in Britain over the past two decades. (Elizabeth David, he thinks, was almost as influential, but she was not a professional chef and her impact was, therefore, limited mostly to domestic kitchens.) Roux was delivering proper food - the kind that makes your soul, and your tastebuds, sing - aeons before the likes of Marco and Gordon, and he was cooking to camera when Jamie Oliver was only a twinkle in the eye of his publican father. But the world moves on. Not everyone remembers this now, an unforgivable shortness of memory that I suspect somewhat irks him.

We might be sitting in a doll's house, but the knives come out quickly. First, he dispatches a few of the delicate little sandwiches. Then he gets stuck into the younger generation - those bullies, boors and loudmouths whose tempers are as hot as their stoves, and whose unfettered appetite for column inches he finds almost as distasteful as their propensity for bad language. 'It is out of control,' he says, his lip curling like an old crust. 'The way they behave towards their staff, their customers, the media. You don't have to be a star to be a chef; you can run a bistro. We are not here to make scandal. But there are some who feel they created the world, that it had nothing to do with us. They use dreadful words. They throw out their customers. They have their friends in the media - like Michael Winner [the film director and a restaurant critic at the Sunday Times ]. I'm reluctant to mention him because that's exactly what he wants, but HE ... IS ... A ... PIG.'

Roux likes modest, quiet cooks - men like Shaun Hill, proprietor of the Merchant House in Ludlow, and Heston Blumenthal, who is the chef at the Fat Duck just down the road (like the Waterside Inn, the Fat Duck now has three Michelin stars). 'Look at that young man!' spits Michel. 'He's a darling! If anyone should be behaving badly, it is him, even if what he does is not my cup of tea. But no, he's a nice guy, he behaves properly. I feel sorry for those young men - I won't name names - who have chosen a way of life that is bad. They're insecure! Insecure! Unbalanced! Look in my kitchen. You won't find bullying there. Everyone is happy, calm, peaceful. They have a problem themselves, and they should deal with it and not pass it on to other people.' From where does this, er, problem stem? 'A lot of people who bully were themselves bullied. They are what I call WET.'

By now, I have a hunch - possibly an unfair one - that the chef he mostly has in mind is Gordon Ramsay. So I ask if he doesn't think that, temper tantrums aside, Ramsay is a fantastic cook. 'Technically, yes,' he says, a mild expression of distaste on his noble face. 'On the palate, it's a different matter.' Oh dear. Ramsay has also been awarded three hallowed stars by the Michelin inspectors that Roux so reveres - so by slagging him off he is, in a way, having a go at himself. 'To be a great chef, you have to be a gourmet,' he goes on. 'Marco Pierre White had the palate so, for me, he was and still is the greatest. Gordon Ramsay comes second, but he hasn't got the depth. His food is visual. It's a picnic, it's lovely, it's dotted [about the plate]. It's good enough , but... I think Gordon is good, but not a genius.'

Who else does he think is overrated? He shrugs. 'There are so many people we should stop talking about. There's Jamie Oliver, but he's not a chef, so we don't talk about him.' Roux particularly loathes TV chefs. 'We have become the laughing stock of the world,' he announced, a few years ago, adding that most television cookery shows were 'obscene' and made him 'sick'. Does he think they have improved since? Not really. 'People think I'm being nostalgic about television. I'm not. Pah! I can't even talk about it. I watched a programme about the new countries that have joined the EU. They asked people to say the names of these countries. One said France! What a lot of hooligans!' It doesn't surprise him that so many people persist in watching programmes like Ready Steady Cook! When he came to this country in the 1960s, he says, it was a 'land of culinary philistines' - and sometimes he wonders whether things have really changed much at all.

Michel Roux was born above his grandfather's charcuterie in Charolles in 1941 and, from an early age, he learnt to tell what day of the week it was by the smell wafting up the stairs. Monday was the day for boudin; Tuesday for andouillettes and chitterling sausages. After the war, the family moved to the edge of Paris and Michel's father, who had been considered too inexperienced to take over the family business, set up his own shop. But, while no one could make veal's head pté quite like him, M. Roux Snr was not a reliable man. He gambled on the horses, and he kept a mistress. The shop, which had started to go downhill, was closed in order to stave off bankruptcy, and he spent less and less time at home until, when Michel was 10, he disappeared from the scene altogether.

Roux transferred all his affection to his mother, and it was from her that he got his love of cooking. When she made a blanquette of veal, he would beat three egg yolks with a fork while she poured in the stock; he was fascinated by the transformation as it thickened into a sauce. His older brother, Albert, had broken with family tradition and swapped charcuterie for patisserie and, at the age of 14, Michel decided to follow him. He got a job as an apprentice at Camille Loyal's patisserie in Belleville. What he remembers most about this time is the intense fatigue he used to feel. At Epiphany, when the French eat the traditional galette des rois , he made 60 of the things in three days. 'I always slept like a baby,' he says. 'We worked 70 hours a week, and there was no machinery. Even the vanilla ice cream was churned by hand.' His sweet tooth endures to this day.

His apprenticeship was nearing its end when Albert, who was then working as a sous chef in the kitchens of the British Embassy in Paris, suggested he apply for the position of pastry cook there. From here, he began working as chef to the Rothschild family. Albert, meanwhile, had moved to England, where he was cooking for a horse trainer.

Michel soon followed him and, in 1967, they opened Le Gavroche in its first incarnation in Lower Sloane Street. 'I would never have come if it hadn't have been for Albert,' he says. 'People thought that I was mad - I didn't even speak English - but there was more scope. The food was so awful at the time.' Soon after he arrived in London, he remembers passing a Lyons Corner House at Marble Arch. Through its steamy window, he saw people hungrily eating British peas - 'fluorescent, the size of a quail's egg' - and bleached white bread. Oh, the horror! 'Like a witness to a terrible atrocity, I told myself I had to put this out of my mind as quickly as possible,' he writes in his memoir, Life is a Menu .

It took the brothers Roux quite a while to persuade people to, say, eat their fish a little pink, rather than have it boiled to within an inch of its life. But, by 1972, Le Gavroche was famous, and they were ready to open the Waterside Inn. These days, both men stay out of the kitchen; their sons do all the hard work. Alain Roux took over as chef at the Waterside in 2001; Michel Roux Jnr, Albert's son, cooks at Le Gavroche. So far, both places have kept their reputations and, more importantly, their stars. Has it been hard to step back? 'Yes, but I had to do it one day or another.' What would he have done if Alain had not been capable enough to take over? Would he have said something? 'My son would have known. The most important thing in life is to know how far you can go. But do you think people write about him? No! Why? Because he's quiet. He doesn't throw customers on to the street! No, they don't want to write about Alain Roux!' Then again - though I'm wary of pointing this out - it is Papa who is the figurehead.

It is still very much a family business. The other day, Albert was here. Helpfully, he noticed some dust on a bouquet of silk flowers. Such an eye for detail! Is it Albert that Michel turns to in a crisis? 'No, a crisis you deal with yourself. But we had a long talk when it became clear that my first wife [the mother of his three children] was going back to France ...'

But in spite of his own success and that of his imitators, Roux does not regard the British food revolution as anything worth writing home about. In fact, he remains stubbornly chauvinistic when it comes to things edible. He thinks most British people eat rubbish, the kind of junk he wouldn't feed to his dog. 'There is only one restaurant in London with three stars. ONE. In Paris, there are nine.' Well, I venture, perhaps the Michelin inspectors are old fashioned and not a little biased. 'I am always concerned about talking about Michelin because people will think I'm putting them in a good light so they're good to me. But I don't care! Nineteen years without a break, AND I don't have to blanch my cooks' heads in boiling water to make sure I keep them. When my chefs leave, I have a party for them. You talk to people who've worked for those other chefs, and they'll tell you that when they go, they're lucky to get a piece of paper. They just kick them out.'

My time is up now: M. Roux is a busy man. Coffee and - oh, this is heart-breaking - pudding both appear to be out of the question. Michel would, however, like to take me on a tour of the kitchen so I can see how happy everyone is. We leave the Wendy house (carefully does it) and he takes me into the engine room of his empire by a back door. Actually, everyone does look happy. I can't see anyone blubbing mournfully into their radish roses, and a few people, including the aforementioned Alain, are smiling. But we can't stop long. Roux's final act is to hurry me back out to reception where, Mr Benn-style, a doorman appears from nowhere brandishing my car keys. I say au revoir, hop in my motor and off I roar, dreaming of warm golden plum souffle all the way back to London.

· The Waterside Inn, Bray, Berks (01628 620691)