Robert Carrier, the restaurateur, food writer and bon vivant who died yesterday aged 82, introduced luxurious Continental cooking to a nation in which ingredients such as garlic and spaghetti were regarded as foreign and treated with deep suspicion.
Theatrical, camp and with a penchant for superlatives ("Gooorgeous… Adooorable… Faaabulous!"), he became the first celebrity chef on British television; his series, Carrier's Kitchen, attracted viewers as much for his drawling American vowels and shameless self-promotion as for his dishes.
The Britain he found when he arrived in 1953 was still surviving on a wartime austerity diet and finding things to do with leftovers and Spam. Carrier soon reversed all that, promoting dishes that involved profligate lashings of Calvados, cream, butter and eggs. Everything was in excess and served up with an ironic humour. A famous Carrier recipe of the time numbered some 25 exotic ingredients, including salmon, caviare, foie gras, truffles, fresh cumin - and a cabbage leaf, "if you have it".
His first book, Great Dishes of the World (1963), lavishly illustrated for the time and priced at the equivalent of around £100 in today's money, sold 11 million copies. It was followed by revolutionary cookery cards, Carrier cookware, more books and two Michelin-starred restaurants, in north London and at Hintlesham Hall, in Suffolk, where he also opened a cookery school. Carrier's, in Camden Passage, Islington, served "everything you couldn't get anywhere else" and was the Ivy of its day, a place where one might bump into Princess Margaret, Liza Minnelli, Ava Gardner or Judy Garland.
His various interests made Carrier a rich man, but in 1982 he suddenly decided that he had had enough. He was suffering from stress, and his liver (which he proudly boasted was the size of a football) was suffering une crise de foie. He sold his two restaurants and decamped to a palace in Marrakesh.
Of mixed Irish and German ancestry, Robert Carrier was born at Tarrytown, New York, on November 10 1923, the third son of a wealthy lawyer who lost his fortune in the Depression. As a child Robert trained for the stage and toured Italy with a rep company, singing the juvenile lead in American musicals.
He arrived in England in 1943 as an American serviceman with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. After D-Day he moved to Paris, where he worked as a cryptographer in General de Gaulle's headquarters, then as editor of a magazine called Spectacle, set up to support de Gaulle's RTF party in its failed bid for post-war power.
There followed some years of drifting around the Continent. He worked as a radio journalist, a cowboy in an Italian musical revue, and as an apprentice chef in Fifine's restaurant at St Tropez. It was in France that he first started to experience and write about good food.
Carrier returned to London in 1953 for the Coronation, liked it and stayed, doing PR for stock cubes, cornflour and New Zealand apples. He was appalled by the contrast between French and British attitudes to food. In France the arrival of the first post-war grapefruit was heralded by ecstatic headlines in the national press ("Vive Le Pamplemousse!"); in Britain, by contrast, there was just one wholesaler in London selling garlic - "little shrivelled-up cloves" - though the vegetable could easily be grown.
Carrier's enthusiasm and public relations flair - "London's gayest gourmet", as Home magazine described him - captivated the magazine editors and he began writing about food. He produced articles for Harpers (for whom he devised the first cookery cards), Vogue and The Sunday Telegraph Magazine. After the publication of Great Dishes of the World his fame grew, and he opened Carrier's, his first restaurant, in Camden Passage, which won him a Michelin star; then Hintlesham Hall, which won another star. During the 1970s he became a regular on television with Carrier's Kitchen.
To viewers used to tamer fare, Carrier was a revelation. On camera his thick, freckled fingers were always poking and prodding: testing a pie, squeezing a pepper, kneading a pastry. "A great cook doesn't need to taste anything - you can do it all by touch," he claimed. His unabashed sensuality won him a huge female following: "I am a cook because I am a sensualist. I love smell and colour and texture. I love to sniff a new food."
But Carrier began to find his celebrity something of a burden. As a sideline at Hintlesham Hall he set up a cookery school, hoping to train would-be chefs. "I walked into my cookery school one morning and found this South African millionairess trembling," he recalled. "I said: 'What's the matter, honey?' She said: 'Oh, but you're the Food God.' I just froze and suddenly realised why people were coming to the school - and it certainly wasn't to cook. They were Robert Carrier groupies."
In 1982 he decided on drastic action, closing the school and selling his two restaurants. Two years later he fled to Marrakesh by way of New York.
He returned to London in 1994, when his Christmas-card list revealed that this was where most of his friends lived. Foodies greeted him like the prodigal son, but any hopes that Carrier would put paid to the fad for rocket and sun-dried tomatoes with a revival of 12-course cream-soaked extravaganzas were soon dashed, for Carrier appeared to have recanted.
A stone less in weight, he reappeared on the nation's television screens with a morning spot on GMTV cooking up vegetarian dishes, and had acquired a new commitment to "immediate foods" prepared and served in a matter of minutes.
In 1998 he published New Great Dishes of the World, in which he committed culinary genocide by wiping out almost every old favourite, replacing wiener schnitzel, casserole of duck, rum baba and raspberry pavlova with such offerings as chilli salt squid sauteed with coriander and yellow pepper, twice-cooked eggs in a hot lemongrass bouillon and wilted salad greens.
Modesty was not chief among Carrier's virtues: he described himself as "a genius in the kitchen" and "the most successful media cook in the world".
For his services to the restaurant trade, he was appointed OBE.
In latter years Carrier lived in Provence, where he enjoyed painting.
Robert Carrier never married, though his close companion for many years, according to friends, was a writer called Oliver Lawson-Dick, who predeceased him.
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