holding their first talks in more than two years. south korean officials have said the north will send a delegation to next month's winter olympics. they're in the truce village of panmunjom, in the demilitarised zone. the united states is to cancel residence permits for nearly 200,000 people from el salvador. they were allowed to live in the us from 2001, when two earthquakes in the central american country caused massive destruction and loss of life. but the trump administration says the disruption caused by the quakes is now over. there are fears of an environmental disaster in the east china sea. a tanker is still leaking oil there, two days after it hit a cargo ship. chinese officials say the vessel is in danger of exploding. 0ne body has been recovered. it's just gone 4:30am in the morning. now on bbc news, hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. not so long ago, british food was the laughing stock of the world — bland, stodgy and flavourless.

but how things have changed. today, the nation seems obsessed with cooking and baking on tv and fine dining. my guest today is one of the new breed of top celebrity television chefs, marcus wareing. yes, we are now obsessed with good food, but is that altogether healthy? marcus wareing, welcome to hardtalk. there are an awful lot of chefs in the world.

only a very few elite, top chefs. what distinguishes the very best from the rest? i think it is — i think first of all it's a mindset, it's a work ethic and i think there is a type of sacrifice that a top chef has and wants to sort of drive themselves individually, and as an individual, to excel head and shoulders above everybody else. and a lot of advice that i've ever had through the years coming through the ranks was... and it came from my father originally, was to stand out from the crowd and to do that you need to do something different. most of the great chefs around the world started as apprentices to other truly great chefs. if we look at your cv, you worked with albert roux, you've obviously famously worked a lot with gordon ramsay, both in their different ways great chefs. so did you acquire skills and knowledge directly from them? without a doubt.

your travels, your working in kitchens is the foundation of who you are as a chef. the most important thing about trying to be a good chef or someone who is going to be a little bit different is working with some of the best chefs. when you work through all the different kitchens, you're inspired, you're energised, but you're also gathering knowledge, education and discipline. they're leaders of examples and leaders of their industry and they have something to offer. they may not tell or talk to you every day, they may not tell you an idea or recipe, but you have to go into their kitchens and feed off their energy, like a big battery that you are sucking everything out of. you store it while you're training, you go and train more, you put it on a shelf, you go and train in another kitchen, you put all that information on the shelf and when you become a head chef you bring it all down and use all of that experience. i've got, as it happens, your menus from last night

here at marcus, your flagship two michelin star restaurant. and therefore, i'm looking at this, it all looks delicious, i notice a very big emphasis on british produce. yes. you know, from starters of wood pigeon and portland crab and glazed ox tongue with dorset snails, through to your mains — herdwick lamb, cumbrian veal, grouse, all of this, it sounds delicious, but very british. yes. so this ‘who am i‘ question, what are your menus saying about who you are? so the way i look at my restaurants, and because the way in which industries change and farming and the way we receive our produce, i look at the uk as my local community of food. because i can put an order in this morning from scotland and get it tomorrow morning. so things move quickly. so local, uk, and then i spread further afield into europe for other different types of produce that are better or farmed better orjust taste better and we're always searching for something really nice. but i don't like to go too

far across the world to gather food produce. so this idea of food miles matters to you? very much. i think now in the world we need to be very careful that we aren't purchasing too much from all over the world. i don't have japanese flavours through my menu, or curries. certain things i don't need to put into this menu because it's not really a reflection of me as a person. i've never trained in lots of different cuisines, but i will never experiment them on my menu. so the reflection of the menu and the ingredients that you've talked about are about a local lad from the north—west of england, using the produce from this fabulous country, this island, that we live on. i love it — the phrase "a local lad from southport", wasn't it, in the north—west of england, with a dad who was a market trader. it's a great story. does it sit uneasily with you in anyway, that here we are in a posh,

expensive part of london, and all this fabulous food you are serving comes at a price. your tasting menu is £120, roughly $140, your a la carte, i imagine a dish, a main, would be about £60, £70. just a bit less than that. yeah, but these are big numbers and out of reach for most people. for a local lad from southport, does that bother you? no, it doesn't, because i think it is not about all men being equal, it's about a matter of choice and i think what we do offer is choice and there are tasting menus, there are a la carte menus, but there are also very good reasonable lunch menus. the wine, you can come to this restaurant and spend the same amount of money on a glass of wine than you would in a good bar or pub. it's all a point of choice. so with the thousands of bottles we have on oui’ menu, when you come here, there's something for everybody. so i don't look at it

as a rich man's room, or we're in knightsbridge, anyone who comes to my restaurant, you can have tap water, a glass of house wine and the lunch menu for two people you could be out of the door for less than £100 if you wish, but it's your choice to come and spend the value that you want to spend. but isn't it nice, even for a northern lad, to maybe come with your girlfriend or your wife and dress up, come to knightsbridge, come to london, do something different? we're not on everyone‘s doorstep, we just happen to be in the heart of london. i sort of love it. i'm proud to have worked my way from there. it didn't arrive on a silver tray, it was a lot of hard work. and what about food snobbery? i mean, you have two michelin stars. not many chefs around the world do. but there is something about this whole sort of fetishisation of the michelin star which sticks

in some people's throats. do you sometimes feel that it's the wrong way to reallyjudge the quality of food and restaurants? no, i don't. i think michelin are very, very important and very present. i think their history determines how good they really are. they are judging chefs as a guide and they're giving you a point of recognition and giving you an accolade. it's not something you ask for, it is given to you. it's almost a gift of your standards of what you do. but it puts you under enormous pressure. some chefs have started saying to michelin, even if they've had in the past one or two stars, they are now saying, i don't want to be part of your network. i don't want to be judged by you any more. the pressure is too constant, it's too immense. the things you require of us in terms of the level of service, the presentation, arejust actually making us a restaurant we don't

want to be. i disagree. i completely disagree, because i don't think it's the michelin putting the pressure on the chef, it's the general public and the expectation of the general public. in the last ten years, social media has become a big part. everybody in your restaurant now can post their thoughts of the dinner, of the experience they are eating. so i think it's more thanjust michelin. every person at your table is now a reviewer. exactly and they can post something on the internet... does that scare the hell out of you? oh, no. no. it's a challenge, it sets standards, it even tells me what my restaurant is doing when i'm not here. you have to embrace technology, you have to embrace it. even if i don't like it and do it as well as the next chef, i do have a team of people around me that can advise me and show me how to move forward. but if i look down on that process, and i look down and say michelin delivers pressure, then i would be a nervous wreck. you must always turn pressure into positive thinking and positive energy and enjoy yourjob.

go back to your roots. think about those ingredients. stop worrying about what everyone is saying. the late aa gill, i don't know if you knew him, but he was one of britain's sort of best known restaurant reviewers and he rebelled against the michelin spirit. the sort of smart, formal dining that it seemed to encourage. he said this, "the guide now seems to be wholly out of touch with the way people now actually eat. it's still rewarding fat, conservative, fussy rooms", maybe he meant rooms like this, "that use expensive ingredients with ingratiating pomp to serve glossy plutocrats." is that marcus? no. absolutely not and i don't think fine dining is that. i think there are lots of food writers and critics maybe that don't see the fun or the luxury or the enjoyment in fine dining, because it is a homage to the chef and i think the world has changed. i think a chef cooking in a high street restaurant, that's got 20 seats in and he's

slaving away in the back of a kitchen, an open kitchen. that is today as enjoyable as eating in a fine dining restaurant. it's all about what somebody wants for an occasion and if i'm going to set up a restaurant in this hotel, a 5—star hotel, it is known all over the world, there's a level of luxury i have to provide and i want to provide. it strikes me that as you've become more successful, like so many top chefs you've developed the brand and become a tv personality, you're on the british masterchef show, which has made you enormously popular in this country. you've also opened other restaurants in central london, so now you've got a stable of three. it all means that you are not every single lunchtime and dinner actually in the kitchen, here at your number one restaurant, doing it yourself. it strikes me that when people come

here, and as we've discussed they do pay a substantial amount of money for food from the marcus restaurant, they expect marcus wareing to be slaving away in the kitchen. i think life has changed and up until four years ago when i revamped this restaurant i was in this kitchen every single day. i never looked for television, it came and found me. i never, ever woke up and wanted to write a cookery book and i never needed to open two of the restaurants on top of this. i was very satisfied with what i had. so why did you do it? why did you stretch yourself? because i found i had some very talented people underneath me that i had to find opportunities for. and what i see is having those other restaurants, i've created opportunities for very talented people to become bosses within their own right, within my stable. but what if you stretch yourself too thin? no. what if the standards at this restaurant to be honest are not quite as good when you are not here?

i come back. i say goodbye to television and goodbye to books and i do thejob that i'm paid to do, which is cook. the rest is a luxury item that is added my life. interesting you talk about the team. there's been a lot of discussion recently about the workplace sort of temperature in top kitchens and there is a lot of discussion about, and there's no other word for it, bullying and abuse that happens in kitchens and is often driven by the character of the number one chef, which in this case of course would be you. have you bullied your staff in the past? i think bullying is a word that is dressed up in many ways. i was born in the ‘70s and bullying was something that was done in the playground. it was a fight, a push, it was verbal. i don't think that happens in kitchens. i've never experienced it myself in kitchens. i'm amazed. i've raised my voice, swear, shout and drive people very,

very hard through a hard service? yes. i've had it done to me and i've done it on my staff in the past. there have been serious incidents in kitchens. i'm looking at one in france, where a station chef deliberately and repeatedly scalded his kitchen assistant, there were other incidents that came into light after that with sous chefs and assistants recounting tales of abuse ranging, i'm quoting here — it sounds absurd, but it's not, including a slap in the face with a wet fish, being stabbed in the calves with a kitchen knife, all sorts of different burning incidents. 0ne ex—assista nt told a reporter in france, quote, these torturers must be told that they are destroying lives. what the heck is going on in some of these kitchens? i think these are very few incidences that are overshadowing a fabulous industry that's bigger than a handful of incidents 01’ many, many more. there are millions of people working in our industry and thousands and thousands of kitchens just

running through london alone. i think the kitchens are pressure cookers. what has changed, and this is something we really must focus on, is kitchens have become very much open places and the chef is part of the front of service as well as the back. chefs are now delivering food. so i believe that the way... you actually come out here of an evening? yes, we can come out and even my chefs can come out here and speak to customers. but what's changed is we, the chef, have now neutralised w l- j —: l4 :l.: we are sometimes taking the training out of our young chefs to make thejob easier. because there's so much choice and so few people wanting to necessarily work in our industry. maybe that's because you don't pay enough as well. that's wrong. we pay our staff minimum and above minimum wage. minimum wage is a bit of a low bar

you're setting yourself. minimum wage is a point of, if you work an 8—hour day,