Cooking up a storm - Pierre Levicky

When his Pierre Victoire restaurant empire collapsed amid chaos and debt, he fled to France, pursued by a horde of angry creditors. Ten years on, Pierre Levicky is back in Edinburgh, back in the kitchen – and vowing not to make such a meal of it this time around

PIERRE LEVICKY is a man of strong emotions, one who doesn't just dislike celebrity chefs, but 'ates zem. A culinary warrior of the old school, he believes Gordon Ramsay and his ilk have provided diners with a misguided sense of gastronomic entitlement and expertise that takes no account of the fact that their palates are often about as sophisticated as Jeremy Clarkson after eight pints of snakebite.

The 49-year-old's main gripe is that a chef should be judged by the food that comes out of his kitchen rather than the words that pour out of his mouth. Actions, he tells me, speak louder than words. He's talking about cooking, but it's an interesting point of view when you apply it to the muted, understated phrases he uses to describe his feelings on returning to Edinburgh. At the beginning of our conversation he admits he was "slightly apprehensive". By the midpoint he lets on that he was "a bit worried". Shortly before we part he owns up to being "perhaps even a little scared".

His actions paint a far more vivid picture. Levicky was so concerned for his own safety that he rented a flat that was literally across the road from his restaurant in the New Town. One where, in the early hours of each morning after a gruelling shift in the kitchen, he would stick his head around the corner, looking left and right as he scanned the road for figures lurking in the shadows. Only when he was convinced there was no one around would he scuttle the 20 yards across Eyre Place to his billet. "It was a very, very big gamble for me to come back," he acknowledges.

If Levicky was concerned for his wellbeing, he had every right to be. Ten years ago, when the diminutive Frenchman did a midwinter flit, hurriedly piling his Scottish wife Jackie, their two kids and as many possessions as they could cram into a rented white van headed for Paris, he didn't just abandon Edinburgh, he left a mountain of debts, a barrowload of lurid headlines, a slew of angry franchisees and some very disappointed creditors.

One was so disappointed, in fact, and so intent on getting his cash back that he dispatched a particularly determined goon, who held a knife to Levicky's throat for 45 minutes before the Frenchman managed to escape. It wasn't the only beating he narrowly missed.

The bare bones of Levicky's story have passed into Edinburgh folklore: how he arrived in the city in the late 1980s with just £100 in his pocket and built his Pierre Victoire restaurant in Victoria Street on adrenaline and blind faith; how his model of impossibly cheap £4.60 two-course set lunches revolutionised the dining experience throughout Britain as he franchised his restaurant until it became a 108-branch behemoth; how it turned out that his accounting acumen was in inverse proportion to his talent as a chef, leading to the financial implosion of the chain amid huge debts.

It all came to a head one chilly afternoon in February 1998 when Levicky received a telephone call warning him of impending meltdown. "I was about to go to France when I got a call on a Friday night saying that everything in the flat would be repossessed on the Monday morning," he says. "It came out of the blue and gave me a real fright, so we rented a little van and packed everything in it, and we left for France.

"It was really a very dodgy time. I didn't know what to do. We had no money and we just didn't have any plan. We had a nice place in France that we'd spent lots of money doing up, but we couldn't afford to heat it – it was the middle of February and we were sitting in one room, huddled around a heater, living off a ten grand loan that Jackie got from the Royal Bank."

Ah, the 'nice place'. We will probably never know whether Levicky was guilty of anything more sinister than chronic disorganisation, but to those left out of pocket by the chain's demise with debts of £6 million, the reports that the Frenchman had removed £2 million from the company shortly before its collapse to buy a château told them all they needed to know.

"All the stuff about money being stolen was lies, pure lies," he says. "Everyone (who was] involved in the company will know that's not true. I had huge personal loans on the farm or château or whatever you want to call it, and in the end we sold it at a huge loss.

"When Pierre Victoire came down, Jackie and I both agreed we'd never do restaurants again. Never, never, never, because it was a very hurtful scenario. I didn't care about the things that were said, because people were not aware of the facts. Some of the newspaper articles read like works of fiction, like books you can buy at the airport. But I did get annoyed at some of the people I worked with because we were all in it together but everything was heaped on me. It was such a large business that I couldn't run it on my own, but when it all went wrong, everything was my fault. I was villainised."

He was also convicted in absentia, the Court of Session in 2001 banning him from being a director of a company in Britain for a staggering 13 years, which is why the business side of the new restaurant is taken care of by partner Donald Thow. However, Levicky is adamant that his company was run properly, that there were weekly stock takes, that all the restaurants kept proper margins, that his court ban was largely as a result of him being unwilling and unable to return to fight his corner.

As a tutorial still run by Stirling University's department of management entitled Entrepreneurship: Pierre Levicky – deviant or genius? suggests, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Levicky is quite happy to admit that the Pierre Victoire chain wasn't planned, that he is a chef not a businessman. For those of us long enough in the tooth to have been around at Pierre Victoire's downfall, stories of its internal chaos are legion. I have several friends who worked for him in Edinburgh who all tell the same story of those crazy times.

"Sure, there were plenty of people doing their best to keep the show on the road, but it was impossible to be everywhere at once," says one friend who ran the flagship Victoria Street branch for a while. "As soon as your back was turned, the staff were nicking everything they could lay their hands on: bottles of wine, food from the kitchens, even loo rolls. Others were using the till as their own personal cashpoint." It's anecdotal evidence that is backed up by the company accounts: during Pierre Victoire's first wine stock check in 1990, some 63 bottles went missing over the course of one evening.

When Pierre Victoire went down, the staff and creditors weren't the only ones who suffered. Levicky's family was caught in the crossfire too. When he desperately needed collateral for his first restaurant and no banker would give him the time of day, he guaranteed the loan using the Stockbridge flat he shared with Jackie. Had he not paid the debt within three months, he would have lost the flat. Naturally, he didn't see the need to tell Jackie. One of Levicky's key lieutenants was his sister Marcelline Levicky, who now owns the highly successful Café Marlayne restaurant, a ten-minute walk up the hill from his new venture, Chez Pierre. But in the late 1990s, she was running Victoria Street for her brother. The problem for his fellow directors, says Levicky, was that she was young and related to him and they wanted someone with more experience in the job. Unwilling to fire his sister, he persuaded her to invest in an underperforming franchise in Ayr, a decision from which it took her years to recover financially. Brother and sister fell out so badly that they didn't talk for almost ten years. He didn't tell her he was coming back to Edinburgh and even when news of his return filtered out she didn't get in touch. It was only when he was rushed into hospital (for what turned out to be a minor ailment) that they finally healed the rift.

MARCELLINE WAS ONE of Levicky's earliest gastronomic guinea pigs. He has cooked for as long as he can remember, but his interest became serious at the age of 12. That was when his mother stopped preparing evening meals for the family and the young Pierre took over, cooking for his foreman father and his three sisters in the small town of Vienne, near the epicentre of Gallic cuisine, Lyon. He learned to cook classic French dishes using the country's favourite ingredients – butter, cream, cheese and red meat.

At 16, he left to study as a chef in Grenoble, but the calorie-laden cooking that was at the heart of Pierre Victoire (or "PV", as he calls it) was already set in stone. Yet the habits of 30 years changed almost overnight when Levicky was suddenly crippled by searing pain in his legs and ankles.

"I was so sore I could hardly walk down the stairs," he says. "It would take ages and I'd be moving like a robot, walking without bending my legs. I was like that for three or four months. I didn't know what it was – I thought it was just chef's illness – but I went to see my doctor and the blood tests came back saying it could only be (rheumatoid] arthritis.

"He told me not to worry – he seemed quite relaxed about the whole thing. He handed me a diet sheet. He was a firm believer in Omega 3, and said, 'Follow this diet for three months and don't change it, and I guarantee you'll have no pain left.' There was no cream, no cheese, no red meat on the diet sheet – no nothing that I really like – but if someone tells you that you won't have any more pain when that pain is ruining your life, there can be no argument. I'm strong-willed and, anyway, three months is not a long time."

To his surprise, Levicky found that the pain disappeared after three months, and hasn't come back – perhaps because he has kept up his new eating habits. For instance, he found a replacement for red meat in pork fillet, and simply cut out butter and cheese altogether. The changes coincided with him finally managing to quit smoking after a lifetime of heavy tabbing, which has completely altered the way his palate functions. The whole experience has changed his culinary philosophy.

"Those three months changed the way I cook. My style of cooking has become lighter, more complicated and refined, even if it doesn't look like it."

It's clear from the way he talks that Levicky has been revitalised by the opening of Chez Pierre. That's partly because leading a new crew of 20-something staff "makes me feel as if I'm 30 again", but it's also because he feels successful and wanted once more.

For all his impish insouciance and insistence that he feels no guilt whatsoever about the downfall of PV, there is a palpable sense of neediness about Levicky. It's as if he needs the affirmation of success that comes with a packed, bustling Chez Pierre. He reminds me how many popular Edinburgh restaurants are run by PV alumni – The Apartment, Maison Bleue, The Outsider, La P'tite Folie and Café Marlayne included. He has even self-published an autobiography called Cooking Life, a manically eccentric and occasionally impenetrable work whose very existence hints at an elephantine ego (and also suggests that he shouldn't give up the day job just yet).

Still, if Levicky is feeling a bit fragile, it's hardly surprising. Life in the years since PV has been a struggle at times, even for one overbrimming with chutzpah. After two months in a freezing château in midwinter, he was running out of cash and ideas when he was contacted by a couple of Americans who wanted his help to start a fast-food franchise in France. He turned out to have quite an aptitude for fast food, but found himself at a loose end when the company was sold. So he packed his family into a motorhome and took off on a tour of Europe. Besides, he had fallen out of love with his countrymen.

"All I knew by then was that I didn't want to stay in France," he said. "As much as I am French, I cannot stand the French. They moan all the time, and I am many things but I am not a moaner. It's customary there, it's part of the personality. I get up happy in the morning and if I don't like doing something, I just don't do it."

They visited Italy but eventually ended up in Portugal and then Spain, where he set up an estate agency before the pull of the restaurant trade reeled him in again and he used his last £5,000 to set up Chez Pierre on the Andalucian coast three years ago. It was, he says with something approaching wistfulness, a little like the early days of PV: all work, all play. There was even the Spanish reserve to break down, just as there had been Edinburgh's frostiness to overcome 20 years ago.

Even though the Spanish venture was going well, it was hard to resist when the opportunity to take care of unfinished business in Edinburgh revealed itself on a visit to the city with Jackie to see her mother. But he admits that the spark had long smouldered. It's as if he's trying to do it right this time, so when he tells me he came within hours of signing a lease on a restaurant in Glasgow last year, I ask whether that means he's planning to expand the Chez Pierre marque in true PV style.

"Would I do it again if I was given the opportunity? Yeah, I would, just not as big. I will probably put a Chez Pierre in Glasgow, for instance, and see how it goes."

And what, I ask, do you plan to do differently this time? "This time, I think I would like to actually plan it."

God help us all, I think he really means it.

• Chez Pierre, 18 Eyre Place, Edinburgh (0131 556 0006)