Michelin man: How Joël Robuchon became the world's most starred chef

Who is the world's greatest living chef? As always when showering superlatives on a subject, it all depends on how you define the term. If it's bespoke iconoclastic creativity you're after, few would argue against Ferran Adrià, of El Bulli fame, being your man. But while it's hard to avoid descriptions of the Catalan chef's undeniable genius, actually experiencing it – actually getting to try his food by somehow securing a table at his notoriously oversubscribed restaurant on the Costa Brava – is even harder.

Talk instead about a chef delivering accessible greatness, the kind of greatness you can experience in a restaurant you can just pop into without a reservation, grab a bite and a glass of wine and – if your discipline holds and you can leave it at that – shell out under £20, and it has to be Joël Robuchon.

In these days of jet-setting superstar chefs who run global restaurant empires, it's Robuchon, a chef who was supposed to have "retired" in 1996, shortly after his 50th birthday, who is the current undisputed champion.

He never quite pulled that retirement off, continuing to keep his hand in with a variety of restaurant consultancies in France and Asia. And then, in 2003, he began opening restaurant after restaurant with the team of trusted chefs and managers he'd worked with previously. Five years and 12 restaurants later, he has a collection of the world's most consistently excellent eateries.

Or so says Michelin, the French guide with the three-tiered star system that is still, despite its detractors, the established arbiter of gastronomic fashion. Because in March this year, after the results were announced, Robuchon became the most Michelin-starred chef on the planet, ever, with an unprecedented total of 18 stars. That breaks down to two three-star restaurants (in Las Vegas and Tokyo); four two-star restaurants (two in Paris, one in Monte Carlo and one in Tokyo); and four one-star restaurants (in Las Vegas, London, New York and Tokyo).

Although those numbers might give the impression that Michelin is suddenly giving stars out like sweeties, that's not the case. Robuchon's nearest rivals in the star wars are Alain Ducasse, with 15, and Gordon Ramsay, with 11, both of whom Robuchon leapfrogged in November last year when he gained nine stars in the space of just over a week with the publication of the company's new guides to Las Vegas and Tokyo.

Not bad for a chef who, when he closed his eponymous three-star Paris restaurant in 1996 – at the time the most famous restaurant in the world – became one of Michelin's fiercest critics. As recently as 2005 he was still giving the guide a good kicking: "As long as Michelin remains stuck in the past, I have no interest in being mentioned in it," he said. "Their judging standards are behind the times... and I am no longer so sure they are so impartial."

Not that Robuchon is letting his new improved star status go to his head; he's too long in the tooth for that. "Having the most stars doesn't necessarily mean you're the best chef," he tells me. "You've just got to have a lot of restaurants to have a lot of stars."

We're sat at a table overlooking his research kitchen off the Boulevard du Général Martial Valin, which, housed ina warehouse in an area mainly occupied by television studios is, despite the sound of the address, one of the less romantic parts of Paris. Across the road is the studio where he records his long-running cookery show, Bon Appétit Bien Sur, which is broadcast nationally on France 3 every weekday morning before the news and each week features five recipes from a stellar guest chef.

But he must be pleased that he now has more stars than any other chef, I insist. He pauses. "I think it's intelligent – after what I've said about them in the past they could have penalised me and therefore shown that they had an attitude, but ultimately they have rewarded me..." he says, "...which at least shows that they are objective."

Dressed in modish Mao-style chef's blacks and a pair of matching Prada slip-ons, an outfit that has been his trademark since 2003, he cuts a very different figure from the young Turk in the toque that first wowed the world with his cooking at Jamin in Paris throughout the 1980s and helped banish the carrot-on-plate silliness of nouvelle cuisine at its worst. It was a period of his career that culminated, in 1989, with him being him declared "Chef of the Century" by ' Gault Millau, a rival French gastronomic guide to Michelin – praise as rich as his famed truffle mash.

Robuchon launched his L'Atelier chain of restaurants in Tokyo in 2003 as a reaction to the traditional style of fine dining he previously practised, and which Michelin was thought to favour. Inspired by the Japanese capital (where they can't get enough of him and where he currently has three restaurants, a café, bar and boutique) and his love of Japanese culture, L'Atelier was basically an open-plan kitchen around which a 38-seat eating bar was built. The obvious nods to the sushi bar are there in the design, not least in the distinctive low-lit black and red colour scheme, which – coincidentally, he insists – makes it look like a giant bento box.

There are now six L'Ateliers, including a London branch, opened in 2006. The restaurants also reflect Robuchon's love of tapas bars, with haunches of the finest Iberico ham sitting on the counter. (After Japan, his other great foreign love is Spain, where he has an apartment on the beach at Calpe, between Alicante and Valencia.)

With no reservations and dishes available in tapas-sized portions, L'Atelier was his two fingers up to formal dining. That he got away with it was as much to do with the quality of the cooking, which, despite the foreign trappings, was still unmistakably, fantastically French in dishes such as chestnut velouté with caramelised foie gras and crispy bacon, as it was to do with a trend towards informal dining. Ironically enough when, in 2003, he opened his second L'Atelier in Paris, it quickly gained a Michelin star. (And, in a further irony, he's since returned to opening gastronomic restaurants on a grand scale, most recently in a luxury casino hotel in Las Vegas bankrolled by MGM.)

Aside from wanting to modernise Michelin, his attitude towards the guide must have been tainted by the suicide in 2003 of his friend and fellow French star chef Bernard Loiseau, whose story is told in painstaking detail by the American journalist Rudolph Chelminski in The Perfectionist. Loiseau had a bipolar disorder and it was alleged that he shot himself shortly after being marked down in the Gault Millau guide and amid rumours that Michelin was going to remove the third star from his La Côte d'Or restaurant in Burgundy. It later emerged that Michelin had no such plan.

"Michelin is modernising; it had to modernise because the most important thing is what's on the plate, not whether or not your toilet is gold-plated," says Robuchon. "Now it is different, but at the time keeping your three stars was the most important thing; every three-star chef in France used to be petrified before the guide came out, and they probably still are. It's not just you lose a star, it's that you lose business, money, your livelihood; and the pressure was too much."

He's a hard man to read. It could be the black pyjama suit; or it could be the fact that, to ease financial pressures on his family, from the age of 12 he spent three years in a seminary wanting to be a priest. He left at 15 and took his first job in a kitchen, at a relais in Poitiers – the town in west central France where he was born. His mysterious monkish air could also be due to a fact that he drops into the conversation: that he's an enthusiastic Freemason (many of the top French chefs of his generation are).

His career was built on discipline, chained to various stoves for 36 years until he started to travel for the first time after closing his restaurant in 1996. "I came from a modest family, so it was about working seven days a week, and when we had a holiday there wasn't the money to travel," he explains. "I've learnt more in the past 10 years than I learnt from the age of 15 to 50. If I only knew what I know now back when I opened my first restaurant, it would have changed my life."

Travelling the world has, aside from inspiring his cooking with new ingredients and techniques, also given him some perspective on the country of his birth. "There's a problem in France at the moment – the taxes and red tape are inconceivable." He pauses to exhale deeply. "No one helps you. Why would you want to open a restaurant here? You can't find decent employees as they've all gone abroad. It hurts me to say this because this is my country but you go to a shop in New York and you don't buy anything and everyone smiles at you. In Paris, you go into a shop and it's as if you're disturbing them. If I had stayed in France I wouldn't have known the difference."

Gordon Ramsay, who worked under Robuchon for 10 months in Paris in the early-1990s, has recently opened a restaurant in nearby Versailles. I ask what advice Robuchon would offer him. "It's not going to be easy for him," he says. "He must come with humility, do his job and allow other people to judge. Gordon can get quite worked up – I know because he worked for me."

Ramsay, in his autobiography Humble Pie, talks of Marco Pierre White, his famously flamboyant and volatile mentor, looking like a "fucking pussycat" compared with Robuchon, adding that working in his Paris kitchen was like being in the SAS. All of the British chefs who trained under him – Ramsay, Tom Aikens, Michael Caines, Richard Neat – have spoken of his perfectionism, his work ethic and the way he worked them. Was he that tough a taskmaster?

"Of course, it may not have always been plain sailing in the kitchen but I am proud when I see chefs who have worked for me go on to do well," he says. "The younger people in my kitchen are stricter than I am these days. I've adapted to modern times. I've worked with many of the same people for more than 30 years and over time people relax. But there's always the same respect, and there must always be discipline in the kitchen."

He will open at least three more L'Ateliers – in Miami, Taipei and Tel Aviv – which will give him a total of 15 restaurants worldwide and, at 63, has no plans to stop working or travelling any time soon. "It's my life: aeroplanes, hotels and restaurants. But I'm very happy." If he has a hobby outside of restaurants, cooking and the Freemasons, it's that he's obsessed with the latest electronic gadgets. He lays out his three mobile phones on the table to demonstrate. He uses them when he's travelling to keep in touch with his wife, Janine – who used to work front of house at his Paris restaurant – his children and his grandchildren.

"I mean it sincerely when I say that everything I do today is what I want to do," he says. "There's no hassle, no stress and no point in thinking about an exit strategy. When I was younger and there were things I wanted to do that I couldn't, I got stressed out and it was bad at times. Now, if I want to create a dish, I create a dish. If I want to go to London, I go to London. So why even think of stopping?"

L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon, 13-15 West Street, London WC2 (020 7010 8600, www.joel-robuchon.com)

Interesting? Click here to explore further