What inspired French Odyssey?

When I started out in the early 1970s French cooking was really my only serious influence. For the first 10 years of having the seafood restaurant open I went to France, and particularly Brittany, to pick up ideas. I based French Odyssey on a book by Caroline Conran called Under The Sun about leaving 1960s London and driving down to St Tropez. The book gives that sense of euphoria at leaving London and heading south, the landscape changing and the anticipation of reaching the Med.

Your journey followed the canals from Bordeaux to Marseille - was it slow going?

The barge travels at four miles an hour and the journey took around two months, but that was because we kept getting off to visit cheese makers and wine makers. It didn't feel frustrating to travel that slowly because it is just such a wonderful way to go through the countryside - you notice so much more. I was constantly thinking - who would want to live anywhere else on earth? There is lovely food, a really agreeable climate and very nice people.

Did you notice much of a change in the food as you travelled towards Marseille?

Around Bordeaux the landscape is lush and verdant, then towards Toulouse it gets drier, sunnier and hotter. The food changes too. One of the landmarks was a fish stall in the Victor Hugo Market in Toulouse. We found an equal quantity of Atlantic and Mediterranean fish and being a French market it was in absolutely perfect condition. En route you find Bordelaise cooking which is very meat and wine orientated and quite sophisticated, then Gascon and Languedoc cooking which is really agricultural, and then at the coast there is a lot more seafood, tomatoes, garlic and anchovies. In Bordeaux the interesting thing for me was the river fish. We fished the Garonne and cooked shad steaks over vine prunings. There is a real affection for local food in France; they're much more adept at supporting and celebrating localness than we are.

Is food a key part of travel for you and do dishes you've discovered abroad ever make it into your restaurants?

Wherever I go I'm always looking for recipes and ideas. I was in Puglia in southern Italy recently and I picked up a very nice squid dish with risotto as a side. The risotto is just cooked with chicken stock, nothing else, and it's like having mashed potato. It will appear in the restaurant soon.

From the French trip I think Provencal fish stews were the best find. But most of the recipes from the series now appear on the menu at our St Petroc's Bistro. There was a really nice daube from the Camargue made with the meat from the breed of bulls used for bullfighting. It's served with a macaronade - cooked macaroni moistened with juice from the stew made of red wine, olives, some chopped saltpork, the beef and Provencal herbs, garlic then mixed with Parmesan and put under the grill. It's fantastic.

Have you always been into travelling?

I did what lots of young kids do now. I left England when I was 19 for two years travelling on my own and since then I've always had an urge to go abroad. For holidays I probably go to Europe three to four times a year, but in the last 25 years I've gone much further afield. I tend to go to the same places - south east Asia, India, Australia and New Zealand. I'm always on the scrounge for new ideas. To my shame I haven't been to Japan, but I'm sure I will soon.

I'm very lucky because I know lots of chefs abroad and tend to use that network when I travel. It's really helpful for finding food markets and good restaurants. But it's really nice to come home to the restaurants in Cornwall with new ideas.

· French Odyssey is on BBC2 on Wednesdays at 8pm. The book to accompany the series is published by BBC Books on 5 September, £20