Yet, true or not, some chefs around Martin might have heard the news and looked a little sheepish. Because as everybody knows in the hospitality world, massaging CVs or simply inventing experience is rife in the business. 

Because such is the competitive nature of getting ahead in the kitchens of our greatest restaurants it’s not good enough – in addition to a little cooking experience – to have scars, tattoos and beards. No, you need to have toiled at the coalface of the world’s most influential restaurants.  

And so leaping off the pages of CVs of chefs across the UK come names like Marco Pierre White, Heston Blumenthal, Raymond Blanc, Michel Roux Jnr and, of course, Gordon Ramsay. Then there are those overseas establishments of legend: El Bulli in Spain, The French Laundry of California and Noma in Copenhagen. 

Indeed, the number of chefs who claim to have worked at Noma almost defies gravity. 

Seasoned restaurateur Mark Hix, who has employed hundreds of chefs during his culinary career, admits: “Name-dropping is rife; it happens all time.” He has experienced both suspect claims of experience on chefs’ CVs as well as discovering that chefs have fraudulently claimed to have worked for him.

But, he says, it’s not difficult working out if people are lying on their CVs. “I just ring up the chefs whose names are mentioned and ask. In fact I wish more chefs did that. The worst thing is people who don’t make the call and employ someone solely on the basis of a CV.”