According to the tabloids, Valentine Warner is “the Russell Brand of the kitchen”. Which makes me a little nervous as I head down a busy high street to meet the BBC’s latest “celebrity chef”. After all, Brand doesn’t look like he eats – or cooks – much. Perhaps his alter-ego will try to seduce me with an eccentric hairdo. Or spice up a dull dinner with a narcotic.

So it is something of a surprise to find a calm and collected sort of chap, when I meet Warner, sitting quietly and looking rather out of place in a smart London bar. He does admittedly have conspicuous hair, but it’s mad and curly in a posh, country-boy way, and he has clipped vowels that immediately betray his Dorset farm and public school upbringing. He has on jeans and a pair of scruffy red trainers, but would look more at home in wellies and cords.

“I’ve no idea where the Brand thing came from,” he says, looking a shade embarrassed. “The only thing I can think of is that he had a Booky Wook and, er, I’ve got a Cooky Book.” He seems new to the interview game (he is) and is cautious, but with a self-assuredness that emerges when he’s talking about food.

His forthcoming programme and book, both entitled What to Eat Now, focus on cooking with home-grown, seasonal produce and on understanding where our food comes from, inevitably leading to comparisons with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, something that he shrugs off (“My favourite chefs are people like Keith Floyd and the Two Fat Ladies. They knew how to have a drink and a laugh.”) The recipes are all woodcock, partridge and pheasant, “roast shoulder of lamb with bitter herbs and honey” (“discovered in late September on a blisteringly hot Greek day”), and curried mussels with celery leaves and lager, which he’d prefer you to forage for yourself.

Warner is very keen on doing things yourself. There is a moment in the programme when he is fishing with two girls, who shriek with disgust when Warner asks them to pick up a mackerel. He seems to me almost cross with them. “Something inside me felt sad that they didn’t want to pick up a fish. Not so long ago people would have thought that was a completely normal thing. It’s a fish, it’s slimy. So what?”

Warner, 36, is the protégé of the team that discovered Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay, but he’s a bit more Tamasin Day-Lewis or Nigella Lawson, really, a return to the days when we liked our chefs a bit high-class, people we wanted to be, rather than already were. His father was a diplomat, a British Ambassador to Laos and Japan, and later the Conservative MP for Somerset. Warner grew up with his brother and sister on a farm in Dorset, where his parents, themselves good cooks, encouraged him from an early age. “When I was really young, I cooked them something which I inexplicably called Australian Bundles. I have no idea why, I had never been to Australia. It was this kind of doughy pancake mess with biscuits. Horrible. But they ate it all.”

It was there that he learnt to hunt. In the programme, Warner teaches archaeologists how to rid themselves productively of a pesky rabbit population that threatens to ruin their dig. It feels more like a nature programme than a standard cookery course. Does he think some viewers might find the sight of rabbits being shot disturbing? “Food has to start somewhere. Yes, there are these rabbits, or cute little lambs, and they do get eaten, but they’ve enjoyed a good life, and it’s the natural order of things. The whole process is a beautiful thing. Nothing is just a piece of meat.”

After years of boarding school, Warner skipped university and decided to be an artist instead, trundling off to an art foundation course in Bath, before trying briefly to be a portrait painter. He dropped the idea when he had an “epiphany” at the age of 23 about becoming a chef.

“At that point I just had to go up to people and said, ‘Hey, will give you me a job.’ They said ‘Have you got any experience?’ To which, obviously I had to reply, ‘None at all.’ ” Eventually he got a job at the Halcyon restaurant in London under Alastair Little, but he stayed under a year, before hopping from kitchen to kitchen, including Fergus Henderson’s St John’s, until setting up his own business cooking private dinners. “I thought because I was naturally hyper, kitchen life would suit me. But I found them too confined, often underground and hot.” Hyper seems an unexpected self-assessment – he has none of the jumpiness favoured by many TV personalities, but could be described as quietly energised. He also says he used to be crippled by shyness, which perhaps explains it.

Private dinners turned into large-scale catering for big names such as Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, but again Warner found himself yearning for the outside world and eventually quit, sold out to his business partner, and went off travelling, fishing – and cooking – in Mexico, among other places, which is where he discovered a love for the cuisine behind his successful Mexican restaurant in West London, Taqueria Café. “I’ve been a latecomer to everything in my life, really. But now I feel I’m where I should be.” He says this despite an apparent hankering to move out of London to bring up a family – he is currently single, although one imagines it won’t be for a lack of advances once his show is up and running.

Where will he fit in then, among the Jamies and the Gordons and the Hughs? Will he soon be leading government agendas, like Jamie’s school dinners or Hugh W-F’s chickens? “I just like people, and cooking, so it’s a wonderful job I’ve got really, travelling around Britain and finding food. If people are interested in that too, that’s great. Who knows what will happen next? I’ve certainly got no interest in being a celebrity.” For Warner it all seems simple. He just likes the food. And there’s certainly nothing Brand-like about him.

What to Eat Now, BBC Two, Mon, 8.30pm; A book of the same name is available now (Mitchell Beazley)

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