Aldo Zilli never wanted to be a chef. He had cooked with his mother since childhood and knew first-hand what a slog it was.

Growing up in the Italian seaside town of Alba Adriatica he fancied he would be a hotel concierge and that’s what he eventually became. But when he left Italy, he hit a language problem.

“The only place I could work was in the kitchen.” More than three decades later, with a string of successful restaurants, cook books and TV shows to his name, he admits it must have been fate. Cooking may have started as a necessity but it has grown into a lifelong passion.

When we speak, he is working on the weekly food column he writes for the Express newspaper and preparing for an appearance at the Taste Of The World food festival at Fontwell Park in West Sussex; next year he will publish another cookbook, film another TV series; he is a consultant for the San Carlo restaurant group and runs Zilli Media, offering PR services to restaurants. It’s more than enough to keep the 57-year-old busy, but he has one other plan up his sleeve too – returning to Brighton.

Zilli briefly ran the restaurant at MyHotel in Jubilee Street in 2009 but withdrew over a disagreement about the menu. He put the three-storey Victorian villa he had renovated in Hove on the market (at an asking price of £1m, no less) and retreated to London, where he owned four restaurants until last year.

But he says opening a new restaurant here is still on the cards: “I love the place. I love being by the sea and it’s somewhere I always take the kids. It’s my second home. But we have to see if we can find the right spot. If anyone reading this has a suitable place, call me!”

Last year he made the tough decision to sell his remaining two London restaurants (he’s owned seven in total), defeated by “greedy” landlords that he claimed had made trade impossible. The restaurants have been taken on by Bill’s Produce, the business founded by Bill Collison in a Lewes greengrocers that now has three London outlets in addition to the restaurant in Brighton’s North Road and the original Lewes site. “Thirty five years in the restaurant business is enough to kill anyone and I wanted to get out before it killed me,” Zilli says.

“With restaurants, you tread a very fine line between success and failure and you can’t ever lose focus. You have to pay constant attention to your staff, your customers, your suppliers.”

Competition, he says, is fiercer than ever now. “I think it’s harder to start a business. People are willing to pay anything for premises, whereas I was paying peanuts when I started. You need much more money these days. But I do think if you have talent and you work hard, you’ll shine as long as you’re doing it for the right reasons. You can’t become a chef just to be on TV. You need to serve your apprenticeship and you need to have that passion for food in the first place. I feel sorry for anyone who just does this for a job.”

Zilli opened his first restaurant in 1981 at the age of 25 and followed it with three more, all bearing his name and all within a short distance of each other in London’s Soho.

“I was a bit arrogant,” he says, chuckling. “I wouldn’t get away with it if I were starting out now.”

He worked hard and was “very ambitious” he says. As the youngest of nine children, he had developed sharp elbows. “I didn’t have my own pair of trousers until I was 12 – everything I had as a child was someone else’s. There was no food in our house, no money, just lots of love and you can’t eat that.”

But if he worked hard, he partied harder and developed a reputation as a hellraiser – drinking and carousing until the small hours with an array of celebrity diners. He recalls Freddie Mercury setting fire to the kitchen when attempting to cook himself chips at 4am without putting oil in the fryer; another time he accidentally locked Prince Edward in the restaurant toilet.

“You own a restaurant and you have a licence to do anything you want and I did! I don’t regret any of it. The 80s were the best years of my life.”

He doesn’t live that way now, of course – he couldn’t. He’s a dad with two children – Rocco Brian, seven, and Twiggy Agnese, five – with his actress wife Nicki (he also has an older daughter Laura, 26, currently carving out a cookery career of her own).

It’s Zilli who does all the cooking in his house – “My wife doesn’t give me a choice,” he groans. “She says, ‘Why would I cook when you’re a chef?’” But he enjoys making fresh pasta with the kids.

Is he bossy in the kitchen? “At home, no. My wife is the boss there. But in my professional kitchens I’m bossy. I have 11 kitchens to deal with so there’s a lot of bossing around!” Naughty for him now involves eating pasta or fish and chips, treats that are largely off the menu thanks to a “constant weight watch”.

He famously shed three stone when taking part in TV’s Celebrity Fit Club in 2007 and went on to write a string of cookbooks about healthy eating.

When he visits Brighton now, he’ll treat the kids to fish and chips while he goes for a light, nutritious lunch at North Street buffet Foodilic.

“I suppose I’ve gone from one extreme to the other!”