Sitting fishing rod in hand on the bank of the River Nore, the 63-year-old gentleman could have been any other affluent visitor to the Mount Juliet estate in Kilkenny this week.
A few hours later Albert Roux slipped into something more comfortable. Jacket pristine white, grey hair covered with an oven-singed chef's cap, he walked with a pronounced limp (the result of a car crash 35 years ago) around a surprisingly calm kitchen.
There was no mistaking the world-renowned master chef now as he carefully arranged the fois gras canapes and put the finishing touches to the meal for 60 well-heeled guests at the Lady Helen Room. "Bloody good," he mutters now and then as he checks and rechecks his concoctions. The Mount Juliet Hotel manager, Patrick Hederman, and every other gourmand around the world know exactly how good. That is why he got Roux to sign an exclusive contract with the hotel, which will see him return several times over the next two years.
For Roux, a committed Hibernophile, the gourmet weekends where punters will cough up around £600 for two Roux dinners and a cooking demonstration is a chance to reminisce on "the good old days".
"I worked all my life in splendid stately homes and Ireland is the last country in Europe that is green - it is a peaceful haven, a country blessed by the gods and this place is so, so beautiful."
All this is uttered with sweeping hand gestures and an accent that is half British toff, 'alf Lyons lad. He worked in Waterford as a 19-year-old and began holidaying in Co Kerry with his family 27 years ago. "What a place, what a people." From his lips it is more homage than hyperbole.
With his brother Michel he is credited with transforming the restaurant climate in Britain and he has counted the wave of enfants terribles of cooking, including Gordon Ramsay, Marco Pierre White and Conrad Gallagher, among his many students.
"Eee wasn't like that in my kitchen I can tell you. If ee keeps it up ee will die soon of an art attack," says Roux of Ramsay, who has become more famous for treating his staff abysmally and kicking Joan Collins and food critic AA Gill out of his restaurant than for any culinary endeavours. As for Gallagher - "he was impetuous, yes, but certainly very, very talented in the kitchen".
It is no exaggeration to say that the quality of restaurant food in Britain, and some other culinary capitals, would be radically different had Roux entered the priesthood, the vocation he was seriously considering at 13, instead of the kitchen.
Fortunately, at the age of 14 Albert Roux began making choux pastry in Paris, the beginning of a four-year apprenticeship at a patisserie that earned him £5 a week. Most of this went to support his mother, his sister and his younger brother Michel who lived near Lyons. His father, a pig farmer, left the family home when Albert was a young boy.
His connections then, as now, were impeccable. Through his godfather Cauchois Etienne, then chef for the Duchess of Windsor in Paris, he secured a position in the kitchen of Lady Nancy Astor's London home. He spoke no English, knew nobody and worked for more than a year as a scullery boy, washing the dishes of the great and good that passed through the prominent suffragette's residence.
At 19 he travelled to the Waterford home of Ambrose Congreve and was allowed cook breakfast. He remembers Mr Congreve, who is still alive, as a wonderfully considerate Protestant who ate cold meals on Sundays so his staff could go to Mass.
When Albert Roux left Ireland, he spent a year as chef de cuisine to self-made millionaire Sir Charles Clore before joining the French army. He was in the service for three years, in Egypt for the Suez crisis and in Algeria during the war of independence. He kept up his kitchen skills by cooking freshly killed wild boar, sauteing it in his helmet with wild mushrooms and figs. He was never promoted but years afterwards he saw his army papers and his superiors had written that he was a leader by nature and definitely officer material. In the battlefield that a top-class kitchen can be, this would later prove accurate.
War weary, Roux wanted to return to England - but when he arrived at Dover he was told his visa had run out and it was stamped in red ink with persona non grata. He was back on British territory almost immediately, with a job at the British embassy in Paris, and from there to Peter Cazalet's house in Kent where he started his love affair with racing and horses. By day he looked after the kitchen, by night he took his apron off and read books on accounting, on commercial law, on business.
At 31 he was ready to go solo. Sort of. Michel was called to London from Paris, where he had been working for the Rothschild family and the Roux brothers were launched. Britain was a gastronomical desert, Roux has said, when they set up their oasis in the form of Le Gavroche in Sloane Street. (The name means urchin, taken from Les Miserables; Albert thought "it was a funny name for a very expensive restaurant".) On their opening night more than 400 people squeezed into the premises that seated 60. In the more than 30 years since, the restaurant - now located in Mayfair - became the first in the UK to earn three Michelin stars and the Roux empire expanded to include rooms such as the Waterside Inn and the more dubiously named Roux Brittania. Now Michel owns the Waterside and Albert and his son take care of Le Gavroche.
He also runs a consultancy firm, with turkey empire man Bernard Matthews and Marks and Spencer among his most mainstream clients.
He has always retained a sense of humour, a sense of proportion and a non-snobbish attitude to food, say commentators, all of which have ensured his success. A typical comment is: "You don't need three Michelin stars to make the perfect omelette or boiled egg". Even when performing the most basic of preparatory tasks, cutting the elastic that binds the claws of live lobsters for example, his face forms a rugged landscape of concentration. Glasses perched on the bridge of the nose, the eyes fixed firmly on the writhing crustacean, the mouth neither a smile nor a frown but a solid, unmoving line that relaxes only when the last pink victim is plunged into a pot of boiling water.
Then he moves his broad frame over to a bowl of mussels and one of the most famous chefs in the world stands over it picking out only the plumpest specimens for his soup. Mistakes in his kitchen are rewarded with a friendly tweak of the ear and nothing as unseemly as a humiliating ear-bashing.
As he works he answers the questions he has been fielding for the past three decades. What's the secret of the perfect chip? Cook them with lard. How do you know a good lobster from a bad lobster? He turns the creature round and displays its eggs on its underside. When it is nice and heavy and still full of life, he says. Rather like Mr Roux.
Albert Roux will return to Mount Juliet in November for a gourmet weekend