After addiction and divorce, he conquered the London food scene. Next on the menu is a restaurant in the Alps.

Opening a new restaurant is never exactly restful. “It’s always the same,” says British chef Mr Philip Howard, 51, the morning after the first service at Union, his new 35-cover place in Plagne-Montalbert, Savoie, southwest France. “You’ve got to get from a rubbish-strewn building site in the morning to a spotlessly clean restaurant in the evening.”

When you’re halfway up the Alps, there are a few additional challenges, too. Where do you dump the rubbish? Who will sell you a carrot at 8pm? They’re having the snowiest winter anyone can remember in that part of the world, so with a few hours to go, Mr Howard found himself haring down to the local bricolage to buy some snow shovels. That’s not something that happened in his 25 years at the twice-Michelin starred The Square in Mayfair, London, nor at Elystan Street – already a west London institution just a year after opening.

“I’ve operated as a chef in London for 30 years – so if I need to buy a carrot or a sea bass or a fork or a dustbin, I know exactly where it’s coming from and I know it will be there when I need it,” he explains. “And all the restaurants I’ve ever been involved with in London, there’s been an architect, an interior designer, a kitchen-fitter, a whole army of people. Here, you have a builder and that’s about it. My French is OK, but not perfect. So I have to make everything happen.”

But if Mr Howard is still standing – tall, athletic, neat salt and pepper hair, relaxed authority – that’s testament to his ability to make everything happen. And to bring himself back from the brink.

He is by no means a household name, but those who know food know Mr Philip Howard. The late Sunday Times restaurant critic, Mr AA Gill, described him as “one of the very best in Britain… a consummate cook who is still working shifts in his own kitchen.” You rarely see him bantering about giblets on weekend TV or banging out recipes for colour supplements and that’s because he’s usually in his stripy pinny, deglazing, reducing, caramelising and doing all those things that chefs his age usually delegate. Actually, he’s the sort of chef who refers to himself as a “cook”. He says he finds TV incredibly boring – shooting the same dish 20 times from different angles. And it’s not like he needs the publicity. His restaurants are always rammed.

He was born in South Africa. His family moved to England when he was seven. His father was an accountant, his mother a housewife, so he grew up on delicious home-cooked food – but it wasn’t until he was studying microbiology at the University of Kent in Canterbury that he realised his calling. He took a date to the poshest place in town – the Michelin-starred Restaurant 74, run by the Scottish chef Mr Ian McKendrick – and had an epiphany. “I didn’t know food like that existed. It ignited a whole new side of cooking and food that was the beginning of my journey. At the same time, I was living on my own for the first time and learning to cook for myself. So, I thought: right, this is it.”

He went on to train under Mr Marco Pierre White at Harvey’s, the fabled restaurant in Wandsworth – rated by London Evening Standard critic Ms Fay Maschler as the greatest she has ever eaten at – and also had a short spell at Bibendum under Mr Simon Hopkinson. But he made his own reputation when he opened The Square in Mayfair in 1991. It was supposed to be Mr White’s second venture with his business partner, Mr Nigel Platts-Martin, and Mr Howard was supposed to be working under Mr White. But that didn’t quite work out and Mr Howard found himself going it alone at the age of 24. “I became my own man much earlier than expected. It was fantastic, but the truth is, it’s much more straightforward to learn your craft and increase your knowledge base when you’re a worker bee in someone else’s restaurant. As soon as you have your own place, there’s a myriad of other responsibilities – the learning is harder.”

It was at The Square in the 1990s that he first used cocaine to help him through the intense 7am-to-11pm working days on four hours sleep a night. It soon spiralled into a crack addiction – he would smoke a crack pipe in the car park round the back of the restaurant to wake up in the morning and snort cocaine in the kitchen. “The reality is, when you start to take drugs like that, it can accelerate incredibly quickly. I managed it for a short while, but it was not sustainable.” He did manage to keep on cooking to a high standard – but only just. He reflected to The Observer last year: “If you’re preoccupied with smoking a drug down in the car park that effectively suppresses your appetite, your enthusiasm for cooking wanes and your ability to taste is compromised.” So, he could produce a great dish, but not a great, great dish. His habit cost him his marriage to Jennie, who divorced him in 1997 – and forced him to take a long, hard look at himself. After a couple of spells in rehab, and a rigid adherence to Narcotics Anonymous (NA), he managed to kick the habit. He and Jennie remarried in 1999 (they have two children, Millie, 22, and Ali, 18) and he has now been clean for 20 years, running marathons and competing in triathlons to boot.

Last year, after 25 years at The Square, he went for a completely clean break. He sold The Square and opened Elystan Street with his business partner Ms Rebecca Mascarenhas. It was a departure for a chef with such a French classical pedigree – clean, casual, vegetable-led, no tablecloths! – but the reviews from critics and punters alike were rapturous. Mr Howard seems pleasantly surprised about that. “We had a very clear idea of what we wanted to do there and it’s pretty similar to what we want to do here at Union,” he says.

“It’s not the most inventive cooking in the world, it isn’t on-trend, so to speak, we’re not doing small plates or Pan-Asian or fermented things. We’re just cooking delicious food and people and the critics have responded to it. It’s reassuring.”

He is also joint proprietor of The Ledbury (number 27 in this year’s San Pellegrino World’s Best list) in Notting Hill and the Kitchen W8 in Kensington, but he doesn’t like to spread himself too thinly. If there’s a word he comes back to most often, it’s balance. “We all need balance in some way, shape or form. Certainly, my early years were not easy. There was no balance whatsoever and drugs were my way out. And as much as I wouldn’t want to re-tread those steps, the learning process has been instrumental in shaping my ability to run the course. It forced me to take a long look at my life and ensure I find balance. One way is to have an effective team. And another is either being in my kitchen cooking. Or getting the hell out of there and doing something completely different.”

And as it happens, it was doing something completely different that led to his opening Union. Howard admits that he enjoys the “finer things in life”. He wears a lot of Nicole Farhi and Paul Smith. When he sold The Square, he bought himself a £100,000 1996 metallic blue AC Cobra. And he and Jennie also invested in a ski chalet in La Plagne.

Naturally, he wanted to ingratiate himself with the neighbours, and he immediately sensed there was a gap in the après-ski market. Unless you enjoy molten cheese three times a day, ski cuisine can become a little monotonous. “Pretty much all the other restaurants in the area run through a similar repertoire of tartiflette, fondue and so on. So we decided to do something completely different. We decided we wanted to offer something that’s better quality than anywhere else, from the environment, to the glassware, to the crockery, to the toilets – and to offer food that’s outside that repertoire. That’s colourful, vibrant and fresh. The menu is short on gimmickry – salt baked beetroot with hazelnut pesto; strozzapretti with Périgord truffles, chicken oysters and leeks; duck with endive, turnip and orange; lemon tart – but it’s all stuff you’d want to eat (and at €45 for two courses, not bank-breaking by ski resort standards). He reckons that all he needs is for 10 per cent of the village to come just once a week and he’ll be full. And as with Elystan Street, the vegetable is front and centre.

“If humans continue to eat meat at the rate that we do, the planet is doomed. So I feel obliged, both personally and professionally, to address that.” He feels there’s a sea change afoot. “At least 25 per cent of the menu at Elystan Street is vegetarian and that’s proved to be a huge success. It means that rather than spending half of your service tearing your dishes apart to meet the needs of others, your menu is 95 per cent accommodating.”

If there is a secret to his cooking, he says, it is in a rigid adherence to the seasons. “At this time of year, it’s all the root vegetables, wild mushrooms and truffles. They all work fantastically with those winter meats: pork and game, particularly. The great thing about cooking seasonally is that nature has a way of producing ingredients at any time of the year that have an affinity with one another. Some people say it’s what we’re used to but I think it’s a lot more profound than that. If you don’t step outside the boundaries of any particular season, your food will have a wonderful harmony of flavours. Wild salmon goes with watercress and asparagus; it doesn’t go with turnips. Grouse goes with elderberries, it doesn’t go with basil. It’s a really fundamental thing. When I think about what it is about my cooking that has appeal over the years, it’s that. It’s not the most technical or innovative cooking, but it delivers pleasure. And the fundamental reason is that it has great harmony of flavour.”

He runs a tight ship, but is far from a stereotypical chef, preferring to empower his staff rather than shout at them. “All my restaurants have been seven days a week and that requires a team. It makes it harder in the early days, but it forces you to delegate and trust others. That’s been a strength in my restaurants.” His own experiences have made him attentive to younger kitchen staff: a line of cocaine after a 12-hour shift is not uncommon in the restaurant trade, and this often leads to problems. “Yes, but in all honesty, drug addiction is rife at all levels of society, whether you’re unemployed or a City trader or a cook,” he says. “My antennae are highly sensitive to this sort of thing, and it’s not something I’ve noticed in my kitchens. The world is riddled with drugs, I don’t buy into the fact that they cause problems that wouldn’t otherwise be there.”

I ask him what advice he’d give to his younger self. “Appreciate your youth,” he says. “And strive for balance in your life. If it’s all work and no play it’s no good. If it’s the other way around, it’s no good either. I need to be working hard, playing hard, looking after myself, spending time with my family, too. Balance. That’s the one key thing I took from those difficult years.”