ATTENDING some reception, I was joined by a businessman who tried to impress the young woman opposite by mentioning all the famous people he had met.

She smiled, knelt, picked up an imaginary object from the floor, opened his hand and discharged the imaginary item into it. "I think that's one of the names you dropped," she sweetly told him.

Wary that I might follow him down that road, I am nevertheless going to discuss celebrity chefs after attending a reception at the new Glasgow restaurant of celebrity pot boiler Marco Pierre White.

The first celebrity chef I met I suppose was Nick Nairn when his then restaurant at Charing Cross, nairns - you must be a celebrity if you can ignore the normal rules of capitals and apostrophes - hosted a lunch for Prime Minister Tony Blair to meet Scottish business leaders. Kept behind barriers with the rest of the press outside, I dutifuly noted that the PM ate watercress soup and salmon served with tomato risotto, although his wife Cherie left half her salmon. Bus boss Brian Souter, who looked like a man who'd had a good lunch, said he'd had a good lunch. Not for the first time I wondered where my career was going.

Then there was the enfant terrible Gordon Ramsay who opened his ill-fated restaurant Amaryllis out west in Devonshire Gardens. I must have looked lost at the opening reception -- actually I was searching for the waiter wielding the champagne - as Gordon took me on a personal tour of his kitchens, chatting knowledgeably and entertainingly about his love of food and Glasgow. I was wondering about his legendary temper when he saw a waitress picking up dishes he had not asked for consumption and he abruptly let rip at her with an explosive oath-strewn rant.

As someone who had worked for editors who had graduated summa cum laude from the same charm school, I didn't realise at the time there was anything untoward with his behaviour. The food was excellent, but the restaurant, expensive and too far from the city's business centre, withered, much like the average amaryllis.

Then there was Albert Roux, a serious shaker of the skillet, first man to run a three-star Michelin restaurant in Britain, Le Gavroche, who was cooking a one-off meal in Cameron House at Loch Lomond. Although I don't remember who invited me, I was driven there in a public relations executive's Porsche Boxter, which confirmed for me that some companies have money to burn. The food was truly excellent and Albert spoke impressively in his halting English about his food. I just felt sorry for the chap who had forked out, if that's the correct phrase, a lot of money to take his girlfriend there, and as they walked up the stairs of Cameron House she told him: "Are you sure he's famous? I've never seen him on Ready Steady Cook!"

Despite Gordon Ramsay's failure, other big names came to open in Glasgow. I never actually got to Jamie Oliver's as there was always a queue outside in the early days, and I've stopped queuing at licensed premises since the seventies when Friday nights meeting young women in The Rock in the West End involved waiting outside as impassive doormen checked the numbers inside.

It was then followed by additional queuing, if you were lucky in meeting said young woman, along the road in Gibson Street at the Shish Mahal for a meal afterwards. Honestly, Russian babooshkas searching for bread never had to queue as much as lovelorn young men in Glasgow in the seventies.

But I did get to meet twinkly-eyed and rotund - boy does he look like the classic well-fed chef - Antonio Carluccio when he opened his Glasgow restaurant while wearing a kilt in an Italian tartan. It had the blue of the Italian football shirt with the red, white and green of the Italian flag threaded through it. He even had time to tell me a joke rather than scream at his staff. It was the tale of the young Italian boy who was told by his mother that if he behaved himself for a whole month, then Baby Jesus might bring him a bike at Christmas - the Italians prefer the Baby Jesus to Santa.

"However," said Antonio, "the boy could not imagine staying good for a month, so he took a statue of the Madonna from the house, put it in a drawer, and wrote a letter, 'Dear Baby Jesus, if you want to see your mother again, send me a bike'."

Well I laughed, but there again the prosecco-carrying waiter had become a good chum that evening. And Antonio can afford to tell jokes as he no longer cooks any of the food, but gets paid handsomely to tour the country opening new branches.

And now the gaunt, curly-haired Marco Pierre White, also a three-star Michelin chef, has come to town, well if not Marco himself, certainly his portrait, of which there are are at least a dozen large black-and-white versions staring down from the walls inside his restaurant at the Hotel Indigo in Bothwell Street. So if Marco is not there himself, then what's the point? Well, like Carluccio's and Oliver's the name guarantees high standards of food and service - and there is the hope that maybe a little of his style will rub off on the premises.

But call me old fashioned. I like to know the owner himself is bustling away behind the kitchen doors, which is why I would prefer Ian Brown's on the south side, Brian Maule's Chardon d'Or or John Quigley's Red Onion in the city centre. And if you bump into them, they'll tell you far more celebrity stories than I ever could.