His youthful smile beams out at me from the big kitchen window. Coffee cup in one hand, he waves me in through the back door to help me escape the rain. He looks relaxed and happy. It's pouring in Port of Menteith, but for Nick Nairn the sun is shining.

Life has changed dramatically for Scotland's first celebrity chef, who recently announced that he was selling up his famous eponymous restaurant in central Glasgow and retiring from the thankless and invisible life of the kitchen chef. The energetic, self-taught founder of Nairn's, the erstwhile uber-trendy city-centre restaurant, is leaving the grind behind to develop his cookery school. The school is set in the lush Nairn family estate in the Trossachs, next door

to the home he shares with his

second wife, Holly, a former TV researcher, and their new baby daughter, Daisy Skye.

''I had a horrible, stressy life before,'' he declares. ''Now, I'm

more contented than I have ever been. The future is a very pleasant prospect indeed.''

What prompted such a definitive downshifting? Before he replies, he gazes across the large stainless

steel demonstration kitchen and out into the garden. It boasts

a massive Victorian glasshouse

dating from the 1850s, in which nectarine, peach, and Italian

fig trees are thriving. A profusion

of salad leaves, trendy variegated beetroot, and other vegetables are growing in the large organic kitchen garden, which is tended by Holly full-time. It's a world away from the hot and steamy hell of a busy restaurant kitchen.

''I am not selling Nairn's because times are hard. Stories saying it's because the restaurant trade is dying are rubbish,'' he begins. ''I'm doing it simply because I've had enough. Running a restaurant really is a young man's job because it's the toughest job in the world.

''I can remember crying with tiredness at two in the morning because I've been cooking for 18 hours

and there's an entire table of wine glasses still needing to be polished. You end up with your head down

the sink because you can't afford

a dishwasher.

''It puts a hell of a strain on your marriage. I've been through that and I'm not doing it again.''

He's enjoying being able to spend much of his time with Daisy, who has inherited his eyes and mouth. He proudly says the breastfed seven-month-old has never had anything out of a jar because he makes her

little individual meals of pasta,

bean stews, vegetable purees, rice

and couscous. She's tasted garlic, basil, olive oil, and fresh herbs,

and loves sweet potato, pear, and strawberry puree.

''I want her to grow up with a love for food,'' he says. ''She'll be brought up on a diet that's low in salt, low in sugar, and full of flavour. But parents can only inform children and let them make their own choices. If Daisy wants to eat McDonald's burgers when she grows up, she'll know what's in them and what they do to her because we'll have told her. Kids' nutrition is so important.''

He's optimistic about Daisy's food future, but is not so sure about the nutritional fate of other Scottish children. He believes food education in schools is still woefully short of the mark. However, he has a plan - and this is where the cookery school comes in.

Abruptly, and before I can hang up my soaking-wet coat, he jumps up and thrusts a sheaf of architect's plans under my nose. Drawn by Lisa de Grove (Dorothy Paul's daughter), they envisage a utopia of glass and brick, incorporating a state-of-the-

art tiered food demonstration

theatre, two private dining rooms, three kitchens, a floating greenhouse, and covered outdoor decking for

barbecue classes.

Nairn - star of the BBC's hugely successful Wild Harvest and Island Harvest TV series, and author of eight Scottish cookbooks, has always been a fervent evangelist for Scotland's natural larder and for promoting healthy eating. The cookery school, he says, is his vision of the future for food education.

''Cookery schools are the new rock'n'roll,'' he says. ''The Scottish people have eaten my food, watched me on the telly, and followed my recipes. Their knowledge of and access to good food is unprececented. Now they want to learn how to cook for themselves at home. It's a natural evolution. There is absolutely no substitute for hands-on cooking.

''I can do more to change the

way Scots think about food here

at the school than I ever could in

the restaurant.''

Although he is a food champion for the Scottish Executive's healthy living campaign, he says he is

frustrated at the speed at which

it is progressing. ''Food is still not important enough to the Scottish people,'' he says. ''I think Gillian Kynoch, the food czar, is doing a fantastic job, but at some stage we're going to have to say: right, let's stop playing at this, let's really start wracking this thing up.

''My problem is that I want the whole thing to go quickly. But

nothing's getting done. I get

so frustrated. I've refused to

talk about the Scottish elections so far - but I despair

of the amount of energy and enthusiasm that is

lost in party politics.

The executive has yet to move food up the agenda. It means spending tens of

millions of pounds, not just a couple of million.''

His plans to develop his own school are being drawn up on

the basis of a huge rise in interest from Scottish people. Nairn says demand has increased so much

that he now runs classes (in conjunction with the chef, John Webber) five full days a week instead of the previous two. By the summer he will be running 270 classes yearly, and teaching annually around 5000 people basic cooking skills using the best home-grown produce. Classes will be taught to amateurs from all walks of life - including schoolchildren, children with dietary prob-lems, their parents, and home economics teachers. Despite this workload, he insists he will not return to working every evening. He shares the teaching with Maxine Clark and John Webber.

He talks 19 to the dozen as he pours his third coffee of the morning. Even his trademark tartan trousers seem to twitch. These are in an unusually jovial shade of blue, but he has no idea which clan it is. ''I've got 15 pairs now,'' he smiles. ''Holly says I choose the tartan according to the mood I'm in.''

He says that at almost 45 he has nothing left to prove and is less

driven than he used to be. The old competitive streak is still there, though. As we discuss Holly's plans for the garden, which will be grown with seeds sourced from Tuscany, he

bristles when I mention the famous River Cafe's home-grown cavolo nero [black cabbage], also grown from Tuscan seed.

''Cavolo nero is a bog-standard brassica, actually,'' he says witheringly. ''We're growing 10 different types.'' He bristles again when I sugest Jamie's Kitchen was a fascinating TV insight into the pressures of being a chef. ''Och, that was just a shallow glimpse of how it really is.'' Rick Stein's cookery school in Padstow is great, but ''doesn't have the same potential for development that we have here''.

Outside, a car horn toots. His chauffeur has arrived to whisk him off to town, where he is due to present a cookery demonstration for British tourist industry delegates. He scoops up his matt-black holdall, pristine, white, short-sleeved shirt, and rushes off to face his audience like an excited puppy.

After 20 years of hard graft, our retiring national chef has finally found himself in a special place. While quietly nurturing the tastebuds of the Scottish people, he still gets to be a showman. Nick Nairn, it seems, is cultivating the best of both worlds.

For further information about Nairns cookery school, ring

01877 385603, or click on www.nairnscookschool.com.

HOME ON THE RANGE: Nick Nairn and his wife Holly, below,

may be relaxing into his new lifestyle, but there is still evidence

of his competitive streak.

Picture: Chris James

Recipe for success: the rise of the premier chef

After leaving McLaren High School in Callander, Nick Nairn joined the Merchant Navy at 17.

In 1987, at age 27, he founded Braeval

Old Mill in Aberfoyle as an untrained chef.

He ran it with his wife, Fiona, and it won

a Michelin Red M award in 1990, and

a Michelin Star and 3 AA rosettes in 1991. They sold it in 1997, and Nick opened

Nairn's in 1998.

Billed as a hip restaurant with rooms,

Nairns comprised a two-storey restaurant and hotel. The metropolitan operation was hailed as a trendy new venue for celebrities and media types. But as Nick's other interests began to occupy

more of his time, it was slimmed down

to a 40-seater basement "neighbour-

hood" restaurant in 2001 and the

rest of the building was sold as flats.

Nairn founded the cookery school at

Port of Menteith, in the Trossachs, in

2000 with his brother, Topher, pictured below - the same year they launched Nairn's Anywhere, the outside catering company which

has since been bought by Compass catering, and

the 'Baxter's with Nairn's range of sauces,

plus his own range of cookware. He has been a presenter on BBC2's Ready, Steady, Cook since 1995.

Last year Nairn admitted to having

neglected the restaurant, and said he'd

been doing much protracted soul searching about it because it was "hard to control".

"I was not enjoying it. I made so many mistakes," he said. "In its early days,

Nairns was a complete nightmare.

We were doing 1000 meals a week. We

had 130 on a Saturday night and 70 for

lunch. It was a conveyor belt. What were

we thinking of?"

Nairn also said he realised he was

not a natural hotelier, and got fed up

waiting for drunken guests to arrive

back at 1am.