Star Crazy: What does it take to win a Michelin Star?

• Paul Kitching at his 21212 restaurant in Edinburgh Picture: Jane Barlow

THE latest Michelin Guide to the UK will be published today. Depending on who is awarded which stars, champagne corks will be popping in some kitchens while teeth will be gnashed and junior chefs slapped in others.

In Edinburgh, the five restaurateurs who already hold a coveted star will be quietly confident that they have held on to them. One or two might be discreetly praying that they have been awarded a second.

Michelin has its detractors, but most head chefs would finely mince their sous chefs to get one, and no-one would deny the happy effects that stars can have on the health of a restaurant's reservations book.

Paul Kitching, 47, knows what it takes to obtain and to hold on to one of the stars. He became the latest Edinburgh-based chef to be sprinkled with Michelin stardust when his 21212 restaurant with rooms on Royal Terrace was recognised by the Guide last January. It wasn't his first star. Gateshead-born Kitching had previously held one for over a decade at his Juniper restaurant in Altrincham, south of Manchester.

That star expired when he left Juniper in 2008 and relocated to Edinburgh with his partner and front-of-house manager, Kate O'Brien. His 2010 star was the culmination of an apprenticeship which has lasted three decades. Kitching has the burns and 14-stitch knife scars, the punishing work schedule and the sleepless nights that often go with Michelin territory.

"Getting the star at Altrincham helped my confidence, but it also knocks your confidence because you start to worry that you will lose it," he says. "You go to bed drunk and wake up terrified most days. I'm the world's greatest worrier. If you're looking for cold sweats in the middle of the night, I'm your guy." For anyone who fancies their chances of being awarded a Michelin star, this is what it takes. First, you need the drive and stamina to work long, hard hours. The day before this interview, Kitching had started work at 8am and finished at 1am. Weeks working 60 to 70 hours are standard. Fortunately, Kitching doesn't have far to commute, since he lives with O'Brien in an apartment in the basement of 21212. It is handy but it also means that he is never really out of the workplace.

This is good because to get that Michelin star, it helps if you live, sleep and dream about food. Just don't expect to have a normal relationship with the stuff. Michelin chefs don't think about food in the way that civilians do. It isn't something you eat and enjoy. It is an obsession.

"Food is the most important thing in my life," says Kitching. "Not eating it but thinking about it. It's not the dishes themselves but how customers or I will react to the food. I hate it but I am obsessed by it. I collect it and I want to work with it and I want to be around it but it still frightens me. It's weird."

After starting his working life as a labourer on Newcastle's building sites in the early 1980s, Kitching's first professional catering job was in a bakery. This had the twin advantages of being inside out of the cold and offering all the damaged cakes that Kitching could stick his thumb into. His first proper chef's job was at a hotel in York.

He took to it like a duck to orange sauce, and by the mid-1980s, after completing his City & Guilds, he was working in the respected Middlethorpe Hall. It was here that he first spotted the hallowed Michelin Guide in the head chef's office.

"That was a big thing for me because I could see where cooking might lead to and why it was important to continually try to set the bar higher in the kitchen. My previous experience had taught me that it was important to get through the day and just get the food out in a regimented way. The Michelin Guide was like the Oscars of the restaurant world and told me that if you're really, really good then you get a special award. That got me interested."

Like most Michelin-starred chefs, Kitching's skills are the result of long years spent working with more experienced chefs. Stints at Gidleigh Park, Devonshire Arms and Nunsmere Hall, working alongside chefs such as Paul Vickery and Shaun Hill, all helped polish the Kitching CV. In particular, he singles out his stormy time under Ian McAndrew (now chef proprietor at Blackaddie Country House Hotel) at Restaurant 74 in Canterbury. The two didn't always see eye-to-eye but it was here that Kitching learnt of the delicate precision needed in a Michelin-starred restaurant.

"To make Sole Veronique, we would pick the seeds out of Muscat grapes using a hairpin on a cork," recalls Kitching, "and that was before we peeled the grapes. If there was a long, hard, laborious way to do things, then that's how he would want it done.

"Working there was the first time that anyone looked at a dish I was doing, said it was no good, swept it onto the floor and told me to start again. I hated it but it was the best thing I ever did. McAndrew taught me many of the techniques which I use in my kitchen today."

While Kitching was learning his chops in Canterbury, bad boy Marco Pierre White was just beginning to ignite London's restaurant scene. Like many other chefs of his generation, Kitching was inspired by this brilliantly talented chef who often looked as though he slept in a hedge and regularly threw out customers he took exception to.

"I met Marco and decided it was time to grow my hair and get an attitude. He changed the rules for everyone in 85-86. We were trained to change our whites twice a day; he would turn up unshaven with a cigarette and knock out this great food. It taught us that it was all about the flavour. You can do your own restaurant in your own style and it can be a bit rough around edges because it is yours."

Kitching is the first to admit that when he first opened his own restaurant, Juniper, in 1995, he cooked pseudo-Marco Pierre White food. However, it was Heston Blumenthal, who opened his Fat Duck restaurant in the same year as Juniper, who helped Kitching find his own style.

Michelin expects consistent, flawless cooking but it also likes originality.

"I know Heston really well," says Kitching. "He took me in a different direction. By this point, El Bulli was being talked about. Ferran Adri (of El Bulli) and Heston changed a lot of things for a lot of people. These guys were redefining cooking.

"I didn't want to copy Heston. Many years ago, quite a famous chef called me up and said that he had downloaded all Heston's recipes on a disk and asked if I wanted a copy. I didn't. Everyone was copying Heston. I didn't want to do that but I did want to look at things in a different way. I wanted to cook the food that I liked to eat, such as meat with nuts or fruit. I wanted to do my own thing whatever the outcome was."

The outcome was a Michelin star and a kitchen serving extravagant, 30-course gourmet meals, with each course often featuring a single, carefully composed ingredient. Rather like Blumenthal's snail porridge, this early period at Juniper also produced experimental dishes (think along the lines of a toothpaste and mouthwash-flavoured dessert) which Kitching has long since moved on from, but which continue to haunt his reputation.

Producing original, distinctive food can help a chef gain a Michelin star but Kitching's rep for ploughing his own furrow has not always worked to his advantage. "I do regret that I am sometimes seen as Paul, the crazy, lanky joker. The silly, Catweazle look-a-like who just throws things together.

" It's partially my fault but it's been blown out of proportion by journalists. I've had chefs come up and say they are surprised at how good the food is because they'd been told that I'm a nutter in the kitchen. I'm quiet in the kitchen. I'm a professional chef. If I was some sort of freaky Catweazle, we wouldn't have a star."

After Juniper, Kitching moved to bigger, grander premises in Edinburgh to try and secure a second Michelin star. Having made the move, he has changed the way in which he is trying to achieve his goal. Like many of his peers, Kitching has come around to thinking that it is better to produce the food he wants than to cook the food which he thinks the Michelin inspectors might want to see.

"The Michelin Guide is less important to me than getting the food how I want it. That will balance things out. If I'm happy with the food then the Michelin Guide will follow me. Gaining a second star is still a driving force but the bigger driving force is the standard of food I'm producing."

Few chefs are brave or daft enough to predict their chances of securing a star but that doesn't stop them being hungry for it. Kitching reckons that it is too early to secure a second star for 21212 but he thinks he knows how it would feel: "If we got two stars, I think I would die and go to heaven."