Neil Perry is a man perpetually in motion. he passes by in a blur. Back again. We talk in grabs. I strain to hear him. It's the unofficial opening of his new bar, The Waiting Room, at Melbourne's Crown Casino, and more people keep arriving. It's noisy, he's soft-spoken and, on top of everything else, he has caught a bad head cold and is rapidly losing his voice. I want to know which god whispered in his ear the first time he felt inspired to cook barbecued swordfish with mango salsa, but there's another topic I need to raise first.

Is he a gambler? "No, although I played blackjack in Vegas in 2005," replies Perry. At least, I think that's what he says. He definitely adds this: "Restaurants are my roulette wheel."

He probably expected the gambling question. After all, his new bar, as well as one of his restaurants, Rockpool Bar & Grill Melbourne, plus his latest Melbourne venture, Spice Temple, are all on casino soil. At the luxury-hotel end of the complex, he points out. But his roulette-wheel quip is instructive.

Perry is alluding to the past as well as to the present. He has made and lost a lot of money in the restaurant game over the past two decades. How much has he lost in one go? "Two million dollars," he says, without hesitation. Breaking even at restaurant tables is hard and it has taken a lot of effort to get where he is now. Back on top of his game.

Suddenly, above the noise, we hear it: a loud crack and the sound of glass shattering. Any questions about losing $2 million will have to wait until the following day when - I live in hope - he'll have more time. Right now he's hurrying downstairs to the kitchen to see what the hell just happened.

"A glass washer exploded," says Perry when he comes back, seemingly unperturbed. The next time he disappears I follow him, curious to see whether he's actually cooking any of the tapas-style bar food on the menu, or just presiding, "celebrity chef"-style, over the action. He's cooking. In fact, he's bent over each dish, focusing on the food with total concentration.

His chefs watch closely. The fresh-faced blonde hovering at his elbow is Perry's 16-year-old daughter, Josephine, who recently decided, on her own, to leave school and learn the restaurant business from her dad. Thrilled with this turn of events, he tells me later that he just bought her a copy of Great Chefs of France, which he first read in his 20s and still loves.

It's doubtful that Josephine or her father's chefs know how fiercely independent Perry was in his younger days: in the mid-1980s, when he was chef at Barrenjoey House, at Sydney's Palm Beach, he once refused to serve a well-done steak with tomato sauce to Kerry Packer. The media tycoon walked out.

Perry doesn't tell me this story. I've heard it from an excellent source who doesn't want to be named - even now. A lot of people admired the young chef that day for not compromising his ideals, says this person.

Funny how things turn out. Crown Casino is owned by the late Kerry Packer's son, James Packer, a good friend of Perry's. It was one of JP's closest advisers, Crown director and former Publishing and Broadcasting Limited (PBL) boss JA, otherwise known as John Alexander, who persuaded Perry to bring the Rockpool name to Melbourne.

So have Perry and James Packer ever had a quiet laugh about the well-done-steak incident? Perry seems to hesitate for a split second (oh Lord, I think, James probably likes his steak well done, too), then says he doesn't think James even knows about it.

"I probably should have given Kerry Packer the steak," he goes on. "I would have, these days. I got on my high horse. Ideals are important, but as you get older and a bit more mature, you realise you can't force your vision on customers. You give them what they want. Even though I still hate it," he adds heatedly, "when someone wants a well-done steak."

Let's talk swordfish. Perry was already serving it with mango salsa during his Palm Beach days. But it was when he opened his celebrated restaurant Bluewater Grill in Bondi, in 1986, that his instinct for exotic combinations of flavours started sending Sydney foodies into a frenzy.

He was very keen on experimenting with South American-style fresh-fruit salsas, he explains. "And also lime juice and chilli, which went really well with seafood and some meat, and then branching it out with Asian flavours," he adds.

His late father, Les, a Sydney butcher, was his first and perhaps greatest influence. "The reason I really care so much about the quality of the meat, and the fish and the vegetables, is because Les taught me all that at a young age. And I love Asian food so much because he introduced me to it," he says.

Perry grew up in Blakehurst, in southern Sydney, then in Rooty Hill, when the family moved there in his teens. He was the youngest of seven children (both his parents had been married before). The family often went to restaurants in Sydney's Chinatown. "It was before Dixon Street really got going, in the days when it was real Chinese food, not sweet-and-sour pork for the gweilos," he says of the jellyfish, mud crab and abalone dishes he ate.

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Perry is perhaps as much known for his trademark pigtail as his exotic taste sensations. He has worn his hair pulled back tight for as long as anyone can remember and now, at 53, the pigtail, more of a discreet knot these days, gives him a certain ambiguity. I'm hardly the first journalist to notice that it also makes him look a little like a Zen master. But there the comparison ends. Perry is a driven man. There's nothing Zen about the way he lives: he's opening another Rockpool Bar & Grill in Perth at the end of January. Even sitting down, for a full four minutes, to keep talking, he still seems to be in motion.

Is he capable of living a slower-paced life?

"Probably not. I mean, that's why I'm not really good at beach holidays," he says. "That's why I love skiing, although I also love playing golf."

Leisurely days on the links remain, I suspect, a distant fantasy. As well as the restaurants to run in different cities, there are chefs to train, cookbooks to write (he has five to his name so far) and TV appearances to make. He's currently one of Australia's three Iron Chefs on the Seven Network.

Then there's his gig for Qantas. Perry has been overseeing the airline's menus for international passengers travelling in first and business class since 1997; he is close to Geoff Dixon, former Qantas CEO, whom he considers a mentor and friend.

Another high-flying friend is the American IT billionaire David Doyle, who is Perry's chief financial backer. The pair met years ago after Doyle strolled into Rockpool, Perry's famous flagship restaurant in Sydney. Perry started Rockpool with his cousin Trish Richards, an accountant by training, in 1989. She's still the financial brains behind the Rockpool restaurant group. Doyle joined Perry and Richards as their partner four years ago.

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It's now 8.50 the following morning and Perry's voice is worse. He's sitting at a workbench, just off the open kitchen at Rockpool Bar & Grill Melbourne, laptop open, another one next to it, studying the overnight reports from all his restaurants. At the same time, he's talking on his BlackBerry to Samantha Skinner, his wife.

Perry has been married three times. Josephine is his daughter from his second marriage, to former model agent Adele Seagar. (She's named after Josephine Pignolet, who used to run the Sydney restaurant Claude's with her husband, Damien Pignolet, in the 1980s. Josephine Pignolet died in a car accident in 1987, aged 31. The Pignolets helped Perry when he was learning to be a chef, inviting him to work one night a week at Claude's.)

Perry and Samantha have two daughters: Macy, 6, and Indy, 4. The family live in Sydney. The chef is a man of hearth and home, when he is at home, but he also likes living out of hotel rooms. "It might sound mad, but I really enjoy that because it doesn't distract me from what I'm doing. My ideal would be to finish work, then just go up in a lift to my front door, although it would probably drive my wife and children mad," he says drily.

He and Sam are rarely invited to dinner parties - everyone's too nervous to cook for him (although he doesn't tell me this). He says they were invited to a dinner party recently ("the food was great"), adding that it was such a novelty being invited that he and Sam weren't even sure whether they should take wine or not.

This doesn't sound so much like the Perry I've read about in the past, who overdid the hubris - even referring to himself in the third person on occasions, according to one report. "If you asked people who know me, like my wife, they'd say I'm actually quite shy," counters Perry, when I mention his reputation for arrogance. "I think I'm sometimes ... what's the word ... my mind is elsewhere. I'm really focused on what I'm doing. Preoccupied. That's the word I wanted. I don't abuse people. I work with a more softly, softly approach. People say, 'Oh, he's writing another cookbook, or a column, and it's all about fame', or whatever. But it's really not about that. It's about getting people to eat better and trying to share my knowledge."

(According to the founding father of Australian food criticism, Leo Schofield, "Neil is a total worker. He has a work ethic that few chefs have. I'm a big fan of his. I always thought he had the goods. Success hasn't kept him modest, though. He isn't arrogant, but there's no false humility.")

Perry decides it's time for us to check the state of play at The Waiting Room, and on the walk over we start talking about the treatment of pigs. He tells me there's an amazing free-range piggery in Western Australia where the pigs pretty much live wild. I question why we eat such intelligent animals at all (shamelessly not mentioning that while I don't eat pork, I do occasionally eat foie gras).

"I just have to accept that pigs are a food source," says Perry, "but I just like to make sure that they can live out their lives as they would naturally. And [if they] can, I'm happy to eat them.

"The relationships we have with our suppliers is very important, and making sure particularly that the humane treatment of animals is part of that," he says. He demands that his suppliers source their food as much as possible from sustainable fisheries and free-range farms. "I hate industrial farming and what it stands for - and what the animal goes through and all in the name of cheaper products. At what cost to the environment and at what cost to our health? Nobody ever counts it.

"What we have to do is change the way people shop - because the reality is, consumers are the only people who can change things. No one gives people what they don't want. People want cheaper and cheaper food. Well, governments have to get in and figure out what that means to the health system, the environment, to a whole lot of things.Like they're saying there should be a price on carbon, there should be a real price on creating unhealthy carbohydrates and unhealthy proteins."

We head back to Rockpool Bar & Grill just as John Susman, a well-known seafood-industry figure, arrives with some clams. Susman and Perry first met back in the Barren­joey House days. Impressed by his meal (swordfish!), Susman wandered into the kitchen in his boardshorts to see who had cooked it. The relationship started from there.

Have the pair ever gone fishing together? Susman laughs. "Neil hates fishing," he says. "He's certainly no Croco­dile Dundee. Fishing for compliments, maybe."

While we've been talking, Perry, with one of his chefs in attendance, has tossed the clams in a pan and cooked them. He and Susman take a couple of forks and chew away. They invite me to try the last three. I eat two. Perry, I notice, is contemplating the last clam. "You have it," he says. I do.

I swear he looks forlorn for a fleeting moment.

Later, we talk about his trials and tribulations in the restaurant game. Remember Wockpool? Rocket? Bistro Mars? There were even two Noodle Bars at one point. In 2000 he shut three of his restaurants in about as many months. Three years earlier, in 1997, he had closed the 270-seat Star Bar and Grill in the IMAX Building at Sydney's Darling Harbour, reopened it at Potts Point a year later as Wockpool, then closed it again in 2000. The $2 million was lost during this period.

Perry says he wasn't given bad business advice. The GST didn't help, but that was just one factor. "I just got caught up in the enthusiasm of it all," he says of opening restaurants one after another. "Hard-learnt lessons are really lessons you take on board and keep with you for a long time. If things aren't well thought out, you lose a shitload of money."

How did losing so much money affect him?

"I guess you realise you don't have any choice but to put your head down and work your way out of it," he replies. "There are people in this world who would just walk away from that, which Trish and I could have done easily. We could have gone into receivership and just walked away without losing too much personally - all of our suppliers and all our friends would have been left hurting - and we could have started up again, which is what plenty of people do in this business.

"However, because integrity is the most important part of my life and honour is very important to me, and to Trish, there's no way we could have done that. So we put our heads down and made some sacrifices and worked our way through it.

"What was great, during the '90s, was that we learnt a few awesome lessons - and if we hadn't learnt those lessons I wouldn't be opening the restaurants I'm opening now. A long time ago I recognised that my energies can only really be used to gather the right people around me."

Perry pays tribute to them constantly, throwing so many names into the conversation that I can't keep up. Everyone who has ever worked with him, past and present. But his BlackBerry is ringing again. Someone is hovering. He's due at a meeting. And his voice has almost gone.

"You should be in bed," I say.

"No time," he croaks.

Look for Neil Perry's new weekly food column in Good Weekend.