Robert Carrier, who has died aged 82, was a cookery writer, restaurateur and television presenter whose programmes attracted audiences of millions in Britain. He also opened a chain of cooking utensils shop and was a leading figure in restaurant trade politics. He made making food seem a joyful art.
Born in New York, Carrier was influential in his adopted Britain for more than 30 years, spreading the message that good cooking was simple but took time (he despised short cuts such as grills and microwaves). His father was a distant and wealthy property lawyer of Irish descent; his mother, whom he adored was the German-American daughter of a millionaire. He inherited his father's calculation and his mother's gregariousness and style.
Carrier's parents went broke in the depression and, with steely determination, maintained their lifestyle, though now without servants, as best they could. This entailed preparing their own elaborate meals. Young Robert laid the table. Wanting to become an actor, he filled in time by taking art courses, and eventually found himself in the Broadway revue New Faces, later filmed with Eartha Kitt.
When the US entered the second world war, Carrier decided that if he was going to be killed, it might as well be in style, and volunteered for the Office of Strategic Services, wartime forerunner of the CIA. In fact, his war was mostly desk-bound: he helped mastermind European operations from Paris. After the war, he worked there for French overseas radio and a Gaullist newspaper.
Carrier had always had a passion for food - and often an expanding waistline to prove it, despite visits to health farms. When a British friend invited him to London for the 1953 coronation, Carrier fell in love with the place, entertained guests to an elaborate meal and was rewarded when one of them, Eileen Dickson, offered him a job as food editor and writer for Harper's Bazaar. He also wrote for Vogue and had a column in the Sunday Times magazine.
A natural entrepreneur, Carrier later aired his flair for public relations by building up a PR company that pushed a vegetarian diet for dogs and various other food. He devised boxes of separate recipe cards, instead of ordinary cookery books, and published more than 20 titles, including Great Dishes of the World (1967), which was to sell more than 10m copies, and The Robert Carrier Cookery Book (1970).
He wanted a restaurant of his own and, in 1959, opened one in Camden Passage, in the heart of Islington, north London. The Greek couple who were to run it for him backed out, so Carrier took over himself. It became a meeting place for British and American celebrities, and was called simply Carrier's.
In 1972, he launched a more ambitious plan by buying Hintlesham Hall, a decrepit grade-11 listed building in Suffolk, converting it into a home and three restaurants and taking over the Hintlesham festival held there. He later made what he considered a mistake by adding a cookery school, which attracted ladies who lunch and took up too much of his time. He was for a while a very visible chairman of the Restaurateurs' Association of Great Britain, fighting for liberalisation of the licensing laws.
Though he loved acting the host, as he loved all forms of acting, and though his adventurousness with saffron, butter and Calvados was undimmed, Carrier had to sell Hintlesham Hall in 1982. He also bowed out of Carrier's in Camden Passage in 1984, retreating to Marrakesh and his ornately restored mansion there. But he continued to produce books, including A Taste of Morocco (1987) and Feasts of Provence (1993), and to present television programmes on food. These had started with Carrier's Kitchen in the 1970s, and were followed over the next 20 years by Food, Wine and Friends, The Gourmet Vegetarian and Carrier's Carribbean.
By 1994 Carrier had returned to London, realising that most of his Christmas cards were from Britain, and started proclaiming the virtues of economical and vegetarian eating on breakfast television. He died, however, in the south of France, where he had been living.
Tom Jaine writes: Robert Carrier was born Robert Carrier MacMahon, but dropped the patronymic when in France after the war: "It sounds good in French and it looks well visually," he remarked. Appearance was ever a touchstone.
While middle-class arbiters of British taste have always handed the palme d'or of postwar culinary revolution to Elizabeth David and her disciples, it was the showman, the publicist, the camp outsider Carrier who broadened the appeal of fancy foreign food and cookery into something that might be said to have been actually revolutionary - as radical, perhaps, for British mores as the contraceptive pill or the Beatles.
His was the cooking that launched a million dinner parties: the great engine of British social change during the 1960s. His Great Dishes of the World was an expanded, book-form version of his articles for the Sunday Times magazine. Dishes like calf's liver with avocado and roast rack of lamb with rosemary owe their popularity, if not their invention, to Carrier.
His brilliant cookery cards (a series of 20 glossy recipe cards in a small box, reissued in 1995) made cooking seem easy and smart: how much more sophisticated were saucisses St Germain than sausages with mash and peas, yet just as quick to accomplish. And if the mandarins are loath to give him credit, just look at the sales.
The actor in Robert Carrier saw that surface mattered, so long as it convinced. His transformation of Hintlesham Hall, a house he arguably saved from ruin, was done on a shoestring. More thoroughgoing restorers might despise the gimcrack painted floorboards in the long gallery (they can still be detected by the attentive eye today), but his creation in the Suffolk countryside was sensational in its day and was a forerunner of many such conversions.
By the 1980s, many thought him old-fashioned, and his retreat to North Africa seemed strategic, though a certain need for cash and kudos brought him out of self-imposed exile 10 years later. In fact, his re-interpretations of Provençal, then Moroccan, food were influential and popular, if not among the fooderati, then among a wider public.
· Robert Carrier (MacMahon), chef, restaurateur and broadcaster, born November 10 1923; died June 27 2006