Hervé This and I are sitting in an unpretentious Chinese restaurant just round the corner from the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris and the National Institute for Agricultural Research where This, a chemical physicist, has worked for the past eight years. This, 52, is best known as one of the founders of “molecular gastronomy”: his culinary ideas and writings have influenced some the world most famous chefs, Ferran Adrià, Heston Blumenthal and Pierre Gagnaire among them.

We might have eaten at the experimental restaurant Chez Léna et Mimile up the road but This hadn’t booked a table there so we’ve settled instead for this unpretentious Asian, a stroll away from the laboratories where he works with a team of 14 researching cooking. “Pot au feu, cassoulet, daube, choucroute – it’s infinite,” he says, “particularly since I’ve come up with a simple formula for inventing an infinite number of new dishes.”