When Theodore Kyiakou invites you to lunch, you go - which is how we found ourselves in his airy South London flat grazing on some of the dishes from his new cookbook, A Culinary Voyage Around the Greek Islands.

Feasting on, more like. There was a fisherman’s relish - “made with rabbit, because Greek islands always have so many rabbits running wild on them,” he explained to any of us silly enough to suppose that Greek island cooking is all about seafood and salads.

A stifado of aubergines. A chicken terrine, in which the meat all seemed to have that tender, moist quality of those plum bits on the underside of a a bird, known as ‘oysters’. Octopus, wonderfully mauve. Cubes of rare tuna wrapped in vine leaves, and more rabbit, stewed with leeks and peas...

And all washed down with good Greek wine of the kind many of us came to know through eating at the Real Greek, Theodore’s restaurant in Hoxton, or at its ‘diffusion line’ outlets selling souvlaki - surely one of the finest fast foods anywhere in the world.

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The restaurant was called the Real Greek to distinguish it from your common and garden Greek restaurant, which is generally run by Greek Cypriots. (Greek Cypriot cooking is wonderful, Theodore will explain, but it’s very different from the cooking in Greece itself).

But Theodore’s background is broader than that moniker suggests. This is the man who, since selling the Real Greek, has been working as a consultant on the first Greek restaurant in Shanghai, where he lived in the old French Concession, and on a hush-hush project in East Berlin.

He grew up in Athens at a time when many young Greeks left the country rather than do national service under the military dictatorship of the Colonels. Theodore ran away to sea, which sounds romantic. It must also have been tough.

He sailed and eventually eventually skippering tankers, survived a shipwreck, and joined a Greenpeace boat for several years, before landing in London in the Eighties. Here he cooked at the French House, that fine hothouse of culinary talent, before opening Live Bait, the seafood restaurant (eventually a chain) inspired by the food he ate sailing around the world.

Thoeodore still sails when he can, for fun, enjoying the singular pleasure of life lived in swimming trunks, not shaving, and beginning every morning with a head-clearing, bracing, exhilarating dip in the sea.

We first met on a culinary cruise, something he’s done a number of times with Tussock, the really excellent, Anglo-Dutch company which traditional gulets out of Turkey, often into the nearer Greek islands - and which made me into a sailor, or at least someone who loves delights of a sailing holiday, on the right boat. We all had a jolly time of it, learning to cook, drinking rose or raki and dozing in the sun.

The 18-day sailing cruise that inspired “80 per cent of the recipes” in the new book, sounds a bit more hardcore. The weather was bad, the sailing was, in the words of Paloma, Theodore’s business partner and “spiritual wife”, “hair-raising”, and even provisioning the boat proved difficult when it was tricky getting into port.

“We found ourselves on this tiny little island, with no shops, no supermarkets, no cash machines,” Theodore recalls. “But I got talking to this wonderful old man who said, what do you need a supermarket for? I have chickens, I have goats. Tell me what you want and I’ll kill it for you.”

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