Scotland on Sunday reports that Nick Nairn, one of the UK’s foremost celebrity chefs, who has cooked venison for the Queen’s birthday, pops up regularly on television screens and charges guests up to £300 a day to master the culinary arts has been forced to eat an exquisitely prepared portion of humble pie by a team of health and hygiene inspectors.

Unannounced visits to the chef’s cook school at Port of Menteith near Stirling between 2003 and last year resulted in no fewer than 13 recommendations to improve standards of cleanliness, equipment and food storage.

Perhaps most embarrassing of all, officials invited the Aston Martin-driving chef and his staff to attend a cleanliness seminar.

Nairn last night insisted the criticisms were minor and did not affect food safety, and revealed his cook school was shutting for a week this summer for a major refurbishment that would exceed health standards.

In 2004, my laboratory reported that, based on 60 hours of detailed viewing of television cooking shows, an unsafe food handling practice occurred about every four minutes, and that for every safe food handling practice observed, we observed 13 unsafe practices. The most common errors were inadequate hand washing and cross-contamination between raw and ready-to-eat foods.