IT'S the start of service in the Michelin-starred Kitchin restaurant in Leith, and the kitchen is like a busy hive, in constant movement, members of its 50-strong staff passing this way and that, calling out numbers, carrying, chopping. On one bench, pigs' heads are lined up in rows, snouts pointing to the ceiling. This is what I think of when I think of you, I tell the chef, Tom Kitchin, whose most famous dish is his rolled pig’s head with langoustine.

“Pigs' heads?” he says, glancing at the porcine faces. “Cheers. It’s been on the menu for a long time. People are always really shocked by the pig's head.”

Kitchin, clearly quite a meat man, has just come out with a new recipe book, Tom Kitchin’s Meat & Game. It’s a subject about which he rhapsodises. But, lest you get the wrong idea about just how highfalutin his background was, he is keen to make clear that he wasn’t brought up eating game. “I keep getting these questions where it’s like people think I grew up living on an estate. Rubbish. I’ve never shot any game in my life. I do have a desire to do it, but I don’t have time. I’m too busy. The whole thing with me and game didn’t really start until I started working in the restaurants during my training. But that attitude shows you that people have this stigma about game that is haw-haw-haw guys going shooting.”

That’s not to say that Tom Kitchin is a working-class kitchen hero. He did go to Dollar Academy private school, but, aged 13, he was working in a local pub in rural Kinross-shire, washing dishes and loving the adrenalin of the kitchen.

The Michelin-starred chef and Masterchef judge, now runs two restaurants in Edinburgh – this one and the Stockbridge gastropub, Scran And Scallie. He also helped set up Castle Terrace. But he did his time at the coal face, working his way up the commis-chef ladder in top-class establishments – from Gleneagles to the restaurants of multi-Michelin-starred Pierre Koffmann and Alain Ducasse.

“Game,” he says, “is something Scotland’s very good at, something that the rest of the culinary world and the foodie world are very jealous of. So I like to try and embrace that.”

When we meet it's a couple of days before the "Glorious" 12th of August, and Kitchin is preparing for the start of the grouse season. He is also about to launch his new book, which includes recipes for partridge toasties, grouse sausage rolls and venison lasagne, alongside classics such as jugged hare and roast rack of venison. What he has tried to create, he says, is a “go-to” publication on the subject that is not too complicated. “I thought, how often do I get asked the question, ‘I’ve got two pheasants in the freezer. What do I do with them?’ Or, ‘I’ve got a haunch of venison in the freezer what do I do with it?’”

Who is asking those questions? Not everyone has such a well-stocked freezer. "My mum, or friends," he says.

The Kitchin has been booked up for August 12 – the "Glorious 12th" – long in advance. “It’s like a bucket-list foodie thing to do," says Kitchin, "to eat grouse on the 12th.”

The game seasons unfolds from August onwards until January 31. Grouse is followed by duck, hare, then partridge. “It’s quite an interesting journey," says Kitchin, who finds it difficult to pin down his own favourite game meat. “It’s like people asking you what your favourite season is. Because what happens is you’re so excited at the start. But by the end I don’t want to see another grouse.”

Kitchin describes his plans for this year's Glorious Twelfth. “It's going to be a crazy day,” he says. “For us it’s not just the game season, it’s Edinburgh festival, big book signing up in town in the morning, back, do lunch, and then drive down into the Borders, get the grouse, still in feather, warm. From our point of view it’s this manic rush to get the grouse, get back, and then you’ve got to pluck them.” He points to a series of worktops, covered with bowls of strawberries. “On the 12th they’ll be all black bags, grouse, people plucking.”

Kitchin isn’t a part-time chef, with his name on the door and a celebrity lifestyle. He puts in his hours, doing his best not to miss any service, lunch or dinner. “I am pretty fanatical. I will go that extra mile to get back for service. So like I’ll do service, take the sleeper to London, do my stuff there, fly back and get back in the kitchen as soon as possible.”

The slogan, From Nature To Plate, emblazons the front of this restaurant, and the philosophy has been with Kitchin from the start. Some 11 years ago, he and his Swedish wife Michaela (nee Berseilus), whom he met while both were working in London for Anton Mosimann, were dreaming about setting up the restaurant “on a shoestring”. On one occasion he came out with the phrase “from nature to plate” as he tried to describe how he wanted to work with suppliers. “And it’s just so true. It’s not like some kind of marketing ploy. You just want to know where it comes from and you want to get the best. I was trained to always use the best. Whether it was a mackerel or a lobster. The price of the ingredients doesn't matter.”

Kitchin plonked his Leith restaurant on Commercial Quay, an inauspicious street next to the Scottish Government buildings that has seen many business try and fail. When Sunday Herald restaurant critic Joanna Blythman went to review it, she described heading towards the location with a “dead man’s shoes feeling in my bones”. Observer food critic Jay Rayner described the location as "not exactly an elegant space", adding: "The unit could quite as easily house a Tex Mex place … On the upside it does not lend itself to stupid, buttock-clenched formality. The night we went this Michelin-starred restaurant was noisy with excited chatter. Nobody had come here to worship. They had come here to eat.” Within six months of opening in 2006, The Kitchin had a Michelin star – the fastest ever to be awarded.

Kitchin describes the restaurant industry as a kind of a team sport. "If a chef is really giving everything then I love that I can help them go on that journey," he says. "The frustration is when you’ve got someone who’s young, got talent, but they jack it all in to go out with the boys on a Saturday night.”

This from a man who came close to jacking it in himself, over an incident in which his mentor, superchef Pierre Koffmann, poured potato peelings over him after he failed to use some leftovers. Fortunately, before he walked out, a friend of his, the Swedish chef Helena Puolakka, pinned him to the wall and told him he was going nowhere.

Kitchin only began to gain a wider fame after he appeared on BBC Two's The Great British Menu, in 2011. Now a Masterchef judge, he is one of those faces that appears regularly on cookery shows. “I think I’ve got my TV in the right place, in the sense that I don’t think I’ve overdone it. I pick and choose the things I want to do. I’d like to think I’m known as a chef who’s in his kitchen.” However, he now loves doing Masterchef. “At the beginning, 10 years ago, I was like – no way. But what it does for business is incredible.”

Before we met, I’d formulated an image of the chef as the kind of obsessive workaholic who, though he has four children aged four to nine, probably never sees them. Interviews described him working flat out from 7am till midnight. However, it turns out, though fanatical about his work, he still finds time for family.

“Living in Edinburgh, I can still take the kids to school," he says. "If I lived in London it would be very different. But I’m in Edinburgh and I’m so grateful for that. The kids go to school at 8am, then I can go to the gym and be in the kitchen for 9.15, finish service at 3.15pm, I go pick the kids up from school, then come back here at 5pm.”

It wasn’t like this in the early days, he confesses. Then it really was 7am till midnight. “Now I’m just managing it so I can do it all. And it's all about being calm in your head, even though it’s mayhem around you.” Sundays, he says, revolve around taking his two oldest sons to their football matches with Spartans youth section.

It helps that business is a family affair. Wife, Michaela, the restaurant's front-of-house manager, arrives as we finish the interview, then wanders through to the kitchen where she laughs and chats with staff. Kitchin recalls that their oldest child Kasper, was “practically brought up in the restaurant”. “I always remember my wife picking up the phone and rocking the Maxi-Cosi [baby car seat] with her foot, while taking bookings.”

Michaela has brought a Scandinavian ethos into what they do – hence children are often at the heart of things. Scran And Scallie is all about the scallie, or kid, a gastropub that embraces the whole family.

Kitchin's own children are adventurous eaters, and he wants to pass on to them “the joy of eating”. “So many people haven’t actually experienced the joy of eating and it’s something really magical. I love that moment when the table’s full of food and you’ve got wine and bread and the kids are eating and you think, ‘This is incredible.’ In Tuscany on holiday this year, we had the big table out at lunch and I go totally over the top. I’ve got the cheese there, the tomatoes there, the ciabatta, the ham, everything, and it’s just like feast and my mother-in-law is looking at me like there’s too much food. But this is what I want. I want to see the kids fighting over the last squashy peach.”

He loves the theatre created by certain food. “Sometimes when I’m in the Scran I stop and I see people eating oysters or pig ears or stuff. It just creates atmosphere. Shellfish as well, I love seeing people getting into crabs. Everybody likes that food. That’s why I’ll never do another restaurant like Kitchin. Because the Scran And Scallie vibe is more and more what people are looking for.”

While Kitchin's mother, Trisha, a former hairdresser, helps out with their four children, his father, Ron, manages the company. A businessman working in agriculture for much of his career, Ron was semi-retired when Kitchin roped him in to helping with the business plan, and then running the company. “Now he’s still trying to retire,” says Kitchin. “But I think he’s had the most incredible 10 years.”

Kitchin's work ethic – "you're only as good as your last meal and don't take your foot off the gas" – comes partly from his father. “My dad is like that. He’ll say, ‘You don’t get too high when you’re high and you don’t get too low when you’re low.’ You just keep going and going. Pushing and pushing. And try and be motivational.”

Kitchin's principle of absolute seasonality does add to the workload. It would be much easier to create a single tasting menu and stick to that for the week. “But," he says, “in a sadistic way I kind of love the mayhem of just taking the produce and getting it on the menu as quickly as possible.”

In spite of the mayhem, he continues to look boyishly fresh-faced and healthy (the writer Julie Bindel once described him as "cherub-faced") at 39 years old. “I think this industry is notorious for crazy overworking," he says, "but I also think the modern day chef has improved their lifestyle a lot. We move with the times. Chefs now go to the gym, we’re eating well, we’re not over-drinking.”

“The world is changing so fast, we have to change," he adds. "We have to make it a better working environment. My brother-in-law in New York, Michaela’s brother, has two-star Michelin in New York, and he is Mr Zen. He is calm and quiet and everything is thinking and spiritual. It's beautiful to see. I’m like, sh**, how do you do that?”

Tom Kitchin's Meat & Game is published by Bloomsbury, £26.99. Kitchin will be appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this Thursday, August 24 at 3.15pm www.edbookfest.co.uk