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‘You have to feel it. You have to want it,” Lynn Crawford says, describing her passion for food, from across our lunch table in the café of the downtown Toronto Holt Renfrew.

“Give me five things you can do with arugula,” she suddenly commands, holding me in the frying pan of her gaze.

“Don't ask me,” I shoot right back.

Just who is grilling whom is what I'm beginning to wonder. We have been sitting here for about half an hour, and she has asked as much about me as I have about her.

Clearly, intensity is her natural state of being. In November of last year, she was promoted to executive chef of the Four Seasons Hotel in New York, the only woman currently in the company to have such a high-powered responsibility in the kitchen.

Recently, she became the first female Canadian chef to be invited to participate in the Iron Chef America competition, the Food Network's hit reality show that pits one chef against another like gladiators in an arena. Although she and her team of two sous-chefs lost to celebrity chef Bobby Flay, she says her pride in having participated “far outweighs my disappointment” over not having won.

In a recent appearance as a guest chef on HGTV's Restaurant Makeover, Ms. Crawford made mincemeat out of two young chefs who were trying, unsuccessfully, to run a Thai restaurant. She hated their menu, poked at a plate of something they had prepared as if it were a pile of garbage, and at one point, when one of the hapless young men addressed her as “babe,” steam could almost be seen emanating from her ears.

“Excuse me, did you just call me babe?” Ms. Crawford asked him, incredulous as a mother who has just witnessed her child pull a moon in public. The young man, who wore his chef's pants slung halfway down his butt, could only stare dejectedly into his simmering pot as she instructed him to call her “Chef Lynn.”

On the day we have lunch, she is a statement of severity in a black shirt and pants. On the way to the café, she moves past the counters and racks of luscious merchandise, undistracted, with her head bent slightly forward, as if marching headlong into a blizzard.

When she settles herself at the table, rather than relax, she looks around, taking in the entire scene. “Wow,” she says approvingly as she reads the menu, turning it over in her hands; feeling its weight.

She will answer questions about her childhood – spent in Willowdale, Ont., the elder of two children, and later, during her high school years, in nearby Richmond Hill – but she frequently interrupts herself with observations.

“What do we have here?” she wonders, focusing on three little pots of spices that have been placed on the table: some herbes de Provence, lava salt and a blend of peppers, she announces after sniffing each.

“Look at those lemons,” she instructs. A small plate of freshly cut lemon slices lies between us on the table. “Look, there's a seed,” she points out. She made note of that? “Yeah,” she says. “It's going to go in your drink.”

Our meal gets under way. Ms. Crawford orders the Roquefort cheese and mushroom tartlet with lemon-dressed rocket, a word for arugula she clearly loves, because she rolls it through her mouth – “rrrrockkket” – several times like a piece of candy.

In between more observations about the taste (she approves), the presentation and questions about my choice (a just-okay egg concoction on toast), she drops little tidbits about her life.

While studying fine art at Ontario's University of Guelph, she realized she wanted to be a professional chef. “I loved going to the farmer's markets, in the fall, the crisp air, the leaves, the smells . . . I would buy secondhand cookbooks. [Her favourite was The Moosewood Cookbook.] And I would go and get all the back issues of Gourmet magazine, back to the fifties and sixties,” she says, talking with her hands as well.

She quit university; moved to Toronto; enrolled in George Brown College; then went to California upon graduation to apprentice in restaurants of two local luminaries, Alice Waters and the late Barbara Troop.

“It wasn't about being a woman chef,” Ms. Crawford explains about that period of her training.

“I just wanted to be recognized for being a very good chef.”

Now 43, she has worked for the Four Seasons for 19 years in several of the hotel chain's prestigious properties, including Nevis, Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto. In the early years of her career, she did find the kitchen to be male-dominated, she acknowledges.

“There's the idea that [women] work in the pantry or they just make salads,” she says, rolling her eyes.

But female chefs are more common now, she adds, though it's a demanding job of 14-hour days and physical strain. Her partner of 13 years, Joy Lachita, a school teacher in Toronto and a playwright, is a great support, she adds.

Ms. Crawford is all calm control, orchestrating the pace of the conversation. It's what she does in the kitchen, too. “If you lose your temper as a man, it means you're tough. And for a woman, if you do, you're a big, bad bitch. I have been heated, but you learn very quickly that that's not a very positive way of resolving conflict.”

So I toss her an unexpected question. She has been talking about the glorious feel of a knife when it slices through a lean loin of tuna. Such passion is why we're so fascinated with the sexuality of celebrity chefs, from the adorable Jamie Oliver to the luscious Nigella Lawson, I point out. We imagine that the way chefs have with food means they are wonderful lovers. True? Ms. Crawford blushes deeply, completely at a loss for what to say. The waiter arrives to remove her plate.

“Thank God for that,” she mutters about the interruption, as she reaches for her water glass.

But then she takes control once again.

“Next question?” she asks sternly, putting me back in the frying pan.

Lynn Crawford will be one of five celebrity chefs from the Food Network preparing menu items for the gala Winemakers' Dinner on May 9 as part of the Santé Wine Festival in Toronto, running from May 8 to 12 (www.santewinefestival.com)

Outtakes from the Hampson Interview

The passion of Lynn Crawford? Well, feel it in her conversation, and you see it on her body. She has several tattoos, and each marks a moment in her life as a lover of great food and wine.

The first tattoo she got is of a small knife and sharpening steel above her left breast. “In the early nineties, I went on a culinary trip through California and spent a month staging [apprenticing] in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Santa Barbara. It was for me, most magical.”

After that came two small black labyrinths, the size of coins, on the palms of both hands. “A labyrinth is about a path. Life is a path, a journey with many different twists and turns, hopefully leading to happiness and fulfilment and giving to others. And I work with my hands, and my hands are my life.”

Perhaps the most spectacular is on the inside of her right forearm: A coloured, graphic tattoo of a grapevine. “I got it a year ago. I was in San Francisco, and I went to the Zuni Cafe. I love the Napa Valley. I had a few oysters, and a couple of glasses of chardonnay, and a really great carbonara, and then I went across the street to this artist.”

Next? “Now I'm thinking if I have white grapes here, maybe I need red on the other forearm.”