Robert Carrier, a restaurateur, food writer and bon vivant who died yesterday at 82, introduced luxurious Continental cooking to Britain, a nation in which ingredients such as garlic and spaghetti were regarded as foreign and treated with deep suspicion.

Theatrical, camp and with a penchant for superlatives (“Gooorgeous! Adooorable! Faaabulous!”), he became the first celebrity chef on British television; his series, “Carrier’s Kitchen,” attracted viewers as much for his drawling American vowels and shameless self-promotion as for his dishes.

The Britain he found when he arrived in 1953 was still surviving on a wartime austerity diet and finding things to do with leftovers and Spam. Carrier soon reversed all that, promoting dishes that involved profligate use of Calvados, cream, butter and eggs. Everything was in excess and served up with an ironic humor. A famous Carrier recipe of the time numbered some 25 exotic ingredients, including salmon, caviar, foie gras, truffles, fresh cumin – and a cabbage leaf, “if you have it”.

His first book, “Great Dishes of the World” (1963), lavishly illustrated for the time and priced at the equivalent of around $180, sold 11 million copies. It was followed by revolutionary recipe cards, Carrier cookware – Eventually sold in 51 American department stores – more books, two Michelin-starred restaurants, and a cooking school.

Carrier’s, in North London, served “everything you couldn’t get anywhere else” and was a place where one might bump into Princess Margaret, Liza Minnelli, Ava Gardner or Judy Garland.

His various businesses made Carrier a rich man, but in 1982 he suddenly decided that he had had enough. He was suffering from stress, and his liver (which he proudly boasted was the size of a soccer ball) was suffering une crise de foie. He sold his two restaurants and decamped to a palace in Marrakesh.

Of mixed Irish and German ancestry, Robert Carrier was born at Tarrytown, New York, on November 10 1923, the third son of a wealthy lawyer who lost his fortune in the Depression. As a child Robert trained for the stage and toured Italy with a repertory company, singing the juvenile lead in American musicals.

He arrived in England in 1943 as an American serviceman with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. After D-Day he moved to Paris, where he worked as a cryptographer in General de Gaulle’s headquarters, then as editor of a magazine called Spectacle, set up to support de Gaulle’s party in its failed bid for post-war power.

Carrier returned to London in 1953, doing PR for bullion cubes. He was appalled by the contrast between French and British attitudes to food. In France the arrival of the first post-war grapefruit was heralded by ecstatic headlines in the national press (“Vive Le Pamplemousse!”); in Britain, by contrast, there was just one wholesaler in London selling garlic.

Carrier’s enthusiasm and public relations flair – “London’s gayest gourmet”, as Home magazine described him – captivated the magazine editors and he began writing about food. During the 1970s he became a regular on television with “Carrier’s Kitchen.”

But Carrier began to find his celebrity something of a burden, and in 1982, he closed the school and sold his restaurants. Two years later, he left for Marrakesh.

He returned to London in 1994 20 pounds lighter and a changed man. He reappeared on the nation’s television screens with a morning spot cooking up vegetarian dishes. In 1998 he published “New Great Dishes of the World,” in which he committed culinary genocide by wiping out almost every old favorite, replacing wiener schnitzel, casserole of duck, rum baba and raspberry pavlova with such offerings as chili salt squid sauteed with coriander and yellow pepper, twice-cooked eggs in a hot lemongrass bouillon and wilted salad greens.