Nigel MacKenzie would be a very rich man if he had trademarked the name of his world-famous banoffi pie back in the Sixties.

But he was busy running a restaurant at the time and, in his own words, "missed the boat". Not that it rankles much.

Nigel is still very much the cat that got the cream and loves the fact banoffi is now nestled in the Oxford English Dictionary.

He describes himself as "completely happy", adding: "It's nice to think you have invented a word."

For Nigel is more bon viveur than entrepreneur and making a fortune was not the idea when he bought The Hungry Monk restaurant in Jevington, near Eastbourne, in 1968 for just £13,000.

He says: "We went in for all the wrong reasons. We just wanted a lovely life in the country and expected to live on a subsistence income.

"But it took off within weeks, mainly because my wife, Sue, and her sister, Jenny, who were running it at the time, were extraordinarily pretty.

"We put these ads in the paper saying 'lonely, just moved to Jevington, need customers', that sort of thing, and they worked.

"And yes, we used to get a lot of men who hung around at the end of the night and volunteered to do the washing up.

"But my wife and I were just married and blissfully in love so I had no problems there. She was as solid as a rock."

There is something joyfully reckless about how The Hungry Monk adventure began in the fading days of the swinging Sixties. Nigel says: "Sue and I were paying my mother a visit at the Deans Place Hotel in Alfriston.

"She noticed the owners seemed to be spending a lot of time hanging around the swimming pool and enjoying the life of Riley.

"That afternoon Sue and I went around the local estate agents. At 3.45pm we visited a hotel in Jevington and by 5pm had agreed to buy it."

The building was a 14th Century flint cottage, formerly a monastic retreat.

It now comes complete with antiques, candlelight, log fires and original oil paintings.

Nigel started his career with Unilever, working for Birds Eye when frozen foods were "terribly chic and sexy".

He was 17 and took a five-year training course in marketing. As soon as it was over he quit to run The Hungry Monk.

Nigel, Sue and Jenny were completely new to the hotel business and, to begin with, the idyllic life was not all beer and skittles.

One of the main problems was water - a distinct lack of it. In those days Jevington was without a mains water supply and had one tap in the middle of the village, which only allowed households to use a limited amount.

Nigel recalls: "We used to secretly run a hose from it in the middle of the night which, as you can imagine, delighted the locals.

"They really hated us and used to cut the pipe. It was not very friendly. But who can blame them? We were tremendously intrusive.

"This was a quiet, sleepy little village and all of a sudden you've got this group of Londoners opening a restaurant in the middle of it."

Nigel reflects: "When we opened The Hungry Monk we didn't know anything about running a restaurant and even less about cooking for numbers.

"We did, however, have a clear idea of the style of food we wanted to serve.

"We wanted it to be like eating at a private dinner party, with lots of sitting rooms and log fires where people could relax before and after the meal.

"We were fresh from swinging Sixties Chelsea with a much more informal approach to restaurants.

"People loved the idea of menus on blackboards and pretty local waitresses rather than formal waiters dressed in dinner jackets.

"More recently the private dining rooms have also been a major success and have since been copied by many other restaurants."

In 1971 the restaurant started serving banoffi pie and it is still the most popular pudding on the menu.

The name was originally a working title made up from banana, coffee and toffee - the three principal ingredients.

A blue plaque on the outside wall of The Hungry Monk says it is the birthplace of the famous dessert, which has since been imitated all over the world.

The original recipe is included in The Deeper Secrets Of the Hungry Monk - the restaurant's second cookbook, published in 1974.

Nigel and Sue were lucky to find a good distributor who shipped hundreds of thousands of copies around the world.

This was how banoffi pie became world famous and how the name got into the public domain before Nigel could patent it.

Nigel says: "We published our first cookbook, The Secrets of The Hungry Monk, in 1970. Now everyone does it but back then we were among the first restaurants to publish our own book.

"Since then we have printed seven other cookbooks that have sold more than 250,000 copies, which is quite good for a private publication."

Friday February 20, 2004