Keith Floyd's funeral at Ashton Court on Wednesday brought vivid memories rushing back.

He may have been a rogue, as we were reminded rather too honestly at times, but to his viewers and readers his talent and enthusiasm for food far outweighed his faults. After all they did not have to put up with his more outrageous behaviour.

I got to know Keith in 1965 when he was a fresh new chef at the Apple & Charlotte in Charlotte Street. It was his first job and I had just arrived to study architecture in neighbouring Great George Street.

Keith, who was full of life and laughter, ensured I studied rather more than architecture.

The Apple & Charlotte was run by a cheerful young graduate architect, Mark Benson with his delightful wife Joy.

To my great delight they were at the funeral – the first time I had seen them since they had packed up and left Bristol some 40 years ago.

After all this time, Mark and Joy greeted me with: 'My God, it's George Ferguson!', which was most reassuring.

Joy used to wear the skimpiest of mini skirts – one remembers these things as an impressionable young student – so I was now able to tell her that the real reason we used to hang about was a combination of Floyd's delicious creamy beef bourguignon, and her legs. After all, this was in the Sixties when one was allowed to think such things!

While Keith may have introduced me to the joys of good restaurant food, he must also take some responsibility for leading me into the more dubious joy of drinking.

I have little doubt that this influence eventually led me to combine the practice of architecture with café-bar life… which is a great combination of places and people.

As the nights drew in and we propped up the bars of Park Street (there was one rather discreet one upstairs that has long since gone), Keith would let his fertile imagination run with ideas for food, including the selling of 'fast gourmet French food' – a concept I found difficult grasp. We have to remember that in the sixties, Britain was quite rightly derided by the French for its bland cooking and dire restaurants.

However, it was not long before Keith was opening his first eatery, Floyd's on Waterloo Street near the Grand Spa Hotel (now the Avon Gorge). Some of us even helped him splash paint on the walls in exchange for a good meal.

The first 'Floyds' – for this was the first of four in Bristol – had shared tables and a distinctly unsophisticated French bistro feel. His following restaurants, smarter each time, were opened in Clifton and Redland between short bouts of fleeing Bristol until his debtors and jilted girlfriends had calmed down.

Somehow he was always forgiven, at least by most.

Keith was the original rude chef and the combination of his enthusiasm for cooking, his mounting debts and his flamboyant character led him into television, and his Bristol based agent John Miles helped him to be more than a one day wonder. However, it was his notoriously irreverent attitude to the medium of television and his hilarious handling of his cameraman Clive that ensured his success.

So we have lost not only the first of the chefs who took us out of the stilted environment of the studio, but Bristol has lost one of its most remarkable 'sons'.

The world of food is a better place for having known him, so let's raise a glass to Keith Floyd who will not easily be forgotten.