He's best known as the chef on RTE's The Restaurant but foodie Stephen McAllister is set to make a fortune on the other side of the camera.

The Diary can reveal that the chef of Dublin's trendy Pig's Ear restaurant can expect hundreds of thousands of euro in royalties this year after devising a cookery show which has become a worldwide hit.

First broadcast on the BBC, Take On The Take Away is now in heavy rotation on German TV where it airs at tea time each day. Holland has just bought the show but McAllister's real fortune could be made in the US where a pilot of the cookery show is being made for The Food Network.

Not bad for a programme which came about over a chat between McAllister and TV producer Philip Kampf on the set of RTE's The Restaurant.

Stephen McAllister (29) told The Diary: "I've worked on The Restaurant with Philip for the last seven years and we were just talking one day about how everyone eats takeaways. That gave us an idea for a TV programme which would tap into healthy eating on a budget."

The pair ended up with a TV format where a top chef visits the home of a take- away lover and tries to cook a healthy meal before his pizza/Chinese/Indian arrives.

When a tape of the pilot ended up in the hands of Jay Hunt, then head of Daytime tv and now controller of BBC1, she described it as "the best food idea ever to come under my door" and commissioned 10 episodes for Network BBC.

High-profile chefs such as Gary Rhodes, John Burton Race, Ainsley Harriott, Angela Hartnett, Gino D'Acampo, Ken Hom, Jean-Christophe Novelli, and Antonio Carluccio, have been featured in the series which went on to become a hit for BBC.

However, the show has proved a real eye-opener for one chef in particular – its creator.

"Chefs normally don't have any idea what's going on behind the cameras and nobody fills them in," he said. "That was the opposite of what happened here. The Irish company making the show, Vision Independent Productions, went through each part of the process and it's scary how much works goes in. The great thing about all this is that it happened so organically after a chat with Philip."

Sources say McAllister can expect two very large royalty cheques soon with more to follow. But the chef says he's more Pig's Ear than pig's back, working hard at his Nassau Street restaurant from 8am to 1am, six days a week.

"The best thing anybody can do now is to keep their powder dry. At the moment we're doing a special two-course lunch menu for €15.95 and that's been keeping me really busy."