Knives and fire and frayed tempers. That's what one expects from a professional kitchen. So, what happens when 20 top chefs get together to cook dinner? There will be blood, surely.

Back in 1998, Peter Gordon, the Kiwi chef behind The Providores and Tapa Room, was asked to donate a couple of cookbooks for a raffle in aid of leukaemia research at Hammersmith Hospital. But he had a better idea. He hatched a plan for a charity dinner in aid of the Leuka Appeal. There would be 20 tables of 10 covers and, in the kitchen, 20 chefs jostling at the stove to cook for one table each. What's more, guests wouldn't know whose food they'd be eating until their chef's name was drawn on the night. And then, at the end of the evening, the diners could bid for a chef to repeat the experience on a more intimate scale in their own homes. Who's Cooking Dinner? was born.

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What's the last thing you want while organising a charity dinner? Global financial meltdown is the short answer, especially one accompanied by the spectre of Mr Madoff, scourge of the rich and famous, aka your charity givers.

But Chris Corbin, the London restaurateur and guiding light of Leuka, the charity dinner in question, is stoical. 'It's never easy to predict these things. But I was in New York recently, and the attitude there is, "Well, times are tough, but that shouldn't mean that your charities have to suffer." That's a peculiarly American view of giving to charity, mind you,' he adds. 'We just have to hope that it exists over here as well.'

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The incredible story of how the life of one of Britain's leading restaurateurs was saved by a stranger... and how the two formed a unique friendship through a series of witty, inspiring and deeply moving letters.

The postcard had a simple message: 'Dear Recipient, I've just had a pint of Guinness – I hope it does what is says on the can for you. Your Donor.'

That slightly irreverent sentence written in hospital late at night before a bone marrow transplant the next day marks the start of an extraordinary friendship born out of one man's fight against cancer, a stranger's life-saving gesture – and 18 months of anonymous letters addressed Dear Recipient, Dear Donor.

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To read about the restaurateur duo Chris Corbin and Jeremy King is to be struck, immediately, by lashings of superlatives. Over the past 30 years they have been called "near deities on the London restaurant scene"; the "Rodgers and Hammerstein of relaxed eating", "the Rolls and Royce of London gastronomy". Yes, there is a bit of a theme: their genius, partly, has been to provide reassuringly expensive and reliable comfort food, at Le Caprice, The Ivy, J Sheekey and, after selling those, at The Wolseley, officially the most successful restaurant London has ever seen. Admiration is tinged with envy and awe, of course, but because they have never courted the limelight or given interviews, perhaps not with quite as much envy as one might expect.

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Chris Corbin is such a dapper man in his well-cut suit that he seems to blend in to the walls of his Piccadilly restaurant St Alban. He is so softly spoken that I have to listen carefully to what he is telling me, for it is lunchtime and the restaurant is humming, as is his other restaurant The Wolseley just up the road. "I was going to suggest we meet there," Corbin says sipping some Badoit, "but it's always frantic in there."

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