Rick Stein on his latest quest to redefine British food culture
Rick Stein has spent more than five decades helping Britain broaden its palate.
In the Seventies, at The Seafood Restaurant in Padstow, Cornwall, he served scallops in their shells and grilled fresh mackerel to holidaymakers used to prawn cocktail and scampi in a basket.
Then, throughout the Nineties and Noughties, he shared recipes from Europe and Asia, such as seafood risotto and Goan fish curry, that became, via his books and television series, part of our national repertoire. But, for his latest project, he started off by looking at a different area entirely – supermarket takeaways.
“It began as a book about Britain’s favourite dishes, so we started with the bestselling ready meals,” Rick says. The chef, author and broadcaster opens Rick Stein’s Food Stories, his 31st cookbook, with a recipe for Vietnamese fresh spring rolls: ready-made rice-paper wrappers filled with cooked prawns, vermicelli rice noodles and crunchy vegetables.
“I based them on my own memories of Vietnam, using ingredients that anyone can buy from a supermarket,” he says. “I’m rather partial to a Vietnamese spring roll myself – that’s another reason I put them in the book.”
Britain’s food culture is unrecognisable from that of Rick’s 1950s childhood, when his mum bought olive oil from the chemist to make mayonnaise to serve with fresh crab on the family’s Cornish holidays.
“My mum and dad really loved food,” he says, remembering a happy, privileged childhood as the son of sociable parents who relished travel and entertaining. His father, Eric, was managing director of Scotch whisky giant The Distillers Company, and they lived on a 150-acre mixed farm in the Cotswolds.
“My dad was what they called a ‘gentleman farmer’,” says Rick, one of five siblings. “At Sunday lunch, he loved to tell guests that the beef and all the vegetables came from the farm.”
Food was a comfort amid the intermittent shadows cast by Eric’s dark moods. Rick didn’t understand the extent of his father’s mental illness – he had bipolar disorder – until Eric dived to his death from a cliff near their holiday home in North Cornwall when Rick was 17.
In his grief and shock, he ran away to Australia, where he worked in an abattoir and laboured on the Adelaide-to-Alice Springs railway, before returning home to study English at Oxford. He dreamed of a career in journalism, but as he wrote in his 2013 memoir Under a Mackerel Sky, his troubled relationship with an often-strict father had left him with “a creeping conviction that I might be completely useless”.
One thing young Rick knew he was good at was throwing parties, which is how he ended up owning a mobile disco that became The Seafood Restaurant. He opened the ground- breaking Padstow venue in 1975 with Jill Stein, his then wife, with little formal training.
“I was cooking fish dishes from India, Thailand, all over the world,” says Rick, who came to the attention of television producers after making his debut on a 1985 episode of Keith Floyd’s Floyd on Fish. “It was a bit radical and odd in a small Cornish fishing village, but it worked. Now, you can get those dishes anywhere.”
Rick Stein’s Food Stories accompanies the 2024 BBC Two series of the same name, in which Rick toured the British Isles meeting cooks, restaurateurs and food producers to explore the way that Britain eats now. It includes the Herdwick mutton hotpot he ate in the kitchen of Lakeland farmers James and Helen Rebanks; the Filipino pork belly adobo made for him by street-food vendor Nallaine Calvo in Belfast; the nigiri sushi he assembled using seabass landed at Aldeburgh, Suffolk, by Dean Fryer – a fisherman he first met 22 years ago while researching his award-winning book and television series Rick Stein’s Food Heroes.
The intervening years have brought Brexit, Covid and the ever-increasing prevalence of ultra-processed foods, yet Rick’s travels have reassured him that British food culture is more vibrant than ever. “Our growing immigrant communities are changing our tastes for the better,” he says.
“People are much better home cooks than they used to be, too. It can feel like being the teacher in a very bright class – I’m only ever one step ahead of them.” It has been thrilling, he says, to meet young food entrepreneurs such as Cameron and Lara Dixon of Bare Bones Chocolate in Glasgow, whose appearance on Food Stories rocket-launched their bean-to-bar business overnight (see our December 2024 issue). “They were so full of hope and enthusiasm that it took me back to the early days of The Seafood Restaurant,” he says. “With people like them, the whole business of food in this country is in good hands.”
Six of those hands belong to his sons Ed, Jack and Charlie Stein. As The Seafood Restaurant approaches its 50th birthday, Rick plans to “sort of retire” from the Padstow-based hospitality group he co-owns with Jill, leaving their sons, who are already directors, to steer the next stage of its expansion.
“I’m proud to hand things on to them,” Rick says. “They understand good food because Jill and I cooked nice meals for them when they were little. Those early years are so formative. If you are in a position to cook well for your children, you’re giving them something really valuable in their lives.”
He’s happy to stand back and let Jack, an accomplished chef, author and broadcaster, take charge of the family’s Christmas lunch. Rick now splits his life between Cornwall and New South Wales with his Australian wife, Sarah, and this year they’ll be together in Padstow tucking into a sage-and-onion- stuffed free-range goose.
As always, Rick has ordered it from Claire and Robert Symington of Seldom Seen Farm in Leicestershire, two of the original Food Heroes featured in his 2002 book and series. He might be stepping back from the front line of hospitality, but he’s still raring to get on the road and shine a light on the next generation of Food Heroes and their stories – a second series of Rick Stein’s Food Stories is under discussion.
“I love filming, working with the same crew, travelling to new places,” he says. Is it not tiring, when you’re about to turn 78 and had life-saving heart surgery less than three years ago?
He grins: “When you’ve cooked in a restaurant every day for many, many years, nothing else seems hard.”
Rick Stein’s Food Stories (Ebury Publishing, £28) is out now.
You Might Also Like
