Food

Rick Stein - King Of Tides

The celebrated chef chats with Selector about mortality, Mollymook, and his lifelong love of fruits de mer.

Trends endlessly ripple across the culinary world like waves on water, a constant churn of changing tastes, restaurant openings and closures, past standard-bearers making way for new hatted triumphs. Above the rolling tides presides the constant moon, shaper of tides, seasonal barometer par excellence, ever-present, beaming, benevolent.

It is as good a metaphor as any for the perennial presence of Rick Stein, whose influence on cooking around the world has proved uniquely enduring. This is, after all, one of the original global television chefs; an almost ubiquitous face gracing our bookshelves and screens for the better part of forty years, over dozens of cookbooks and television series. Understandable, then, when he stated earlier this year in an interview with The Times that he's "not got long left" following heart surgery to replace his aortic valve, it generated a paroxysm of press here and in the UK that all but trumpeted Stein's imminent demise. Legions of dedicated fans seemed to hold their breath.

"That was ridiculous," Stein laughs, hale and hearty, as avuncular as you'd imagine over coffee at Bannisters in Mollymook, the New South Wales home of his eponymous Australian restaurant (another Rick Stein at Bannisters can be found in Port Stephens, also in New South Wales). "I'm fine," he stresses. "All I was saying is that at 77 if I've got another twenty years to live I'll be extremely lucky, right?"

Not that it fazed Stein all that much. "I went to see the surgeon for the final follow-up and after all the testshe said to me 'You've got the heart of a 37- year-old' so I thought, that's alright - not sure about the rest of me, but there you go." So, the intimations of mortality were blown out of all proportion? "Yeah, they were, basically," says Stein. If anything, the press may well have simply been a key ingredient in Stein's proven recipe for success. "That interview," he says, referring to the source of the quote, "I did it because I was selling a stage show, right?" he concedes with an impish grin. "If you want to get the quality papers, you've got to give them more than just 'hey, I'm going on a theatre tour.'"

RICK STEIN ON HIS EARLY PADSTOW DAYS

The show, 'An Evening with Rick Stein', which ran for 15 nights across the UK over March this year, drew on archival materials from his storied career to share with audiences, along with poetic interludes and reflections on his global adventures. Besides being a roaring success, it was also a rare instance of the self-taught chef looking back.

After all, this is the man whose tireless travels introduced countless aspiring home chefs to some of the great culinary traditions of the world, from the UK to France, the Mediterranean traditions of Italy, Greece and Spain, and beyond - and in particular, to the delightful qualities of fresh seafood, simply cooked.

... I JUST THOUGHT, WOULD YOU, YOU KNOW, BE INTERESTED IF I
ACTUALLY SORT OF RAN THE RESTAURANT?

It was a tutor at Oxford University, where Stein studied English before moving to his beloved Padstow in Cornwall - the unassuming birthplace of Stein's culinary empire, the genesis of which is the still-operating nightclub-turned- bistro The Seafood Restaurant - that first drew his attention to the dire state of British seafood in the late 1960s. "He'd got me into Oxford and had latterly left to live in Italy... and just said 'I can't understand how bad the fish is in the UK,'" Stein recalls. "He lived, I can't remember, by the sea somewhere, and said 'the fish is so good, everybody likes it - it's so fresh, it's so simple!'" 

For Stein, it's childhood memories of fish that really dominate how you feel about it for the rest of your life - and Stein's relationship, with both seafood and Cornwall, is inextricably linked to his own childhood. It is the originating influence on everything he's subsequently achieved in both food and life.

"My parents had had a house in Cornwall," he explains. "Actually that's why I was so attracted to Mollymook... obviously different countryside, but the same kind of people coming year after year to holiday in Mollymook as they do in Padstow, Cornwall, generally." He first went as a very young child, enjoying time by the sea, fishing with his father. It left him with an abiding desire to return and work in Padstow, which he did: first operating a mobile disco, then a quayside nightclub where he'd serve freeze-dried curries to patrons. "Chaotic," is how Stein describes this time, with frequent brawls between locals leading police to shut the nightclub down.

He and his business partner Johnny still had a licence for a different part of the building, and eventually in 1975 - with the help of Stein's then-wife, Jill - The Seafood Restaurant was born. "I started the restaurant as a way of paying the bills and as soon as it started to work for me, I really enjoyed it because I realised I was onto something."  Word spread amongst the locals, and Stein, who'd absorbed a great deal from his parents ("Both good cooks"), a brief stint as a commis chef, and whatever cookbooks were at hand (he credits the inspiration for his tartare sauce to a 1970s recipe by English food writer Jane Grigson), found himself at the beginning of an odyssey that would define his life.

It was Stein's appearance on BBC's Floyd on Fish however that would sharply angle his trajectory to the heights. Producer David Pritchard, having forgedsuccess capturing Keith Floyd's distinctive manner via the 'travelogue' style of the programme, believed he could have a similar-sized hit on his hands with this unassuming Cornish chef. The rest, as they say, is history.

RICK STEIN ON BANNISTERS AT MOLLYMOOK

The sea, it seems, forever calls to Stein. He credits wife Sarah Burns (Sass, to her friends) for introducing him to Mollymook, and again observes the similarities between it and Cornwall; notably how it is the kind of place parents bring their kids, who then bring their kids, carving out a special place and countless seaside summer holiday memories over time.

"It just happened," he says. "We started coming here about twenty years ago with Sass just for summer holidays and I started buying fish from a local fish merchant called Lucky - and we still buy from him because one of Sass" friends said that's where the best fish is. And it was really good fish. Beautiful tuna, stuff like sea urchins. I didn't think, 'Oh this would be a great place to have a restaurant.'" Indeed, it was more a quirk of fate followed by impulse that led to Rick Stein's aligning with Bannisters in 2009. "I'd become friendly with owner Peter Cosgrove and he rang me when I was in Cornwall one time to say, 'The chef's walked out, you wouldn't happen to have a chef that could be our head chef?'" recalls Stein.

Initially, Stein recommended someone to Cosgrove for the job then, a day or so later, called and said to Cosgrove, "Actually, I just thought, would you, you know, be interested if I actually sort of ran the restaurant?" It was what Cosgrove was hoping to hear. It opened to the kind of buzz you'd expect, and very quickly put Mollymook on every foodie's must-visit list.

Celebrated Australian chef and presenter (and Selector regular) Lyndey Milan fondly recalls meeting and working with Stein before Rick Stein at Bannisters was even a thought bubble. "Rick and I are old friends," says Milan. "He is the master of simplicity, whether it's cooking, explaining, describing, or taking us on a trip." The regard is mutual - Milan featured Rick Stein at Bannisters in her Taste of Australia television series, and Stein reciprocated by showcasing a Milan recipe in his book, Seafood Odyssey. "Though he spelt Lyndey wrong," Milan recalls. "I'll never let him live that down!" 

Similarly, Maggie Beer, an icon in her own right in Australia's culinary landscape, has this to say about Stein: "He is such a legend; think of how many he has inspired with his amazing television programmes as he travels the world, with recipes so clear and accessible."

RICK STEIN ON HIS INFLUENCE

One local chef that Stein has had discernible impact upon is Josh Niland, whose highly anticipated Saint Peter has opened in its latest incarnation at The Grand National to critical acclaim. "Rick is not just an industry icon, but someone I've admired deeply since I was 14," says Niland. "His joy and genuine enthusiasm for food is contagious, and his books and TV programmes are compulsory in my opinion for young cooks." Stein is equally effusive about Niland's skills, and speaks of how influences extend and perpetuate in such interesting, unpredictable ways.

"It was me that got him interested in fish, I think! And it's funny - when I was doing this BBC series that SBS is airing there was certainly one occasion - no, two occasions - where the food I was eating, I know, was influenced by Josh," says Stein, referring to Rick Stein's Food Stories, a series released to accompany a new book of the same name launching this month.

"It was an all-fish restaurant in Northern Ireland, such a lovely couple, really young - they were doing carbonara, right, but using smoked dogfish... its one of those fish, it's very nice, it's a shark, but people regard it as very cheap and nasty fish - which it's not - but he was using it because it's the sort of thing that Josh Niland would have done." 

But Stein is self-effacing when asked to comment more specifically on how his work has changed the world of cooking. "The stuff I'm saying is the same as I've always said," he says, finishing his coffee as wind stirs the trees behind him and the tide comes in, visible through the glass windows of Bannisters.

"Looking back, I don't think how young I was; I think, yeah, I'm saying the same stuff I always did." You get the best, and you mess with it as little as possible: perhaps simple truths are, in fact, the greatest influence of all.

Rick Stein's Food Stories will be released 17 September, available for pre-order now.