the times Saturday January 1 2022Body + Soul 11
JAMES RAM; DAVE M BENETT/GETTY IMAGESchaotic bar full of fighting local
fishermen on Padstow harbour-
side. Back then the licensing laws
dictated that Stein serve “a sub-
stantial meal” with every
drink, so he had a vat of
Vesta curry (a 1970s
concoction created
from powder and
boiled water) on the
bar. One night
undercover police
officers visited and
discovered you could
buy a pint of beer with-
out being offered a curry
for each one. The magis-
trates in Bodmin said Stein
wasn’t “a fit and proper per-
son” to hold a drinks licence.
“A lot of people assume I
was a foodie who came down
to Cornwall with grand ideas
about lobster, but it was more‘Sex and food are
what drive life,
aren’t they?’
Restaurateur and
chef Rick Stein tells
Michael Odell about
what really makes
him happy at 74
E
veryone knows that Rick
Stein loves seafood. He has
built a Cornish restaurant
empire on lobster, crab and
all the rest. But mermaids,
they’re a new one on me.
“Oh, but aren’t they just
the most enchanting and incredible myth-
ological idea?” he enthuses. “To me, they
capture all the feelings we have about sex.”
Stein is about to appear in Rick Stein’s
Cornwall, a new BBC series in which he
explores the county he has called home
for almost 50 years. It’s great fun. He goes
stock car racing and explores a rainforest
on the south coast. But it’s in Zennor on
the Atlantic coast that he encounters a
600-year-old carving of a mermaid reput-
ed to have seduced a local man and taken
him beneath the waves. “She’s a beautiful
sea creature who symbolises our desire,
and yet at the same time there is that fear
of drowning in the abyss if we pursue her,”
Stein says.
Wow. And there I was thinking we
were going to discuss the best way to fillet
a turbot.
“Sex and food are what drive life, aren’t
they?” he goes on. “But they can both be
damaging if you have them to excess.
Food can make you obese and the pursuit
of sex can... Well, everything in modera-
tion as they say.”
Now that Stein mentions it, I’m seeing
food and sex drivers everywhere. The
74-year-old chef is speaking via Zoom
from his house in west London. He is
packing for Australia, where he spends a
few winter months with his second wife,
Sarah — Sas — every year. There’s a little
plaque behind his desk themed on food
and love. “Let’s have breakfast and get
married”, it says. Has he ever said that to
anyone? “Sas said it to me,” he says.
Stein met his first wife, Jill, in Padstow in
1968, and together they built a restaurant
empire that now stretches across Corn-
wall, Wiltshire, Hampshire and London.
Then, 24 years ago, he was invited to
judge a best restaurant award in Australia
and began an affair with Sarah, his
Australian PR. It lasted five years before
Jill found out. They divorced in 2007 and
Stein remarried four years later.
Somehow, though, the
expanded clan coexists. Jill
still co-runs the empire,
and has an interior design
business. Their three sons,
Edward, Jack and
Charles, are involved
in the restaurants too.
That must have
taken extraordinary
resilience and diplo-
macy, I say.
“Yes, diplomacy is
a good word. What
we have created is a
huge joint effort.”
The new series
shows that Stein is
an accidental foodie.
His first venture was
a nightclub called
the Great Western, athat the magistrate didn’t revoke my res-
taurant licence. I had six months’ experi-
ence in a kitchen in Paddington but that
was it. I started cooking as a way of surviv-
ing a very difficult financial situation.”
There’s a poignant scene in the new
series when Stein visits a surf therapy class
in Sennen Cove, the westernmost village
in the UK. Since 2010 an organisation
called the Wave Project has offered surf
lessons to young people suffering with
mental health issues there. Stein gets in
the water with one troubled youngster and
sees exactly the effect the sea can have.
“To witness this child finding something
positive in nature was something really
special,” he says. “I know therapy is impor-
tant but sometimes talking isn’t what you
need — it’s experience that changes you.”
When Stein was 17 years old his father,
Eric, killed himself near the family’s holi-
day home in Cornwall. Aged 19 Stein “ran
away to sea”, as he puts it, working his way
to Australia, America and Mexico, as a wayof dealing with his grief. “Yeah, they didn’t
have surfing therapy then. The thing about
travelling alone is it’s hard work. And I’d
left my mum behind, which was hard too.
But a bit like that boy surfing, I remember
having this moment walking along George
Street in Sydney. It was warm and sunny
and I thought to myself, ‘You don’t have to
let Dad’s suicide dominate your life. This is
your life.’ ”
Stein returned to England, went to the
University of Oxford as a mature student
and thereafter began his Cornish adven-
ture. These days his name is synonymous
with the county, but his TV love letter to
the place doesn’t shrink from the darker
stuff. In one episode he talks to Ed Rowe,
the actor from the Bafta award-winning
film Bait, which explored the effect of
second-home owners and gentrification
on traditional Cornwall. A difficult topic
for Stein, surely?
“It’s not as simple as that. Of course
there are places like Mevagissey [a port on
Cornwall’s south coast] where it feels
empty in winter because so many houses
are second homes. But at the same time I
like to think I’ve brought renewal to some
bits of Padstow.”
Does he feel Cornish yet? “It’s my home,
but I’m not a local. I’m just a guy who made
his life here.”
There’s a bit more to it than that. Stein is
part of unassailable culinary royalty that
includes Mary Berry, Jamie Oliver and
Nigella Lawson and which dominates our
TV screens. The problem is, where is the
new generation? Even Oliver has said he
wouldn’t be given a TV show these days.
Is it over for the superstar TV chef? “No,
I think we will always need them — Nadiya
Hussain is that next generation surely.
I think she is sensational.”
He is generous about Hussain and talks
up Angela Hartnett. However, Stein did
get in hot water last month after com-
ments he made on the BBC’s Saturday
Kitchen. He attempted to praise the ac-
claimed Turkish Cypriot chef Selin Kiazim
by saying, among other things: “What I like
about female chefs is that they’re very
practical, they stay within what they’re
capable of doing and they do it well.”
Wasn’t that faint praise? “No, but some-
one will always find fault with what you say
these days. The fact is I really do admire so
many female chefs. They are so calm and
so organised.” Organised? Who comes out
of a meal saying, “Well, that was very well
organised.”?
“Well, they are, but that doesn’t mean
they don’t also take risks. And that doesn’t
mean we don’t have room for a fiery female
chef. We still have this idea that bad temper
is a sign of male culinary genius, but that’s
not true. My kitchen is very quiet. A lot of
those fiery tantrums are just for TV.
Gordon Ramsay might swear like a troop-
er on TV but actually he’s very polite.”
During our winter he enjoys the balmy
Australian summer, cooking at the two
restaurants he and Sarah run in New
South Wales, and when he’s in the UK
Stein divides his time between his homes
in west London and Cornwall.
“In Cornwall I swim in the sea every
morning, which can be bracing to say the
least. After that I work on menus or taste
the restaurant food and either congratu-
late the staff or moan about something.
In terms of fitness, I’ve recently got into
electric biking with some friends.”
Things are good. Better than this time
last year, when lockdown posed a serious
threat to his business. Stein was taking
daily crisis Zoom calls from Oz. “We adapt-
ed. The whole family rallied round, which
was just great. But let’s not forget the real
hero in all this — Cornwall. It’s a world in
itself, and I owe it everything.”
Rick Stein's Cornwall starts on
Monday, January 3 at 6.30pm on BBC2My perfect
we ekend
Bondi or Padstow?
Padstow
Favourite late-night
snack?
I love Greek gyros,
especially if I’ve been
drinking alcohol
Wine or water?
Wine
Control freak or
chilled-out boss?
I try to be the latter but
fear I am the former
Michelin-starred meal or
pub grub?
Pub grub
I couldn’t get through
my weekend without...
A cold water swimRick SteinStein and his
wife, Sarah