There is a memorable photograph in the Seafood Restaurant’s 40th anniversary cookbook that shows Rick Stein and Jill Stein in the year their Padstow adventure began. Newly married they are clinging to each other, grinning, walking down the high street in Oxford in the summer sun, having driven all night from Cornwall to have lunch with Rick’s brother, a don at Magdalen College. They seem to have brought the beach with them: Rick is in white flares, Jill is barefoot. And, at 28 and 27, they are illuminated with the confidence that whispers the world is waiting just for them.
Sitting in the Seafood Restaurant now, over lunch, Rick Stein can well remember the feeling. He still sees it all the time when he meets young couples and chefs just starting out in the business. For his new TV series, he says, he has just been filming in Split in Croatia. “I met these guys who had just opened this brilliant new place near the seafront, they had made this great bean and fish stew, they were all a bit pissed, they had got all their mates to come and play music in the street outside. It was fabulous. And all the time I was thinking: ‘This is what it used to be like!’ You had limitless energy and limitless hope. Loads of dreams.”
The dreams Jill Stein remembers from that period are slightly less heady than those that still transport Rick. “My recurring dream was just before we opened at Easter,” she tells me, separately. “The restaurant was filling up with more and more people – and no food at all was coming out of the kitchen. Nothing. When we started, we had no idea about booking systems. I remember one group walking out after waiting more than an hour for their first course. I found out where they lived and went round their door next morning and said, ‘Please, please come back tonight.’ So it was a bit like that.”
To begin with she and Rick would put flyers on all the parked cars in Padstow and go round the caravan sites with a loudhailer on the back of the car yelling at people to come that night.
Did she always have faith Rick could cope with the kitchen pressure, I wonder?
“Not really. He was terrible. He is obsessive about simplicity. And flavour. I remember we had a rich family in here from Rock across the bay, one night early on, complaining. The waiter mentioned it to Rick and he came into the restaurant shouting, ‘I hate the English middle classes!’ I had my head in my hands, you know…”
The year 1975 was, in retrospect, a good year for embarking on enduring Cornish dramas. The original Poldark was essential Sunday-night viewing when the Steins were opening their warehouse nightclub on Padstow harbour. (It was quickly shut down, “too much drunkenness”, forcing a change of use and Rick away from his DJ turntables and into the kitchen.) There seems something fitting, 40 years on, that Winston Graham’s passion play should return just as the Steins are marking their restaurant’s midlife anniversary. All family histories are really family sagas – limitless hope and limitless energy becomes something much more complicated as the decades roll by – and this one is no exception.
In the time since Ross Poldark and Demelza first got it together, Rick and Jill have raised three sons; their original Seafood Restaurant has become an ever-growing business that takes in four more restaurants, a hotel, a pub, a cooking school, numerous TV and book projects (as well as a Stein gift shop in which Rick grins from every shelf). For their efforts they have accumulated a £30m fortune and each won an OBE. They have also, very publicly, separated and divorced and Rick has remarried, and spends more than half his life with his second wife Sarah in Sydney, Australia. But the business, the idea of fresh-from-the-sea cooking they accidentally landed on all those years ago remains, somewhat storm-tossed, stronger than ever.
I was in Padstow the day before an anniversary dinner at which many of the dozens of chefs who have worked at the Seafood Restaurant over the years were returning to raise a glass. The family was using the rare occasion of them all being in the same place at the same time to have a board meeting. Over the course of a day each of them, three sons, Rick and Jill, slips out one by one to sit with me in the restaurant and tell their version of the family story. The Steins’ sons are closer now to the business than they have been since they left home. The eldest, Edward, worked as a sculptor for 10 years or more, often at Michelangelo’s marble quarry in Carrara in Italy. In the last year he has returned to Cornwall to help Jill with design ideas and use his masonry skills to extend and refurbish the new restaurant at Winchester and the Cornish Arms in St Merryn up the road. Jack, second son, is the heir apparent to the food side of the business, now executive chef across all the Stein properties. He dreams of restaurants in lighthouses, and plans for a farm restaurant up on the cliffs. (“I like the idea,” he tells me, “as you walk in through raised flower beds, you notice some of the fruits are prepped. You get your amuses bouches from the plants…”) Charles, the youngest, is perhaps the most entrepreneurial, helping to set up Vintners, a west London wine merchants (which now supplies, among many other restaurants, about three-quarters of the Stein list).
Rick remembers saying to Jack when he graduated from university: “You know, you have a degree in psychology, you don’t have to come back to the kitchen.” In many ways, though, listening to them all talk, you can’t help thinking a degree in psychology might have been the ideal qualification.
Looking back at his childhood, Jack suggests that “what we were aware of when they weren’t there was that they were doing something really important for the family. We didn’t really understand it until I was six or seven or whatever and I had a look round the kitchen. The restaurant was mostly just somewhere they went in the evening.”
The boys were often looked after by Rick’s mother when they were young. “We were a nightmare bunch of kids,” Jack suggests, with a laugh. “We used to set fire to stuff and that. My older brother always seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of petrol…” Each year the Steins would shut down the restaurant in the winter, take the boys out of school and go travelling for a couple of months, mooching around food markets in the Far East, usually ending up in Australia. One time Ed and Jack, then 8 and 5, went missing in Singapore after wandering off into the city from the Raffles hotel. “We didn’t think much of it,” Jack recalls. “I think my brother just wanted to check out something he had seen in a shop. We bumbled back eventually and were surprised to see everyone a bit frantic.”
They remember Dad, Rick, as the inspired bedtime storyteller. He never taught them to cook, but the passion rubbed off. “I think he showed me how to slice bread once when he was very drunk,” Jack recalls. “But, still, when I went to university and I watched people buying packets of bolognese sauce or whatever I just wondered: why?”
The boys are all in agreement about one thing. Mum, Jill, was the rock of the family and the business. Her own memories of that time include “putting the children to bed and then coming straight down here to do front of house and Rick shouting through, ‘Can you knock us up a couple of treacle tarts?’”
Television, for better and worse, was the turning point of the Steins’ business and their lives. Rick first got his own show, The Taste of the Sea, on the BBC exactly midway through their narrative, in 1995. Loudhailers on caravan sites were no longer required. “The day after the show came out,” Jill says, “I can remember manning the phones. They never stopped.” They haven’t stopped since.
Even so, looking back, Jill can recall thinking she hoped that first series would be a one-off. “I kept saying to him: leave it at that,” she says. “But, of course, how can you stop someone doing something when they are clearly so brilliant at it? I was left here to run this business and hold the babies. Suddenly he was out of the kitchen, travelling, ‘Wey hey!’ It was faxing in those days, not texting, so we would have these heated fax exchanges…”
Rick recalls the before and after of TV in similar no-going-back terms. In his memoir Under a Mackerel Sky he says he thinks of himself – still – as essentially a shy person; television gave him the licence to perform.
“I was listening to Mark Rylance the other day on Desert Island Discs,” he says, “and how he was so shy he couldn’t speak till he was six. I think there is a corollary to shyness in that if you are put in the spotlight you will really give it everything.” Cooking on television granted him that spotlight.
I wonder, of Jill, what it was like watching Rick those first few times on television. Did it look like him?
“Well,” she says, “Rick has two sides to him, and that was, of course, very much his affable side. I used to get nervous about watching him at first. But not after a while…”
Reading Stein’s memoir, you are reminded insistently that the overwhelming event of his growing up was his father’s suicide – Eric Stein jumped off the cliffs at Trevose Head, not long after he had retired, at 58. You don’t have to be a psychologist to guess that Rick’s drive to please people, to be loved, might have roots in dealing with his bipolar father growing up. He begins his book, pointedly, with an account of one of the few occasions he can remember when his father was unequivocally happy in his company. They are fishing off the rocks on holiday on the Cornish coast. I wonder, at one point, talking to him, if he was ever anxious that he might have some of his father’s darkness as well as his bonhomie?
“I’m not clinically depressed at all but I go up and down a bit,” he says. An Oxford English graduate, his original plan was to go into journalism, but he feels finding his real vocation has probably saved him from too much introspection. “If left to my own devices I will invariably find something to do with my hands,” he says. “It’s just reassuring really. It gives me a sense of purpose. I like cooking at a very basic level because I still really enjoy cutting stuff up and putting it in pans.”
He also needed to find a stage of some kind – that was what led him into being a DJ after college. “I was always a bit shy to get up and dance,” he says. “But I thought as a DJ I can really make my friends enjoy the best dancing experience. I feel the same way cooking. When you are on a roll and people are loving the food you are making – there is a tremendous affinity between you and them in that.”
He was as surprised as anyone to discover he could make, through TV, that connection a kind of global love affair. But when it happened it was addictive.
“I totally understood,” Jill says. “But at the same time I felt quite vulnerable. People used to push me out of the way literally to get to Rick. He was the celebrity. I was just the wife. I remember even a lady at our PTA meeting elbowing past me…”
Rick met Sarah Burns, then his Australian publicist, 17 years ago. He separated from Jill in 2004. He sees the “inevitability” of their divorce a different way. “We did complement each other extremely well here, but not necessarily as human beings. I think to work with somebody and try to do everything else is a tough thing. I don’t think the dynamic here at the restaurant between me and Jill has gone, even though we are no longer together.”
Did he assume it would?
“Yes. I assumed that when it all collapsed this would collapse too. I think it was Jill more than me really who kept it together. She just said, ‘I am not letting this go. We have put so much bloody effort into it.’ So. We have managed to make it happen.”
What is the dynamic of those board meetings, I wonder.
“Can be a bit tense,” Rick says, with a full laugh. “But on the whole we have been quite restrained.”
If the business has been the saving grace of all those years of effort, they have also both emerged to tell the tale. Jill allows herself a smile when she contemplates the air miles that Rick has put in to keep his round-the-world life on track. Isn’t it a bit knackering?
“Maybe I am just so used to it,” he says. “I suppose it is a bit weird. But is it really? Whatever works. It’s always about ways of escape, as Graham Greene said, you are just trying to cheat the grim reaper in one way or another. Work is one way of doing it, travel another.” He and Sarah and her children are planning a move to London later this year.
I wonder if Jill envies him his escapology?
“I don’t envy it at all,” she says. “Not one little bit. I have my life really sorted. I have this, I have my interiors business, which is going really well. When you have lived with a very strong alpha male all your life then it is quite liberating to find your destiny is really your own.”
Does she prefer it when Rick is in Padstow or when he is away?
“I like him being here because we have so much to discuss in the business. Though when he comes back I think he finds it difficult to re-enter. He feels things have been going on without him. He is very indecisive, so sometimes it’s good that he is not here because we can get on with it.”
When I ask each of them if they would ever step back from what they started 40 years ago, they both quickly say no. Though they hope the day-to-day running can be passed on, they are, happily for food-lovers everywhere, still locked in. “We are quite competitive with each other, Rick and I,” Jill says.
On this Rick can agree. “A family restaurant business is such an ongoing commitment it’s always almost impossible to envisage doing something else.”
He looks around their creation from his corner table. “This place has devoured most of our lives,” he says, still smiling.
Stein vs Stein: the family on each other
Jill Stein, restaurateur, interior designer
I set up my own interior design business really to prove a point to myself that I could do it alone. It has always been a bit male-dominated here and I have always taken that second role, not entirely willingly. Not at all willingly! So making a success of my own business was important. But if I had ever left the restaurant I know I would have regretted it. For a start Rick wouldn’t have been able to afford to buy me out, and my children’s future would have been compromised. I’m a tough northern girl. So I stuck it, and I am very glad I did.
Edward Stein, stonemason, sculptor
It was bit awkward for me when Dad started on television. I was 17, and people would always be asking “are you Rick Stein’s son?” At that age you are trying to find out who you are for yourself - that was really why I got away from the business and started stone work. I had to find my own place in the world and Dad was suddenly everywhere. Obviously I don’t feel like that any more. We have to move the business forward. Jack is taking on some of Rick’s role. I guess I am doing some of Mum’s role now, and Charlie will bring something new, when he eventually gets back involved, I think.
Charlie Stein, vintner
Mum and Dad have a good working relationship, they have always been able to work well together. If anything I think Mum has become more determined to do that since they were divorced. I like to think a family business is more honest than a corporate one. I think we make decisions with our hearts as well as our heads. It’s never just an accountant looking at figures and there is nobody in the City telling us what to do. So we can really do only things that we care about. My parents always said go and do your own thing, but I think they secretly hoped we might want to come back. We know exactly how much they both put into it.
Jack Stein, executive chef, Stein Restaurants
After university I was effectively offered a job with a big insurance broker in the City. The old man did say: don’t go into the kitchen, it’s too much hard work. But the cheffing world has changed a lot. It’s gone from being a full-on shouty environment to something more like Heston [Blumenthal] and Ferran [Adrià] do. There is a bit more of a tertiary education element about it. The young chefs we get in now are really into the science. Dad still thinks of it as six-day weeks, 80 hours sweating in the kitchen. I was tempted by the City, but I’d much rather give my soul to the family company than anyone else’s.
Rick Stein, chef, writer and broadcaster
I find myself increasingly guided by my sons’ opinions. I will still cut in if I am really troubled about something but so far I haven’t noticed a kind of “killing your dad” feeling in the way we work together. Maybe there should be more of that. I suppose for all sons their dads are quite enormous figures. It’s only when you get older that you realise they have probably been making it up as they go along. I think my sons still expect me to have the answer. It seems a bit unfair of me to turn round and say “I’m just as lost as you are.” And I suppose I am not, quite – at least I have seen most problems before.
Rick Stein’s new cookbook From Venice to Istanbul will be published in July and accompanies the TV series of the same name
- This article was amended on Sunday 19 April 2015 to give the correct name and identity of Rick Stein’s father.
