When he was 19, the chef Nathan Outlaw took a four-hour train to Bodmin, a bus to Padstow, presented himself at the back door of Rick Stein’s Seafood Restaurant and asked for a job. Outlaw didn’t even like fish at the time – he swears he’d only ever eaten fish fingers – but he loved A Taste of the Sea, Stein’s first solo travelogue for the BBC.
“Rick was away filming, and I never met him the first three months I worked there,” Outlaw recalls. “But you got these daily faxes – faxes would come through! – saying, ‘I’ve been to this place today, I’ve seen this …’ The head chef would then pass on the information to us all. Weird things would come through the post. He’d find some ingredient in Thailand and send it to us. And the chef’s like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ Haha.”
Twenty years on, Outlaw has two Michelin stars of his own; his restaurant was recently rated the finest in Britain. “It’s very rare you see things like that, it’s very inspirational,” he says. “Ultimately, the Seafood Restaurant for me to this day is still the best restaurant I’ve ever been to. I’m a bit biased but it’s got that hero status for me.”
Many OFM readers seem to agree with Outlaw, judging by Stein’s victory in this year’s Best Food Personality category. The Seafood Restaurant turned 40 in 2015, and Stein was 70 this year, but his enthusiasm and ambition remain undimmed. “It’s quite simple,” says Stein, watching the tide go out from his new restaurant in Barnes, south-west London. “Every day you wake up and you’re hungry, so it’s not something you could ever get bored with. I should be quoting Brillat-Savarin at you now: he said something about how the joys of the table are the last things that leave you before you snuff it! And that’s true.”
Stein certainly seems in fine fettle: he says he couldn’t do a service any more, but he swims most days, listening to Desert Island Discs on waterproof headphones. The Stein empire now consists of 14 restaurants, pubs and bars in the UK, and one in Mollymook, New South Wales – and he keeps a close eye on all of them. He is a lot more professional and business-minded now than when he started out. “Learning how to run restaurants was quite easy in the 70s because nobody did it terribly well,” laughs Stein. “I remember the second season we were open, somebody left a message: ‘Maybe if you want to run a fish restaurant, you should learn how to fillet fish.’ A mackerel was the offending fish!”
He also sustains a prodigious output of books and TV work. Coming soon, Stein returns to California and Mexico, retracing a trip he first took in 1968, when he was 21 and in the grip of an Ernest Hemingway obsession. Back then, he had lodged (unwittingly, he adds) in a brothel: “I was too naive to notice, except that there was the most terrible noise during the night.” This time, he drove down the coast in a convertible blue Mustang. One thing hadn’t changed, though: the food.
“Shocking is the wrong word,” says Stein. “But this idea of throwing lots of heat, lots of sourness, lots of sweetness into food, it’s so in contrast to what Europeans do – and there was never any question it was delicious. It was an assault on the senses really. I never stopped thinking about it.”
Stein even slipped back into his old habit of sending back recipes to his head chefs, and crab tacos with chilli, lime and avocado will soon be on his menus. “It might seem a bit odd coming to Barnes and having a taco,” he says, smiling, “but so what, really?”
