Rick Stein: “The older I get, the more I just love simple food”

50 years in the biz is a long time! Aside from your shows and books, how do you track your foodie memories when ‘off duty’?
I’ve got into the habit of taking pictures – I almost snap everything I eat apart from when I’m at home. Everybody used to think it was very poor, bad manners, but because everybody does it now, nobody cares. When I’ve been filming, I’ve always just written down what I’ve eaten. I’ve got a drawer full of old notebooks.

You pioneered this country’s love affair with seafood from our shores and beyond. Are there any fish or shellfish you’re yet to try?
I’m always open. I went with my boys to a bar in Reykjavik last year. We ordered the fermented Greenland shark but it didn’t have the pungency it’s supposed to have. I said to them, what’s wrong, and they said “The tourists don’t like it.” What the hell, you know, that’s the point of it! Another thing I haven’t tried is fugu [pufferfish]. We were filming in Japan and we were all lined up for filming in the fugu restaurant. I thought it would be a really fun thing to do but something went wrong with the camera. I’m still after the fugu!

What’s the one fish you think everybody must try?
That’s so hard! It seems mundane but I think dover sole is the one fish you can’t fail to love. It’s unfortunate that it’s so expensive, but it’s just the perfect fish. I was doing Saturday Kitchen recently, and I was doing the Provençal dish bourride. We had a fillet of red mullet and I found myself enthusing about it. I think it’s just a lovely looking fish, with the yellowy pink of the skin but also the flesh.

What are you most nostalgic about from your 50-year career?
It’s funny, because I was filming in Split, in Croatia, with these two women in their early 20s, running a really great restaurant on a back street. They started to get pissed. And they made this fish stew, which was great, but then we all started getting pissed, then this band turned up and was playing in the street. I remember saying at the time it reminded me of the early days of our restaurant, when it was fun. We used to have staff parties on the beach. There were only about 15 of us then. They were really good times.

You work with your family, and many of your team have been with you for 20, 30-plus years. What is it about hospitality that breeds these tight bonds?
It’s a business where you depend on each other. I was talking to my brother the other day – he’s a neurophysiologist. He was saying that some of the happiest people are those in the armed services, because although it’s obviously not great if you have to face death, everybody looks after each other and everybody’s got their backs. It’s belonging to something they believe in. It’s great for the human psyche, and I think it’s the same in kitchens.

You were a nightclub owner – does that mean you consider yourself a raver?
My nephew is [the DJ] Judge Jules. In the mid 1980s I was driving through Soho and there’s Jules on the pavement. I said, “What are you doing here?” He said, “Well, I’ve got hold of this old warehouse and I’m doing a rave in it.” I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, but now I do! I wasn’t a raver myself, but it’s interesting that Jules and I both have this slightly nerdy take on stuff, on watching other people have a nice time. That’s what my disco was all about as well, taking pleasure through vicarious living.

Do you have one track you remember from your disco and nightclub days?
The last track I played from those days was at a 50th anniversary supperclub in February. It was LA Woman by The Doors. My wife Sas bought me a new vinyl copy.

How have your cooking, eating and drinking habits evolved over the past 50 years?
The older I get, the more I just love simple food. I wasn’t like that in my 20s and 30s. At that time, with nouvelle cuisine, we were all trying to be incredibly clever. I remember with some embarrassment, I had a dish on which was three fish cooked differently, each fish with three sauces on it. I mean, that is so stupid!

Also I remember with great affection my parents’ cooking. It was very simple, because they weren’t professional cooks. But we were lucky enough to grow up on a farm. The farm was my dad’s hobby, and it was all pretty much organic and just very simple: local vegetables, local beef, lamb, chicken. That’s what I hanker back to.

What would you call the greatest hits from the restaurant over the past 50 years?
The first dish that really made us money was called seafood thermidor, which was like a lobster thermidor sauce, but instead of being all lobster, it had lobster, crab, prawns and monkfish in it. It had cheddar, a bit of cayenne pepper and a bit of paprika on the top and breadcrumbs. It was just a fish pie with a bit of attitude. Honestly, I would say that dish really set us up. Another dish that’s our signature is turbot hollandaise, which is the same sort of degree of luxuriousness and simplicity. And turbot is just one of those fish which is really nicely flavoured. All fish is great if it’s dead fresh.

Singapore chilli crab was quite a daring thing for us to do at the time, to a) send out a whole chopped up crab, and b) with lots of chilli in it. It first appeared on the menu in 1988. With my wife Sas, we go back to Australia a lot, so we stop off in Singapore for a night, and I had it last time we went through Singapore, just to check that we’ve still got it right, and we have! It’s very simple – garlic, ginger, oil, chilli, soy sauce, tomato ketchup and water, and then you finish off with coriander and spring onions. People love it!

Of late, a starter of mine that I like is the tuna guacamole. So it’s seared tuna, with lots of black pepper and salt, and then you just sear the outside so it’s actually raw inside. You slice it, it’s served with some dressing, a bit of salad garnish and guacamole, the recipe for which I got from doing a series in Mexico. That’s really come into its own, because we’ve started getting bluefin tuna from [Cornwall], and using the local tuna is just unbelievably lovely.

Oyster charentaise has been on the menu for a long time. It’s oysters, with a spicy sausagemeat and wrapped in caul fat. I got the idea from France, around La Rochelle. Although I did recently look up the origins of the dish on the internet and it said it was me!

Are there any food trends you’d like to forget or ‘get in the sea’?
I do quite like a bit of grilled cabbage but when it’s really burnt… get it in the sea. The other thing I got really irritated with was flowers on everything. I sent this email out to everybody [on the team] and said I’m calling it flower abuse.

What have been the biggest changes you’ve seen in the restaurant industry in the past 50 years?
The enormous gain in knowledge from our customers and the sorts of things that we can now do that people will accept. It’s just wonderful. In the early days it was really tricky to put new things on [the menu] and get it accepted. Now it’s really easy. I did this series last year of food stories and the point to that was to see how the country had changed since we opened the restaurant, in terms of what people are eating. One of the ways of measuring that was looking at the nation’s top 10 dishes, which are things like curry, bolognese, pizza, which are definitely not British! We have become a country which is, as far as we’re concerned and people that know this country, really good for food. It’s just the French still have this really irritating belief that all we do is boiled meat!

What’s the secret to running a successful restaurant and restaurant empire?
It’s like the joke about how do you open a small winery? Start with a big one! Make no mistake about it, it’s going to be incredibly hard work. And that doesn’t just mean physically hard, you’ve gotta give up a lot of stuff to do it. But I think it’s the case with lots of jobs. I’m a great fan of the film, Whiplash. It’s about a drumming school and they’ve got this incredibly tough teacher who teaches them to the point that the main character is bleeding and it’s still not good enough. You think he’s just a sadist. But he’s saying that if you really want to be that good, this is what you need to do, you know? And it’s sort of like that in restaurants. I guess I’ve got a love-hate relationship with the Michelin Guide because it’s a great accolade, but then it also forces people into absurd hard work. But whatever you do in restaurants it’s going to be hard work, but the rewards are enormous. You meet so many people, it’s a very, very lively business. But if you just wanna do a 9-5, don’t do it!

How do you think the British public’s appetite for fish and shellfish has changed in the past 50 years?
It hasn’t changed as much as I thought it would. I think shellfish is no problem, right? It’s also massively expensive, most of it. Lobster, crab, clams, it all tastes great. But I think people do find resistance to a lot of fish. I just quoted in a recent book, actually, a quote from Jane Grigson, Fish Cookery, which was one of my earliest books for inspiration. She had quoted some person who said fish isn’t a proper meal for a man. It’s not full of enough richness or protein. I think there’s still a bit of an element of that there. But I think the main problem is that we didn’t have fish as kids, most of us, and that’s what I realised I’m up against. So I think it’ll take a generation or two. If you look at the Spanish, particularly French or coastal Italians, they love fish in a way which most of us don’t understand, and I think it’s because they have it as kids, as simple as that.

In the past 50 years we’ve also become more acutely aware of our impact on the planet. Do you think that’s impacted people’s interest in fish?
I think a lot of people, if they’re not choosing fish, it’s because it’s expensive but also because they think that they are denuding the sea of a particular species. We do our best to choose ‘green’ or ‘amber’ fish on the traffic light. There is a problem with farmed fish and farmed salmon because of the detritus, but in Iceland they’ve started growing salmon in land. In my last programme, I did this interview with a colleague of my brother’s, called Professor Michael Crawford, who says that we need fish for our brains – the omega 3. He said it’s not a question of giving up fish to save the planet, we’ve got to have it.

Do you have any recommendations for those who want to eat fish more responsibly?
Oily fish because there’s no shortage at the moment of mackerel, herring and sardines. I think if you can take some trust in the Marine Conservation Society, and go for the species [they recommend], you’ll be alright.

In life and work consumed by food, how else do you get your kicks?
I go on holiday with my wife. We really do go on interesting holidays – she loves Saint-Tropez and everybody dresses up so well. It is fun. We’re also thinking of going to Evia in Greece, it’s near Athens. We love Hydra, where Leonard Cohen lived, because I’m fascinated by him. My brother, when he was in his 20s, stayed with Leonard Cohen and he said he wasn’t a very good guitarist and I didn’t get too much from his poetry at the time. I think he got better at it.

How has living in Australia for some of the year shaped your palate?
You have availability of Chinese, Japanese, Thai, you name it food, literally at the top of the street. You’ve also got every type of produce and it’s good stuff – they grow stuff well. They’ve got massively large mangoes and large avocados. I’ve just asked Sas to write about an Aussie Christmas for a book I’m writing. I’ve just read the first draft of it and there is so much stuff that her family eats over Christmas. We’ve two restaurants in Australia, too, called Bannisters – they’re the same menu [as in Padstow]. I started off doing more Southeast Asian dishes but they like a butter sauce as much as we do! The fish and the shellfish they have there are similar. They’ve got some really great fish like snapper and great prawns, and great wine. We’re also doing a series in Australia, starting filming in March and going through to May.

Learn more about Rick Stein’s 50th anniversary celebrations in Padstow.