Rick Stein
Whether at a London fine-diner or a beach shack in India, the English restaurateur, chef and TV presenter indulges a passion for fish that began on the Cornish coast.
Rick Stein reminisces about his first fine-dining experience
Shortly before my younger sister, Henrietta, got married in 1975, a group of us went to The Connaught hotel in London for lunch. Michel Bourdin was the chef and it had a Michelin star. We were in our 20s and none of us had much money. It felt very grown-up. The first course was lobster, scallops and Dover sole in a white wine and cream sauce, with basil, in a vol-au-vent. For the main course, I had turbot with hollandaise sauce. The quality of the food, the efficiency of the service, the starched linen tablecloths, the wine… I think we drank a 1973 Meursault Perrières. It was extraordinary. That meal is one of my abiding memories and what I now aspire to. The signature dish at my restaurant in Padstow [in Cornwall, England] is turbot with hollandaise sauce cooked exactly the same way.
Filming in India about six years ago, we had the idea of finding the perfect curry.
In the Punjab, there was a wonderful lamb curry and a marvellous example of what Australians would call butter chicken. So many times we’d think, “This is it!” Then we found ourselves on a beach called Mahabalipuram in Tamil Nadu. There was a row of shacks, right on the sand, where the fishermen ate. We walked into the Sea Shore Garden Beach restaurant and I said, “You wouldn’t have a fish curry, would you?” The guy took me into the kitchen where he had lobsters, prawns, a kingfish, a pomfret and snapper. The spicing was so simple: green chillies, turmeric, coriander seeds, curry leaves, tomatoes and tamarind. He cooked it over a wood fire. When I eat something that good, I get so excited that I think I irritate people. It was mind-blowing. We ended up filming there and since then that guy has done really well – he’s now opened a little hotel.
Every summer when I was growing up, my family decamped to Cornwall. My dad had a share in a lobster fishing boat so we had shellfish all the time – not everybody had to live on terrible British cooking. My parents had a friend who was a composer and piano player called Tony and his wife, Collette, was French. One day in the late 1950s my dad and I caught some fish off the rocks – mostly pollock and wrasse – and Collette made a bouillabaisse out of it – a proper one with olive oil, garlic, onions, tomatoes, fennel and saffron. I had never tasted anything like it; nobody in Britain made fish stews. But where did she get the ingredients? Where did she get tomatoes of that quality? In the ’50s and ’60s you could only buy olive oil from a chemist for putting in your ears so it remains a mystery. When you’re coming up with recipes, you’re often trying to recreate the memory of something you tasted for the first time. It was a particularly sunny summer and I got a taste for French cooking that has never left me.