So Rick stein, why slap you and wife no
eVERYBODY loves Rick Stein. My mum (‘Such a nice man and that lovely dog Chalky’), the taxi driver who drops me off at Stein’s London publishers (‘Ahhh! Did you see his India show?’), the receptionist (‘Ooh we all adore Rick — he’s our favourite writer’).
And, of course, the 350 people employed in his restaurant and hotel empire in the Cornish town of Padstow (now known locally as Padstein).
Not forgetting all the estate agents who must be coining it in after house prices shot up so high the locals can barely afford to live there any more. Indeed, in person, he’s instantly likeable. Doggy brown eyes, big pink bald head sprouting with a few rogue wiry hairs, crumpled shirt straining over two fat hairy rolls of tummy, and a huge, warm smile.
He looks utterly at home in his own skin — relaxed, happy, content with his lot. The sort of person you’d want to cook with, fish with, eat with and know you’ll have a good twinkly chat and get massively stuck into the red wine.
So it’s a bit of a surprise to hear over the course of the next hour or so that he’s a bit more complex than that.
In fact, he’s full of insecurities, regularly suffers crises of confidence, still has repetitive fear dreams about working in a kitchen and being unable to get the food out to customers and, thanks to a very strained relationship with his late father, has always been desperate to be popular.
‘So I pretend to be nice — I wish I could stop pretending, but I can’t,’ he says. ‘It makes me feel a bit wet. I’m always saying, “Ooh yes, I’ll do that”, “Please let me help”. And inside I’m thinking, what a complete idiot I am. I’m always criticising myself — “You’re too cautious, Rick, you’re an underachiever”.’
A strange description for a man with a food empire worth an estimated £35 million and TV series and bestselling cookery books (19, to be exact) coming out of his ears.
According to his latest project — an utterly riveting and surprisingly moving memoir called Under A Mackerel Sky, to be serialised in the Mail from Monday — Rick’s wobbles all result from his relationship with his father.
Eric Stein, the managing director of a distillery company, suffered from manic depression and, one morning in 1965, suddenly shouted, ‘I said I’d do it!’ and jumped to his death over a Cornish cliff.
‘Something went wrong between me and my dad,’ says Rick. ‘He never hit me and was perfectly nice to me, but he was disengaged from me because of his illness. I always felt I had to compensate somehow to get his attention and I’ve been doing that ever since. It comes from a feeling of inadequacy — not being a strong enough person to get people’s attention.
‘I know it’s not possible, but I just
‘I’ve maybe slept with 15 or 20 people in my life’
want everyone to like me. But it’s not possible because you can’t help do things that p*** people off, so you might as well not bother.’
There’s no doubt he’s annoyed a few people in his time.
For starters, his ex-wife Jill. They were married for 27 years, have three sons and built up the Rick Stein empire together from scratch.
Then in 1997, when he was 50, Rick started an affair with a pretty blonde Australian publicist 20 years his junior called Sarah Burns.
To make things worse, he then dithered. He and Sarah (who was married with two children when they met) rowed, so he returned to Jill, begging to be taken back. She refused and he went back to Sarah. They married two years ago.
‘Sarah’s brilliant — she’s so bossy, she’s really fierce, but I like that. She takes me in hand.’
Meanwhile, and perhaps surpris- ingly, he and Jill continued to run the family business together.
‘We’d both put so much effort into building up the business that it was just too important to us not to.’
But, in 2008, it all got a bit too much for Jill and, in front of a restaurant full of customers, she slapped first Sarah and then Rick around the face.
‘I certainly would have preferred if that hadn’t happened, I can tell you,’ he says, going a bit pink. ‘I remember at the time saying to Jill: “That was a very silly thing to do.” But emotions were very high. It was bloody tough. It was horrid.
‘But, thank goodness, time moves on. Twice now, both Sarah and Jill have been in the same restaurant at the same time and it’s been fine and nobody’s been slapped!’
Despite all his Cornish connections, Rick actually grew up in Oxfordshire, but holidayed in Cornwall with his extended family.
He was neither academic nor focused and, despite a very expensive educa-
‘Emotions were very high. It was bloody tough’
tion at Uppingham boarding school, left early with next to no qualifications.
His first job was a street sweeper in London (he lasted two weeks) and later, briefly, he worked as a junior chef at The Great Western Royal Hotel in Paddington as part of a management-training scheme.
Already lacking in confidence, his father’s death completely derailed Rick. He ran away. First to Australia, where he worked in an abattoir, on the railways, in a dockyard and chased girls (largely unsuccessfully). Then New Zealand, America, Mexico and finally home.
When he returned, he somehow won a place at New College, Oxford, and spent the next few years drinking, partying, running a mobile disco, scraping a third- class degree in English (one of his tutors was Iris Murdoch’s husband John Bayley), and, again, relentlessly chasing girls.
So does he have hundreds of notches on his bedpost?
‘No! I tried and tried, but I wasn’t very successful. I’ve maybe slept with 15 or 20 people in my life.’
Including a rather embarrassing episode with a prostitute that he dismisses with: ‘It’s all quite innocent when you’re 21, isn’t it?’
Eventually, though, he calmed down, moved in with long-term girlfriend Jill Newstead and the pair went into business together. First they ran a mobile disco called the Purple Tiger. Then they bought a nightclub in Padstow.
‘It was a disaster,’ he says. ‘We had no idea. There were fights every night. There was a terrace and the paving slabs were very absorbent, so it was really difficult to get the blood off.’
Eventually, and inevitably, they lost their licence — despite a last ditch attempt to appear more upstanding by getting married — ‘Our solicitor thought it might help!’
In the end, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The nightclub shut down and they opened a restaurant on the same site, which, after several disastrous incarnations, became the now world famous Seafood Restaurant.
And so began years of horrifically hard work, financial worry and searing tempers. ‘ It was bloody tough, a nightmare — stuck in this tiny, boiling hot kitchen with no back-up and no sleep,’ says Rick.
‘Being a chef is similar to ballet
dancing. It’s so all encompassing, it just becomes your bloody everything. One of my chefs once said: “It’s not a vocation, it’s a disease.” I think it’s an addiction.
‘I was really bad tempered and I’d throw customers out if they irritated me. If anyone was thrown out of one of my restaurants now, I’d go mad. But I probably was a bit mad because I couldn’t cope.’
It didn’t help that Rick was a massive worrier — about everything from money to his sperm count.
So when he and Jill were trying to start a family and nothing was happening, he worried the restaurant microwave was damaging his sperm.
‘I thought it was making me sterile, so I started operating it from a distance with a wooden spoon — and suddenly she was pregnant!
‘And then I worried the children might turn out deformed and stuff. I always need something to worry about.’
For years, he worried he’d inherit his father’s illness.
‘We [Rick and his siblings] were all terrified about becoming manic depressives and then latterly nervous about it coming out in our children — there’s plenty of evidence that it is inherited. If one of my sons goes through a really bad period of being low, I sort of think: “Oh God.” But touch wood ( he gropes desperately round for some wood), not so far.’
Today he’s worried about his weight: ‘I eat terrifically when I’m filming — I just let go. So now I’m really tough on it because otherwise I’d be so bloody fat.’
Back in Padstow, Rick and Jill worked harder and harder and the business went from strength to strength.
The Seafood Restaurant was soon joined by a bistro, a cafe and holiday accommodation. It was all fuelled by Rick’s TV success — he got his first big break on Keith Floyd’s series Floyd On Fish, despite bombing in the screen tests.
‘I was rubbish. I was trying to be something I wasn’t, and then one day I had an appalling hangover, I just let go and became myself and it was all fine.’
Suddenly Rick (together with his constant companion, the late Chalky the dog) was freed from the tyranny of the kitchen and away more and more, filming and promoting. Jill was running their empire at home. Life was brilliant. All their hard work was paying off. And then he met Sarah, and everything changed. Though they were both married, both with children, and living on opposite sides of the world, they began a ten-
‘The second time I saw Sarah, I said I love you’
year on-and-off affair. He risked so much, it must have been love. When he met her, did he just know?
‘Yes, I did! I remember the second time we met, I was all stressed because she was going to go off somewhere else and I said: “Don’t go, because I love you.” It just popped out. Afterwards I kept telling myself, “I didn’t mean that”, but I did.’
Needless to say, he then spent years worrying about whether they should get married.
‘I was always thinking: “Oh God, I f****d up the first marriage, should I really get married again?
‘But it’s fabulous. And she’s great and we’re very happily married. It’s so bleeding obvious we were meant to be together.’
So it’s a shame they still live (mostly) on opposites sides of the world — she with her children in Sydney and he in Padstow overseeing his and Jill’s empire.
‘We spend a lot of time in planes. I’m doing six trips to Oz this year — the jet lag goes on for about five days. And we talk about six times a day and send dozens of text messages every day. But the time difference is a nightmare. It’s a bit silly to fall in love with someone from the other side of the world.
‘I think it’s testament to how smitten I was, because we’ve been through a lot. But when her kids go to uni, she’ll move here.’
In the meantime, isn’t he tempted just to up sticks and move to Oz — it must be a bit lonely stuck here?
‘No, I have to be in Padstow every month — it’s too personal between me and the staff.’
And he and Jill — do they really work well together? ‘It’s all right. Obviously we have our moments, but we get on fine about the business. She’s a bit firmer than she
used to be, so now if she thinks I’ve been stupid, she’ll just say. And if a decision really has to be made, we just concentrate on it.
‘Of course it bothers Sarah. She doesn’t like it — husband still dealing with first wife: who would? But she’s great. She could be very, very difficult about it.’
Goodness, what a pair of very understanding women.
Meanwhile, at the age of 66, Rick has no plans to slow down. ‘As Dylan Thomas said, “Do not go gentle into that good night . . .” I’m not the sort to retire quietly.’
So he’s looking at ideas for a new TV series, planning a children’s book (which he’ll cowrite with Sarah) and dealing with the occasionally downside of fame.
‘Sometimes you don’t feel like being nice to people when they come up to you and say: “Ooh, you’re Rick Stein!” But mostly they just ask: “Where’s Chalky, where’s Chalky the dog?” And I break it very gently to them that he’s been dead since 2007.’ Oh dear. Rick Stein is quite a mixture. He’s funny, enthusiastic, open, neurotic, a terrible worrier and in many ways has behaved like a prize cad. But his wish has come true because, try as you might, it is also absolutely impossible not to like him.
Because it turns out he’s exactly the sort of person you’d want to cook with, fish with, eat with, chat with and get massively stuck into the red wine.