by Rick Stein
Every year we ploughed most of our profit into improving the rooms and we installed proper sewage pipes just before an Easter opening for yet another season. We then quickly discovered water dripping through the new recessed low-voltage lights in the restaurant ceiling on to the starched white tablecloths below. I panicked. I thought it was our new wide-bore sewage pipes. I knocked on the doors of all the rooms above and discovered the source of the leak in bedroom 5. The guests had gone out for a walk. The bath was empty but the bathroom floor was still damp, and soaking wet towels everywhere. We assumed they had left the taps running and then done an inadequate mopping-up operation. Meeting them again some years later, they admitted they’d overfilled the bath, then become far too excited with each other in it and, though they knew water was slopping all over the floor, they hadn’t been able to stop.
Ah, the life of an innkeeper! The stuff that some people take – towels of course, and sheets sometimes, and pillows – but also the things they leave behind … Letting out rooms, however, is much more profitable than restaurants. Once the building, decoration and fittings are paid for, the main expenses are loo paper, soap, breakfast, bed-making, cleaning and service. For about 15 years we were able to buy cheap properties to convert into rooms.
St Petroc’s had been built in the sixteenth century by a friend of Sir Walter Raleigh. It had been added to over the centuries and, by the time I came to look at it in the early eighties, it was a substantial house, with about seven bedrooms, but it had been a semi-derelict doss house for a long time. I looked over it with the owner George Mott, and was fascinated by its history and faded splendour. It had a ballroom on the first floor with a vaulted ceiling and a fireplace with arabesque vine scrolls in the Adams style. But I was overwhelmed by the atmosphere of decay that prevailed. Mushrooms, moss and ferns everywhere, the depressing smell of damp, an acrid odour of coal fires and bodies, and pathetic attempts here and there by the residents to bring a little humanity around their sleeping bags or stained mattresses with a splash of paint or a photo torn out of a magazine. George offered it to me for £25,000, but even my willingness to have a go was daunted by the size of the job. I said no. Some years later a man called John Shaw, who had made some money working on oil rigs, did it up. It was 1988, the country was in recession and he wanted £230,000 for it. Our accountant and bank manager tried to persuade me not to buy it, but all I could see by then was a growing demand for our rooms.
It’s pure nostalgia to remember that bank managers were once local people with offices in small towns like Wadebridge and green leather-topped desks with matching blotting paper holders, blotters and pen holders in pale blue. Ours was called Mr Sharp. He looked a bit like Martin Sheen and he is my hero. He enabled us to buy St Petroc’s out of our turnover at the height of that season and he extended our winter overdraft.
St Petroc’s has been the conservative heart of our business ever since. The Seafood Restaurant, though now really smart, was always just a rather ugly converted granary. St Petroc’s was a lovely Elizabethan house and, as we improved it, it became our own comfortable hotel in the heart of Padstow. Even though we had two restaurants by then, The Seafood and the cafe, I couldn’t resist reopening the hotel restaurant. We served breakfasts there anyway, but I decided to establish a little bistro serving simple French food like gigot of lamb and steak frites. I reasoned that if I could give the hotel restaurant a meat inclination it wouldn’t compete with The Seafood menu. The first summer we opened it, 1989, I cooked there two or three times a week, leaving the new sous chef who I’d just taken on at The Seafood, Paul Ripley, to hold the fort down the road. I remember walking down St Edmunds Lane from St Petroc’s to The Seafood one summer evening and feeling rather entrepreneurial at having two restaurants within walking distance of each other and thinking that one day I might own all one side of the lane because I’d just bought the old garage on the same side for car parking for the hotel. It almost turned out like that. Puffin House, just behind the restaurant, became more rooms. Then in 2001 we bought St Edmund’s House, the only other large house in the lane, and turned that into four large rooms. By then we owned all the lane except for the last house on the corner across from St Petroc’s which I turned down recently because property prices have become too steep to justify buying large houses to turn into rooms. Indeed by the time we bought a little house further up the hill out of Padstow called Bryn Cottage, in 2008, it was becoming impossible to do any more. I think the expression is ‘hoisted by my own petard’. Not that we hadn’t done well with our accommodation. Earlier, we had turned the rooms above the cafe into what we called bed and breakfast rooms, still with their own bathrooms but smaller and therefore cheaper. We’d bought the house next door to St Petroc’s, St Decamon’s, which had been part of the original Elizabethan house, and converted it into four rooms looking out over either the estuary or the prettiest part of Padstow.
By then, 2008, I had made seven TV series and written nine books, and had generated more than enough publicity for Padstow. So much so, that a journalist had dubbed it ‘Padstein’, a name which stuck. I was embarrassed by it but slightly chuffed too. Many of the locals, that is the Padstonians who have lived there for generations, regard the effect of our business on the town as a good thing because we bring employment – but not all. No, by no means all. We were met by a barrage of complaints when we put in planning permission for Prospect House in 2005. There was lots of opposition from residents nearby. It was a difficult location off a narrow street bordered almost exclusively by holiday accommodation. The owner of one such holiday home had set his heart on buying Prospect House and when we outbid him we’d made an enemy. What irritated me was that none of the owners of these houses was local: most had recently bought properties to let out, cashing in, I reckoned, on the prosperity brought to Padstow by our popularity, so we were being opposed by people whose reason for being there was us. But this was a dangerous attitude to take, as I learned to my cost.
Prospect House was behind St Petroc’s. Eventually we demolished it and built a brand-new house in its place. The complaints mounted: mud on the road from the demolition, road closures while the drains were laid. We received letters demanding compensation for lost business in March and April. I felt indignant. ‘If we hadn’t been there,’ I argued to our general manager Rupert Wilson, ‘they wouldn’t be attracting any business in March.’ He agreed but advised a diplomatic response.
Like a fool, I wrote an email to one of the outraged holiday home owners saying, in effect, give us a break, it’s only a modest house. I concluded by pointing out that we were all benefitting from the ‘rosy glow of publicity’ which me being on television had brought to Padstow.
He promptly sent my email to the local paper, the Cornish Guardian, which published it the following day. The next thing, I was the villain of the piece. National newspapers picked up the story but worse was to come. I had apparently alienated the ‘Cornish Liberation Army’ which at the time was keen to get all non-Cornish entrepreneurs out of the county, notably me and Jamie Oliver who has a restaurant at Watergate Bay near Newquay. I received a letter informing me that the ‘rosy glow’ they’d seen in my email in the paper would shortly be my restaurant burning down.
Someone smashed every window in the front of the restaurant in the middle of the night. We had the glass replaced by 8.30 a.m. and, miraculously, avoided the rosy glow of publicity.
All this led me to rue the day I ever got cross with those holiday home owners. It’s part of the price you have to pay for being well known. But also, I admit, the price of hubris.
When I was first a success on TV and people started recognising me in the street it made me feel claustrophobic. It’s a shock, losing your anonymity. But I wouldn’t say it’s all negative. We all like to be noticed, it’s one way we cope with our essential isolation. But realising that you have to respond in some sort of official way to people greeting you is unnerving.
I was tipping kitchen waste into the
large wheelie bin outside the kitchen door.
‘You’re Rick Stein, aren’t you?’
‘Look, I’m emptying the rubbish,’ I said, straining to get a bag full of fish guts over the edge.
‘I’m so sorry,’ the man said. ‘I love your programme.’
‘Yeah, OK, but can’t you see I’m busy?’
‘Sorry,’ he said again. His body language was crestfallen as he walked away and I felt awful.
I made a resolution to be good-humoured with anyone who spoke to me. I saw it as self-protection. If I didn’t react nicely I would come off worse then or later, because I would feel bad about it. Why should I care? Some people don’t. It’s something that slightly irritates me about myself: I still like to be liked. I can’t bear people thinking ill of me. There is a practical advantage though; a smile and a ‘nice to meet you’ keeps the conversation short. Neither you nor the person who has greeted you really wants to prolong the exchange. It’s not what recognising celebrities is about. What is it about? I think it’s a wish in people, myself included, to make contact with someone we perceive to be somehow not subject to the normal human frailties, doubts and uncertainties. We like to invest our royalty, prime ministers, film stars and even cooks with an aura of stardust.
I was looking for videos in a Woolworths in Lymington, Hampshire. A woman came to me and said, ‘It’s you. Isn’t it Rick Stein?’
‘Yes, it is,’ I said, smiling.
‘I can’t believe you come shopping in Woolworths like ordinary people.’
I’m human. I like to be praised; it’s pleasing when someone says they like my work. And when viewers say they don’t like me, I try to avoid getting angry or at least showing I’m angry.
III
My first TV series Taste of the Sea (1995) was about my life as a cook in Padstow. It’s nostalgic watching it now, particularly the scene on Bodmin Moor when I’m salmon fishing. My very young son Charles is with us and he’s so bored, saying, ‘How much longer, Dad?’ to which I reply, ‘Two hours,’ and he says, ‘Two hours! That’s 120 minutes!’ He preferred Harlyn Beach. Framed on the wall in my house I’ve still got a postcard he wrote in a wobbly childish hand saying ‘Dad I always want to go to Harlyn’.
David Pritchard and I followed Taste of the Sea with Fruits of the Sea (1997) which was essentially the same thing with some travel thrown in. Next we made The Seafood Lover’s Guide to Britain and Ireland. At the time, David and I were becoming increasingly worried about overfishing. We’d both read Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky which told the story of the collapse of the cod fishery off Newfoundland. We had the apparently difficult task of drawing people’s attention to declining fish stocks while at the same time rhapsodising about the great seafood off our coasts. I saw no dilemma in this because as I said in the introduction:
The more we love seafood and the more we know about it the greater will be our diligence in preserving it and the more we will prefer to eat it ourselves rather than see it trucked overland to the fish markets of Spain and France. There is no reason why fish conservation shouldn’t work, I just have this nagging doubt that it won’t if we don’t care enough.
I’ve made all my cookery programmes for the BBC. The production company has always been Denham Productions, owned by Chris Denham, and the director has always been my friend, David Pritchard, who also writes a lot of the voice-overs. The creativity of the programmes comes only partly from me. Most of it comes from David and the cameraman, Chris Topliss, who can get a better picture out of a mobile phone than most of us could manage with the best camera in the world. The rest too, Pete Underwood, the sound recordist, and Arezoo Farahzad, who keeps everything going when we’re filming and who’s known as Our Mum, create a specially optimistic and convivial working atmosphere. None of the shows would have the impact they do without Malcolm Ironton, who composes the slightly yearning music, or indeed the film editor, Chris Waring.
The ideas are worked out by David and me, either in a pub or in a restaurant. The London Inn in Padstow, The Seafood Restaurant in Padstow, The Miners Arms in Hemerdon just outside Plymouth – that was a good one, it was David’s local. We’d go there and meet Chris Denham and Billy Edwards who lived at the back of the car park and installed sound systems, and Anthony who was a local auctioneer, and David and Linda Honey, the landlord and landlady, would be behind the bar pouring the Bass. We’d talk about, well nothing to do with making TV programmes. Chris might be praising the quality of the draught Bass, and we’d possibly exchange a few thoughts about the very pretty wife of the local used-car dealer standing at the other end of the bar. Someone might be trying to interest me in flooring for one of my restaurants. Billy would be telling me about a song he’d written about Chalky, my dog, and David would say he had bought a smart motor cruiser.
‘You once said the best part of owning a boat was the day you bought it and the day you sold it.’
‘Yes, but this one is different. It’s got a lovely cabin and the deck’s really shiny.’
‘So where’ve you been in it?’
‘Well, I’ve been out to the Plymouth Sound breakwater and back, and last Sunday I tried following the Roscoff ferry out to sea but I couldn’t keep up. But I did go all the way to Salcombe.’
‘I love Salcombe. Stayed there once at the St Elmo Hotel with a friend from school and knocked a girl over in the laundry by mistake. Saw her knickers. Early sexual awakening.’
‘I’ve been reading this little book about a yachtsman who brings his boat back from Majorca to England across France by canals. He starts at Marseille, and did you know you could get all the way to Bordeaux?’
‘No, I didn’t. That’s quite interesting.’
‘Well, I was thinking. If we did a journey going the other way, I could use my boat and get the BBC to pay some expenses. We could pretend you were on it on your own going to vineyards and fois gras farms.’
‘With Chalky?’
‘With Chalky, of course. One man and his dog on the Canal du Midi.’
‘That sounds OK. Another pint?’
That was the sum of discussing Rick Stein’s French Odyssey. We didn’t need to say any more. Once we’ve got an idea it grows.
In those days we went to Bristol to see the commissioning editor, Tom Archer, and sat down to lunch with him at a restaurant called the Quartier Vert. In line with its French bistro appeal, it had thick white paper tablecloths and, long ago, we could smoke and we did. I was going through a last love affair with Gauloises. Tom then went back to the office and David drew a map of France on the tablecloth and started sketching pictures of vineyards, prune farms, cheese-makers and cherry orchards with some enthusiastic additions from me. By the end of lunch, complete with a couple of cigarette burns and a Beaujolais stain or two, we had the series sketched out. We got hold of a large envelope, folded up the entire tablecloth, slipped it in, addressed it to Tom Archer and dropped it off.
Within a couple of days we got his answer: he’d talked to the powers that be and it was agreed but could we just do a page of A4 for formality’s sake.
These days we have to plan everything and write what they call ‘the treatment’. Then David has to plot a detailed account of each programme which can run to about 30 pages.
What we really liked to do was to follow our noses, because it gave the programmes a true spontaneity and, I think, engaged the viewers in feeling the same excitement as we did when we found ourselves, say, in Galicia facing a large platter with half a steaming pig’s head with glistening teeth, a curly tail and a backbone, all long simmered, plus a big bowl of grelos, turnip greens cooked even longer than the cabbage I remembered from my prep school. Filming, for me, has been like going on holidays with Denham’s tours. I guess it’s mostly because David and I have a good creative relationship.
It’s a world of its own. Sarah Burns calls it Filmingland. Filmingland is the sort of place, I suspect, where lots of people would like to be, where life is si
mple, or so they like to imagine. All we have to do is go out and find a nice programme and bring it to screens in people’s houses. We don’t have to worry about our real families or real businesses back home. We just have to get up, have breakfast, go out filming all day, come back tired to the hotel, have a few beers, eat dinner, then go to bed and fall into a trouble-free sleep, get up and do it all over again. The reality is, of course, tougher and greyer, and I find it hard work but it’s never boring. Mostly I suspect because David is so thoroughly entertaining, whether he’s enjoying himself or not, whether we’re laughing at his unpredictable take on things or outraged by his appalling behaviour – demanding too much and stomping off if he doesn’t get his own way. We’re a Filmingland family.
For me, it’s like when I was a child before my father was ill. We would be driving to Cornwall in our Jag when my dad insisted we stopped to see Wells. On other occasions we were forced to go round Exeter Cathedral or unwillingly to climb up Glastonbury Tor. I even remember, too, a diversion to buy baskets on Sedgemoor in Somerset. Sometimes – a habit which I’ve copied – we’d stop in the car while we waited for my dad to have a ten-minute nap. My mother would be complaining about the time it was taking to get to Cornwall. Henrietta and I and John, and Rupert the dachshund, would be scrunched up in the back of the car, feeling sick and longing to see the sea. Filmingland is like that to me. It’s frustrating, there are diversions and halts; but it’s a safe place to be and there’s always something wonderful to look forward to.
