by Rick Stein
Delicate mother Kangaroo
Sitting up there rabbit-wise, but huge, plump-weighted,
And lifting her beautiful slender face, oh! So much more
Gently and finely lined than a rabbit’s, or than a hare’s,
Lifting her face to nibble at a round white peppermint drop
Which she loves, sensitive mother Kangaroo.
Her sensitive, long, pure-bred face.
Her full antipodal eyes, so dark,
So big and quiet and remote, having watched so many
Empty dawns in silent Australia.
Not unnaturally, with native game on the menu, conversation turned to anecdotes of eating wallabies, goannas, crocodiles and emus. Jan Power told about going to a very serious aboriginal meeting in the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. Lunch was a piece of burnt meat of indeterminate origin. She asked the chief what it was and was told echidna. ‘That’s interesting,’ she said. ‘I haven’t eaten echidna before. Where did you catch it?’
‘I scraped it off the road this morning; it hadn’t been dead more than a couple of hours.’
It was one of those evenings when the awfulness of the food only served to improve the spikiness of the conversation. Not only was Jan Power full of robust humour but Peter Dillon was the sort of priest you dream of meeting but so rarely do, in other words, religious but with a sense of humour, very widely read, nicely dressed conservatively (herringbone jacket, English-university professor look), the sort of person you would trust to help you through a difficult time. Sas, I had discovered within the first half-hour of meeting her, was a Catholic. I suddenly wanted to be one too.
The second of our restaurants was called E’cco which means ‘here it is’ in Italian. It was one of those perfect restaurant evenings which occur only occasionally. One of the other judges was a cookery writer called Jacki Passmore. It helped that I had already got one of her books on Thai cooking and admired her recipes. I ordered a wine called MadFish Premium White. On the label it had an aboriginal painting of a turtle with fish swimming around it. The wine was a blend of Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc. It seemed to sum up everything I was enjoying about Australia. The first course was some soft white crab meat with parsley, tomato and linguine pasta with a little olive oil and chilli. I took both this dish and the MadFish back to Padstow. Crab linguine has become common everywhere now, but it’s too often overcooked and over-handled, with too much stuff added. I make it by carefully warming some olive oil and gently sweating a little chopped garlic, then adding skinned, deseeded and chopped tomatoes, a pinch of chilli, salt, pepper and parsley. Then I very carefully fold in crab meat so as not to break it up and heat it only enough just to warm the crab through. I pile the sauce on to just-cooked linguine. The cooking of Philip Johnson, the chef at E’cco, was like that, an instinctive understanding of the innate simplicity of Italian cooking.
I had no means of knowing that night that E’cco would be my choice of the best restaurant in Australia – there were so many more to visit in Perth, Adelaide, Hobart, Melbourne and Sydney – but one of the things that was clear to me was that it was a restaurant in balance with the capabilities of its staff and also serving the food that its customers wanted to eat. The Australians have a love of Italian food. Certainly the climate is more like Italy than the ‘old country’ and I think they sense that Italian cuisine is more appropriate. Philip had worked in London as well as Australia and, like me, has a joy in finding great raw materials and cooking them simply.
In Fraser’s restaurant in Perth, I was introduced to the delight of pearl meat. This is the muscle that opens and closes the plate-sized shells of the pearl oyster. I always scrape out and eat the same meat on our own oysters but it’s only tiny. With these it’s about the size of a scallop; it’s tough, like abalone, but if it’s thinly sliced and seared, marinated with lime juice or braised slowly, it is of a similar taste and quality. But memories of Perth are more tied up with Sas than eating the excellent food at Fraser’s.
We flew in from Brisbane, arriving in the early afternoon, and she rang my room in the Hyatt and asked me if I’d like to go to Cottesloe Beach. For her, it was mid-winter, so she was rather surprised that I wanted to swim. The water temperature was about 18 degrees, warm by my standards. I swam for over an hour and when I got back to where she was lying reading in the sun in a yellow swimming costume, she was actually a bit worried about me. I learnt later she’d been on the phone to one of her friends saying I was a bit of an idiot. I’d gone swimming a long way out in ‘shark city’.
As I walked up to her, I took in long tanned legs. I wasn’t yet interested in her physically. She was tall and blonde. I was a bit intimidated because she wore glamorous clothes. She also wore glasses which added to the somewhat icy demeanour she seemed to have. But talking to her was easy and delightful. She had a sense of humour and knew lots of chefs. The year before she had travelled with Robert Carrier and had got on well with him. He called her Duchess and she used to go to his room and read with him. I was slightly in awe of someone who could behave so naturally with someone so famous in my world.
When I came back from my swim she ticked me off about swimming out so far.
‘It’s a dangerous beach for sharks.’
‘Nice of you to tell me now,’ I said.
We moved to a pub on the beach called The Cottesloe Hotel which was filled with surfers and the sort of people you would find in a Newquay pub; the Australians call them bogans. She seemed a bit embarrassed that the main pub on such an iconic beach was filled with very ordinary people. I said it was absolutely what I liked and I had two schooners of Swan lager to celebrate. Later we went into Freemantle to see a mutual friend, Ian Parmenter, an English TV producer who had made a name for himself in front of the camera with a long-running Australian television show called Consuming Passions. That night we ate at the Indiana Tea House back at Cottesloe Beach. I found myself telling Sas much more about my life. Possibly a bit too much.
The next day was a Sunday and a trip to Rottnest Island had been organised with a local wine writer called Peter Forrestal. I first met Peter on the jetty going out to the boat. He seemed to be carrying an inordinate amount of wine and provisions for what I gathered were only seven of us going on the boat for one night – two cases of wine and a couple of insulated Eskys of food and wine plus some other boxes with more food – all this fetching and carrying along the rocking planks accompanied by his beagle, Munch. Peter was short and square and was looking after the provisions with seriousness. He reminded me of Badger in The Wind in the Willows. I took to him immediately and we’ve been friends ever since. He had left a message via Sas to ask if there was anything I would like to be taken on board to cook that evening, and I suggested squid. At the time I was keen on stir frying squid in olive oil with a touch of garlic, chilli and roasted red peppers, so I cooked that. Everyone seemed to enjoy it. Peter cooked some abalone and Mike, the boat owner, did some steaks and a couple of large salads. Peter had brought some wines from Margaret River, a Pierrot Chardonnay as well as some more Chardonnay from the 1995 Art Series from Leeuwin Estate. There was also some Sauvignon Semillon from his friend Vanya Cullen at Cullen’s Winery and a bottle of old Moss Wood Cabernet from another friend, plus some vintage Bollinger for Sas, who drank only champagne.
We motored over to Rottnest, dropped anchor and ate and drank late into the night. All that evening I was conscious of Sas not talking to me. I felt I was being ignored. It seemed something had changed from the night before when perhaps too much had been said. I felt that somehow I had crossed a line of propriety.
The next morning we awoke in Rottnest Harbour to discover that Princess Diana had died. I wonder if there is a special kinship between you and the people you are with when some dreadful news is announced. I remembered the same sort of slice of time and place with the assassination of Kennedy; I’d just arrived to play a rugby match at Sedbergh School in Cumbria. This time I was sitting in the stern of a boat in bri
ght sunshine feeling slightly anxious about Sas.
The next day, back in Perth, she was back to her normal abrupt breeziness. We flew to Adelaide and ate a test dinner at a restaurant in the Hilton Hotel called the Grange where a Malaysian-Chinese chef called Chiung Liew was cooking a fusion of Malaysian and European flavours.
We talked and talked, first in the restaurant and then in the hotel bar. The night at the Indiana Tea Rooms in Perth was being repeated but this time with a fatal sense of concentration on everything she said, the sparkle in her blue eyes and every movement of her body. It was like the space ship at the beginning of 2001, A Space Odyssey, locked into the gravitational pull of the giant circular space station, gradually assuming the rotation of the wheel in space and being guided, inexorably, into its heart.
The next morning we went for lunch in McLaren Vale, a wine-growing region just outside Adelaide. I was feeling a mixture of dread and elation. I had crossed a border into another land.
Looking from the terrace of the Veranda Restaurant at d’Arenberg Winery, down the valley to the rows of budding vines and the low hills behind in the early spring sun, and feeling so utterly filled with the knowledge that, for better or worse, nothing would ever be the same again …
Whenever I feel depressed about how much trouble and pain I’ve caused, I go back there in my mind and I’m filled with such a sense of the acute clarity of that morning, that it’s no longer a question of right and wrong. It had to be.
There was something about Sas that I couldn’t forget. Her cheerful Aussie directness, her way of summing things up in a few witty words, her love of books, her enthusiasm for life. I met her father, Tony, who was over from Sumatra for his first visit to Sydney in 15 years. Like his daughter, it was almost as if I’d known him all my life. I’ve often told her that meeting him sealed it for me. It felt almost like I’d come home. It was too much to wrap up as a bit of ‘what-goes-on-tour-stays-on-tour’.
Before long I was talking David into another TV series with the BBC. Why not a seafood odyssey? Why not visit all the places I’d been before? In the back of my mind, I knew I’d make a big part of the new series in Australia. And so it turned out. Sas visited England before we started filming, and the next time I saw her was in Noosa, where of course I’d got her the job of fixer on the Australian leg of our film. I kept ringing her from Goa, when we filmed there, and then from a resort hotel in Hua Hin in Thailand, where I realised I was in love with her. For the next four years, I tried to see her whenever I could, but at one stage we were apart for two years. All the time, I was desperately inventing reasons to fly to Australia. Tours, food festivals … I accepted them all, grasping at every opportunity. Nobody guessed. I hid it from everyone.
In 2002 I moved out of the family house in Trevone. It was the year I made Food Heroes and the series shows me setting out in the Land Rover with Chalky from a bungalow overlooking the Camel river. The same year, Edward married his girlfriend Kate. I went to the wedding feeling like an outcast. Yet it was enchanting. Edward and his friends made extraordinary speeches and his best man, Russell, wrote a touching poem which he read out loud instead of giving a speech.
Jill and I divorced in 2007. We still run the business together and she now has a successful interior design business as well.
My long-distance love between England and Australia has been hard. Sas can’t yet move permanently to England because her children are at school in Australia. We flit from one side of the world to the other like time-travellers. But we have a rule that we must never be apart for more than four weeks. I feel – and so does Sas – that it is worth every single air mile.
In Cornwall, I don’t go out much and miss Sas dreadfully. The best part of the week is going to The Cornish Arms for two pints with Johnny Walter, my brother-in-law Chris, and a couple of old friends, Chris Rowe and Hugo Woolley. We go for just an hour and each of us drinks two pints, except for Chris who prefers gin and tonic and Hugo who always has Famous Grouse with water from his own Famous Grouse jug which is behind the bar. We are as boring as men who have known each other for ever can be, and I love it. I think it partly alleviates the restlessness of living half in Australia and half in Cornwall. I guess with me, I don’t want to go gentle into that good night.
There was criticism about my choice when I finally announced in Sydney who had won the Australian Gourmet Traveller accolade. By then I’d been to most of the great and good restaurants of the time in Australia, and had especially enjoyed the Rockpool in Sydney and Jacques Reymond in Melbourne. But I stuck to the brief, which was to reward the restaurant that was greater than the sum of its parts and, as such, a contribution to human happiness. It was a hard choice because Australian restaurants are very good, and it’s difficult when you’re eating delicious food night after night to stay objective, but in the end it’s your choice. I’m pleased to note that Philip Johnson has gone on to keep the faith with his restaurant E’cco: he hasn’t expanded. Sure, he runs a cookery school now as well as the restaurant, but he’s still in Brisbane cooking lovely food.
I’m still in Padstow – dividing my time between Australia and Cornwall. I don’t cook as much as I used to but I still dream up recipes for all my restaurants and all my cookery books. I pass my ideas on to my son Jack who runs our development kitchen where he tests recipes, checks on existing dishes for consistency and works out how best to cook everything for large numbers. He’s becoming increasingly good, too, at copying his old man and doing television which makes me very proud. Jack’s never lost for words.
Charles is working in London for a wine company called The Vintner which suddenly seems to be getting more and more of our business. We’ve got the three restaurants in Padstow and two fish and chip shops, one in Padstow and one in Falmouth, and now we own my beloved old pub, the Cornish Arms in St Merryn.
Apart from missing Sas, what journalists call Padstein is a source of great satisfaction to me. I live in a cottage just up the hill from all the restaurants, so I can walk into all the kitchens in a couple of minutes. I work with our executive chef, David Sharland, and the head chefs, Stephane Delorme at The Seafood, Paul Harwood at St Petroc’s Bistro and Luke Taylor at the Cornish Arms. Today we employ 290 people all the year round, and up to 400 in the summer months. Over the years, my sons, nephews and nieces have all done time in the business. Edward and Jack must have been about 14 when I had them washing dishes – an early and brutal reminder of the realities of restaurant work. My brother John’s wife Clare – who will always have a place in my heart because she was so welcoming to Sas – sent her daughter Kate to learn the ropes at St Petroc’s. Kate is a doctor now. William and Polly, John’s two older children from his marriage to Fanny, are now respectively high up in BT and a teacher in Oxford, but they also put in their hours. Molly, Henrietta’s daughter, was once a waitress at The Seafood; she’s now an actress. Julius, son of my sister Janey and Shaun, used to work with me in the kitchen at The Seafood – and I still feel bad about how tough I was on him all those years ago. Now he’s Judge Jules, the famous DJ. His brother Samuel was a very popular presence in The Seafood; he now has a pub in London. In fact the restaurant was a focal point for my family in the early days. My mother, naturally, was a tireless supporter but I always used to feel a little sorry for her when she came with the children, my nieces and nephews including William and Polly, Julius and Samuel and my brother Jeremy and his wife Jenny’s children, Anthony and Frances, because she was always on tenterhooks that they wouldn’t behave or that something would go wrong; she never seemed to be able to enjoy it as much as I’d wanted. But they all did behave and loved it, still do. Henrietta’s daughter Rosie – grown up and a psychologist now – will still stop to tell me how much those visits to The Seafood Restaurant meant to her.
Lucy – Clare and John’s other daughter, now an artist – gave me one of her paintings, which depicts Lucy herself in a bikini trying to stop a cod escaping over the harbour wall. She said it was inspired by the Padstow
of her childhood and her memories of The Seafood Restaurant.
And now I’ve got Sas. Sas is sunny and Aussie. She doesn’t see the world, like me, a bit gloomily. Her friends get ill and die just like everyone else’s but she mourns for them and gets over it and remembers them with great love. I used to feel ten years younger when I got off that plane in Sydney, now it’s 20 years younger.
Ever since the days of the search for the best restaurant in Australia I’ve been aware that Sas has a much brisker and more efficient attitude to business matters than me. At that time, after an early radio interview in Adelaide, I came out of the studio thinking I’d been marvellous and said to her,
‘How was I?’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll tell you if you’re terrible.’
So we’ve taken on a restaurant together on the south coast of New South Wales at Mollymook called Rick Stein at Bannisters. Our business partner, Peter Cosgrove, owns Bannisters Hotel which is right on the sea. I look after the food, and Sas looks after promoting it and keeping a friendly eye on everything when I’m away. Mollymook is like Padstow. They are both holiday places where the same families come back year after year and the seafood is good. I found an enthusiastic fish merchant called Lucky in Ulladulla, which is the town with a fishing harbour next door to Mollymook. I cooked fish for Sas and her family every year, learning what was local and excellent. For me, cooking with snapper, kingfish, tuna, blue-eye trevally and leatherjacket was a fascinating change from cod, monkfish and turbot. The local estuary prawns, the squid which they call calamari, abalone and oysters were for me, as Sas says, like being a kid in a lolly shop. I found a supply of sea urchins and a local lobster fisherman called Chiller, so named because he keeps his lobsters in chilled sea water in tanks in his garage. The menu I devised for Mollymook is very similar to Padstow’s. Same dishes, different fishes.
