Rick Stein didn’t follow the usual route to becoming a top Chef, but with a defunct nightclub on his hands he reopened it as a restaurant, his first foothold in Padstow. Good fortune followed when he was spotted in a Keith Floyd TV programme where he had a slot as guest chef – the rest, they say, is history. Many successful series later, many Padstow properties later he is now able to tell his story from a childhood overshadowed by his Father’s bipolar disorder, the education failures and the flight to Australia through to the success he has worked so hard for.
'All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.' Rick Stein's childhood in 1950s rural Oxfordshire and North Cornwall was idyllic. His parents were charming and gregarious, their five children much-loved and given freedom typical of the time. As he grew older, the holidays were filled with loud and lively parties in his parents' Cornish barn. But ever-present was the unpredicatible mood of his bipolar father, with Rick frequently the focus of his anger and sadness. When Rick was 18 his father killed himself. Emotionally adrift, Rick left for Australia, carrying a suitcase stamped with his father's initials. Manual labour in the outback followed by adventures in America and Mexico toughened up the naive public schoolboy, but at heart he was still lost and unsure what to do with his life. Eventually, Cornwall called him home. From the entrepreneurial days of his mobile disco, the Purple Tiger, to his first, unlikely unlikely nightclub where much of the time was spent breaking up drink-fuelled fights, Rick charts his personal journey in a way that is both wry and perceptive; engaging and witty.
Rick Stein OBE is one of Britain’s favourite cookery writers and chefs. In 2004 he was named the BBC Food Personality of the Year at the BBC Radio Food and Farming Awards for his Food Heroes television series. His other tv programmes include Rick Stein’s Taste of the Sea and Seafood Lovers’ Guide – which won the Television Programme Award at the Glenfiddich Award for Food Book of the Year, and Taste of the Sea, which won both the 1995 André Simon Memorial Fund Food Book Award and the 1996 Good Food Award for Cookery Book of the Year. His most recent seafood book, Rick Stein’s Seafood, won the coveted James Beard Foundation Cookbook of the Year Award in 2005. Rick Stein owns The Seafood Restaurant in Padstow, Cornwall, which every year attracts thousands of fish lovers from Britain and abroad. He also runs the highly acclaimed Padstow Seafood School, two smaller restaurants, St. Petroc’s Bistro and Rick Stein’s Café, a deli and a fish-and-chip takeaway. Rick was awarded his OBE in 2003 for services to tourism. He divides his time between Padstow and Australia, which he regards as his second home.
