by Rick Stein
We closed in early September and realised, even then, that it wasn’t going to reopen next season.
The fish restaurant fared little better. We had taken on a girl who had previously worked at The Blue Lobster. Sally Prosser brought most of their menu with her but the problem was getting people to walk up two flights of stairs to the top floor. It is a general rule in restaurants that people don’t like going upstairs. If the restaurant is on the ground floor you can peer through the windows to see if you like the look of the place and, almost more important, if there’s anyone else in there. Interestingly, basement restaurants are less off-putting, perhaps because once you’re upstairs it’s an embarrassment to turn round and go back down.
It was in 1976 that I decided I would have to do the cooking myself. We couldn’t afford to pay anyone else to do it but, almost more importantly for me personally, I felt I had to pin myself down to something. It’s a source of some embarrassment to me to have to admit that I came into cooking by default, but it’s true. I had a pressing need to do something worthwhile after so much, as the Australians say, ‘stuffing around’. I started cooking the same dishes that Sally had cooked the summer before. A good cook, organised and methodical, she made me keen to have a go. We used to make a fish velouté together by gently cooking flour with melted butter, then adding fish stock. This would be made in a large 24-pint aluminium pan, just as at the Great Western Hotel in my youth, and stored in a gallon ice-cream tub in the fridge. For the service we would take a couple of handfuls of finely chopped shallots and cook them down with white wine, cream and fish stock. When the original volume had reduced by about three-quarters, we would stir some English mustard into the velouté which we had by then warmed up. When a Thermidor was ordered, we grilled a little lobster meat, prawns, scallops and some white fish, added some white crab meat, then poured on the warmed sauce, sprinkled it with grated mature Cheddar, paprika, cayenne pepper and dried breadcrumbs, and browned it under the grill. The white fish was normally monkfish which nobody knew at that time, so there was no point naming it.
In those early days we couldn’t afford the sort of gratin dish I really liked – an oval dish with ‘ears’ at either end. Instead we bought round shallow baking dishes from the cash and carry in St Austell but, as these were normally end-of-line runs, we ended up with a collection of different-shaped dishes and, being much cheaper than the French versions, they broke frequently. I had about five of the fine French porcelain dishes. If there was a large order, the seafood Thermidor would come out in lots of different dishes. I guess it’s testimony to how little the restaurant was regarded that on one occasion the host of a large party from across the water in Rock appeared the next morning and complained vehemently about how I had short-changed them by serving big and small portions at the same price. Unusually for me, and not to be repeated henceforth, I didn’t tell him to eff off but patiently poured water from one bowl to the next to show that indeed the volume was the same. He had written a note on the bill the night before: ‘A bill’s a bill but the cook’s a crook.’
Our menu was short and very simple – baked crab with cheese, which was just a scallop shell filled with lots of white crab meat and a little brown meat heated up under the grill with some melted butter and black pepper, sprinkled with Cheddar and gratinated. There weren’t many other starters. We didn’t even do mussels or oysters, we couldn’t get them. Occasionally, I would find time to gather some mussels myself off the beach at Booby’s Bay or on the lifeboat pillars below Polventon, our old holiday house on Trevose Head, but you couldn’t buy them. There were no fresh scallops and only frozen prawns. We simply grilled whatever fresh fish was available – lemon sole, sea bass, sea trout. We bought in frozen Dover soles from Young’s Seafoods.
There wasn’t much to be said about the first version of The Seafood Restaurant, except that it had a pleasing homely quality, if you respected that sort of thing. If you ordered sea bass or sea trout, the fish was served with local new potatoes, sometimes from my own garden at Redlands. Your salmon came from the Camel Estuary, poached like my mother used to do and served with mayonnaise which I made with olive oil. You could also order a whole cold crab with the same mayonnaise, or a good fish pie. Fresh, local and simple. Many of the customers liked what I was doing.
A couple who owned Marine Villas, a slate-hung house next to the restaurant with interesting curved windows, were regulars that year. Herman Friedhoff was quite a lot older than his wife Polly. He was Dutch and had been a resistance fighter during the war. He was quite happy to talk about it, which I found fascinating. He was always well dressed with lovely manners and a genuine interest in what Johnny and I were doing. Polly was very pretty. They were important to me because they were the sort of customers I craved, and the very fact that they liked the plain grilled sea trout and bass was a terrific confidence booster. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that people like the Friedhoffs kept me going. Johnny and I were certainly not making much money. Jill had taken up running the travelling disco again and had turned Redlands into a guest house. I paid a couple of teenagers, whose parents ran the Tregloss Hotel, to do the discos at St Merryn parish hall. We had very little money.
We kept the restaurant open through the winter of 1976/1977. Most nights nobody came. It was more or less a waste of time but we thought that a little money coming in was better than none. We also ran a disco on the now-unlicensed middle floor for teenagers. I hated the sort of music they liked – ‘Living Next Door to Alice’, lots of Bay City Rollers, The Sweet, Racey and Showaddywaddy. The fact that they also liked Abba helped a bit but mainly I felt I was in purgatory. Most nights we earned about £10. These days I sometimes meet those kids, now in their late forties, who remember those days with enormous affection and I feel mean about it.
The favourite song of Peter Billings, the boy who worked for me upstairs in the restaurant, was ‘Seasons In The Sun’ by Terry Jacks. Billings, as I used to refer to him, worked hard but had the most annoying line in teasing.
‘Rick, you see those lumps in the plaster over there?’
‘Yes, I can see it’s a textured plaster designed to give a rustic finish. I don’t really like it but we’re stuck with it for the time being.’
‘No, it’s not plaster, it’s Thermidor sauce and people have got so bored with it that they’ve thrown it on the walls and it’s dried.’
He was like a young puppy dog, friendly and massively energetic. Whenever he heard ‘Seasons In The Sun’ he went all dewy-eyed.
‘Can’t you see what a pathetic spastic song it is, Billings? It’s got as much sincerity as a crab stick.’
Well, I couldn’t have said that because crab sticks hadn’t been invented then.
I became frustrated with turning up to cook for no one. I realised the only way the restaurant was going to work was if it was on the ground floor, so I suggested to Johnny that we split up – he take over the top two floors and turn them into flats and I take over the now-closed club and try and turn it into a restaurant. We organised a sale of all the club equipment and most of the catering equipment. We got very little for most of it. The purple faux leather club seats did quite well and the abstract fish got 30 quid. Jill’s old employer at the Brentwood Hotel in Treyarnon where she had worked as a girl bought the chargrill from the Great Western Hamburger express for £60. He came back and gave me abuse because two of the elements had burnt out. It was the only time in my life I ever said ‘tough’ to anyone. I still feel bad about it, but just couldn’t give him back his money – there was so little of it.
I moved all the rest of the equipment downstairs – the old blue six-burner cooker, a grill, a fryer, and a fridge and a dishwasher. I took down one of the plasterboard walls at the back of the club and dragged it to the middle and stuck woodchip wallpaper over it to create a division between what I wanted to be a small restaurant and the weird-looking kitchen which was just the old club bar. I didn’t bother with any extraction; just put a big electric fa
n at the bottom of the dumb waiter shaft which I hoped would blow most of the smoke up and away. We made more trips to household sales for more tables, old pictures, lamps and general bric-a-brac for the walls. I bought a catering sink from a second-hand sale held at Wadebridge Cattle Market every spring. I plumbed it in myself, as well as all the gas equipment. We opened just before Easter 1977.
We had spent some time trying to come up with a new name as we felt that The Great Western Fish Restaurant was pretty meaningless now that the club had gone, and ‘fish restaurant’ suggested fish and chips. We wanted ours to be more upmarket. The Blue Lobster was, alas, as good a name as you could get for a seafood restaurant … and my friend Martin suggested The Gay Lobster. The Pickled Prawn. Rick and Jill’s. Whatever we came up with seemed too familiar or ran the risk of becoming outdated too quickly. In the end we chose The Seafood Restaurant out of frustration. At least, I argued, it implied it was THE Seafood Restaurant.
Opening up for a new season is always a time of excitement. Every winter you work out the new things you are going to do – an expansion, a change to the kitchen, a renewal of tables and chairs, new windows, new floors, bigger cookers – there was always something. I can’t these days smell freshly drying oil paint without a sense of spring in Padstow, lighter evenings, a chill wind blowing up the Camel Estuary but a hint of summer days to come. That first opening on the ground floor was no exception. New tables, red-and-white gingham check tablecloths, candles in Verdicchio bottles and the promise of better business downstairs. The summer of 1977 our turnover went up from £9,000 to £20,000. These were still tiny sums but the 120 per cent increase in turnover was enough to tell us that we were on the way. Johnny, meanwhile, had started turning the top two floors into four holiday flats. It was Johnny’s family money which saved us from bankruptcy – not only did he put in twice as much money when we bought the property, he also had sufficient cash left to develop the flats which gave Jill and me the freedom to build up the restaurant. Each year we were able to plough most of our profits into improving it. We never borrowed money to do this, except for arranging an initial overdraft which we could pay back in the summer months. Each season we would open just before Easter and close at the end of September. I would then spend much of the winter working with a local builder, Roger Bennett, on the latest improvement. Within a few years we had a proper kitchen and a restaurant with white cement-rendered walls, white tablecloths and a parquet floor. Jill had found some large old mirrors and we began to put posters on the wall, mostly framed prints – originally things like David Hockney’s ‘Bigger Splash’ – and art exhibition advertisements.
The menu had started to change too. Seafood Thermidor was still the rage but I now had two Garland stoves back-to-back in the centre of what was still a small kitchen and had installed some lobster tanks near the back door. I had also bought a cold room which went in the gap behind the new restaurant wall and the old wall of the building.
I was beginning to get hold of a lot more local fish and shellfish than previously. Mostly, it had to be said, because many of the fishermen who used often to be a problem in the club were supplying me. I got lovely salmon and salmon peel (sea trout from Jim Chown, who had on many occasions been incoherently drunk at the club; never any trouble, but very difficult to understand). He turned out to be a salmon netter of extraordinary skill. Often he would come in with an 18-pound salmon wrapped in a damp towel, complaining about the ‘bastard seal’ that had stalked his every move and slipped into his net as soon as it saw a fish in there. Seals in the Camel Estuary were clever enough to retrieve a salmon and then get out of the net. What really used to irritate him was that if they weren’t hungry they’d kill the salmon just for the hell of it. He often threatened to borrow a gun and shoot the seal, but never did. He was soft-hearted.
The fish were firm, silvery and sleek. I soon developed ways of cooking them, other than just poaching them and serving them with mayonnaise. One method, which I still do, was to cut the fish into steaks, season the steaks with salt and pepper, and fry them gently in butter, turning them over after four minutes, then again after another three. I added half a glass of Muscadet, let it reduce gently, added roughly chopped parsley, and served the fish still quite pink in the middle with a bunch of watercress and some potatoes as recently dug out of the ground as possible. The fishermen sometimes brought in large crayfish which I would split in half and grill. Some of them were really large – six or seven pounds – and I used to reckon on a pound per person. I relied very little on the markets for any fish. Most was off the boats. Everything is regulated these days, but back then you could buy a couple of boxes of mixed fish – cod, monkfish, pollack, all sizes of Dover sole, hake and haddock – off a trawler and pay cash. Generally it was legitimate. Once it wasn’t: a fisherman had stolen a box of fish from the skipper and sold it to me. Next thing I found the skipper mouthing off at me at the back door. I got quite shirty with him saying, ‘It’s not my business to check who’s stealing your fish!’
We’d also get large bags of scallops off the trawlers. In those days it was difficult to find scallops that hadn’t been soaked in water. They were soaked so that they swelled up and then they were frozen, but when you defrosted them the soaking water would leach out and you’d be left with a small scallop minus a lot of the flavour. Because of this we’d have to clean them ourselves, and this was hard work. Serving scallops in the shell, therefore, seemed like a sensible thing to do, so I would just grill them with a lump of parsley butter or garlic butter in each.
We were blessed with lots of very cheap mackerel. A man called Billy would come round every morning with a home-made cart with mackerel he’d got off the daily fishing trip boats. He’d charge 5p each for them. Fred Murt, who had lost a leg in a motorcycle accident when he was a teenager, sold mackerel, too, for the same money. I grilled the mackerel and served it with thin chips and a tomato, onion and thyme salad dressed with wine vinegar and olive oil.
Billings and I parted company when we moved downstairs. I had help from a local farmer’s wife called Frances Partridge, and a boy from Padstow called Patrick Bate. Patrick – distantly related to Richard Bate – is of course a grown man now. I see him from time to time. I remember him as a tall, very thin boy with a rather startled expression in his blue eyes because he’s standing by me when a man, yelling at me, rushes in the door and punches me three times in the face. So hard, in fact, that I fall backwards and slide along the line of Seafood Thermidors we are preparing at the bar, which is now our worktop, scattering half a dozen all over the floor. I’m overwhelmed by the force of it. He’s shouting, ‘Don’t you shout like that at my kid, you bastard.’ I’m seriously thinking he’s going to kill me but in my confusion decide I’ve got to keep him here so I can hand him over to the police. ‘Shut the door,’ I shout at Patrick. Which he does. By then the assailant has, I realised afterwards, done what he came for and is trying to leave in a hurry, but I grab him and now I’m really angry and he’s getting frightened. There’s a big tussle, with him trying to get away and me holding on to him. We burst through the double doors and my chef’s jacket has pulled off and his shirt rips away as he’s struggling to get free. I chase him over the car park yelling I’m going to kill him and catch up with him near the harbour’s edge. We are lined up facing each other. I have my hands in fists like a Victorian prize fighter, he’s right on the edge of the quay and I’m seriously threatening to knock him into the mud below. Fortunately by then lots of people have pulled us apart and there we are both covered in my blood. Someone leads me sobbing for breath back to the restaurant. I’m filled with a red feeling of outrage but also complete shock at my uncontrollable anger – and a sense of the ridiculousness of two men stripped to the waist about to fight in the middle of a car park.
It turned out that the night before he had been in the restaurant, leaving a very young child in the car with the window open. The child had been screaming out of the window. In the kitchen with the ba
ck doors open and a really tough service, the screaming had become intolerable, so I had run out of the back door and shouted to who, I knew not, to calm that child down. Just as I was doing this, the mother had walked out of the restaurant to do just that, and was so upset by my yelling that she persuaded her husband to go into the kitchen and sort me out the next day.
The couple persuaded the police to charge me with intent to commit grievous bodily harm. I was very upset by this because I felt his attack on me was far more severe than my yelling at his child. I spent six months terrified that this, coupled with my not being ‘a fit and proper person’, would close the restaurant. In the event, the charges were dropped the morning we all arrived at the magistrates’ court in Bodmin. I have been more than happy to be a non-violent person ever since.
It was 1978, the year after the summer of the big fight, that we took on two of the girls who had worked in The Blue Lobster, Marie Hill and Penny Rabey. Marie went on to work for us for 27 years, Penny for about five.
Penny worked with me in the kitchen and, from the moment she started, life changed. I had enjoyed cooking with Frances; she was intelligent with a great sense of humour but she didn’t really like working in a kitchen. Penny, on the other hand, had worked in kitchens most of her life. I wouldn’t exactly say she liked it but she put up with it. Some nights, when it was particularly hot, she’d gaze wistfully out of the double doors across to the other side of the estuary and say, ‘It’s nice over at Rock.’
It always looked magical over at Rock when I was stuck in the hot kitchen. I sort of liked cooking and sort of didn’t. I liked it well enough when we were really busy, but on quiet nights it was a bugger. Some nights in those early days we’d get no one in, just hang round disconsolately, hoping at first we’d get some customers, then hoping we wouldn’t because if we’d got no bookings by half-past eight I’d say that we were going to the pub and we’d be out of there as quick, as they say in Padstow, as a rat up a drain. If someone came while we were packing up we’d have to serve them, then we’d be on till 11 or later.