by Rick Stein
In addition to having a good extraction system, the kitchen today is air conditioned. I’ve only cooked in this kitchen on an occasional service or when filming some cookery sequences. The kitchen that I worked in was about one-fifth of the size of the current one. The area where it was is now a small part of the restaurant. It had a terrible extract system and a low roof, so that we were always very hot, particularly as I insisted on having a real charcoal grill in there. Near the back door were the lobster tanks; I put them there as it was the coolest part of the kitchen. It was also where all the fish came in, most of it, in the early days, literally across the quay. We always kept that double door wide open so that in the summer it was the most comfortable place to work. In winter you wore an overcoat. I heard much later that at least one enterprising Padstonian used to nip in the back door when no one was looking and help himself to two or three lobsters from the tanks, then come in later to sell them to us.
There were six of us in the old kitchen. We used to get hot, very hot, while coping with large numbers of customers, up to a hundred a night in the height of the summer. I had difficulty in recruiting staff. I used to ask any chef coming for a job if he surfed. If he did, the chances were that he’d stay, because the beaches either side of Padstow – Summerleaze, Widmouth, Crackington Haven, Polzeath, Trevone, Harlyn, Treyarnon, Porthcothan, Watergate – are great for surf. We were also lucky in that Padstow is close to Newquay, where there’s plenty of night life. It was a typical scenario: not enough resources to ensure that the kitchen is correctly equipped and not enough reputation to ensure that a regular supply of talented young chefs will come through. My aspirations were always well ahead of what was possible. I also have a tendency to get over-excited about a new dish and put it on at the last minute without ascertaining if it will work with the existing menu. The only way to get through a busy lunch or dinner is to be completely prepared for each dish with what we call our mise en place, which is where all the parts of a dish – chopped herbs and onions, peeled, deseeded and chopped tomatoes, reduced stocks, sauces in the bain-marie – are laid out ready to cook.
So not unnaturally, for reasons beyond my control and others which were of my own doing, service in the old days was often extremely fraught and my temper was not always level. I’ve realised now after many years that I’m not naturally a bad-tempered person, nor are most chefs. It’s just that the conditions, the coup de feu as the French call it, can be of such immense stress that the only way is to erupt. The only thing I can say is that I never hit anyone and, after I’d finished letting off steam, I always apologised.
But it was tough. Recently I asked Claire Cross what it used to be like. Claire, who still works for me as a waitress and has done so off and on for over 20 years, wrote,
Every night was like being on a stage or in a performance and you were never sure what would happen next. The further into the season we were the harder it got as everyone had been working six days a week and all the hours God sent and tempers got frayed. Towards the end of the summer, I remembered asking you to pass the large catering jar of English mustard as a customer wanted some for their steak. You told me to take that out to them as it was. When I said I thought it might be better in a ramekin, you blew your stack and said no, just effing take it out to them like that. I put it in a pot anyway where you couldn’t see! Every season’s end I went to Australia for the winter. Once I mentioned to you that I’d be leaving in a couple of weeks. You were mortified because you’d just lost it again and thought it had caused me to hand in my notice. You kept apologising saying sorry you’d lost it and were so sweet. It was no use answering you back when you were shouting as you’d just get worse! But you always, always apologised. No matter how cross you were. I knew it was because you had such a passion for your food, and you were always salting and tasting your food and if the chefs didn’t do this you’d get upset! Pressure in the kitchen is so different to front of house, if you mess up a dish you have to start from scratch but if front of house makes a mistake there’s always a way round it.
We had an agreed golden rule with all the front of house staff if there was something wrong with a dish and it would have to go back to the kitchen we weren’t to tell Rick directly, it always had to go through Jill because you would go ballistic but she knew how to handle it and soften you up!
Nowadays everything is so different, there’s training, everything is tidy and organised now. I had no training but it was such good fun. I used to love seeing how the customers were dressed, very odd yellow trousers with tartan jacket, all colours, every one dressed in the same odd way, I used to say they all came from one egg! Some of the customers were really eccentric and some very rude. One chap was being really awkward and was very big. Usually Jill dealt with them and was very calm when they were pissed and kicked off but he was so rude and intimidating to her, as she was only small and he so big, that she just yelled at him. ‘Don’t you talk to me like that you bully’, then turned to me and said: ‘Get Rick, get Rick.’ You marched out and said, ‘Why don’t you fuck off,’ he yelled back to you and said ‘Don’t you tell me to fuck off, you told my brother to fuck off last week!’ But he left and I remember he was yelling at you outside through the kitchen door.
The staff were our refuge from difficult customers. We knew each other very well, since we spent so much of our time working together. We didn’t get much opportunity to socialise outside work, so we socialised within it. It’s a cliché but it’s true to say that you only get out of life what you put into it. A lot of the work was really tough, but when we were off we took delight in letting our hair down. We liked each other and we had lots to talk about, simply because we worked under such pressure and there was so much to remember with pleasure and happiness after a few glasses of wine. We had some great parties. In the early days, we’d throw an annual party just before Christmas at the Bedruthan Steps Hotel which had a Sicilian chef. Later, we started having barbecues on the beach where we played volleyball, had a clam bake and ended up completely plastered with lots of surfers and my boys and their babysitter Liz dancing uncontrollably to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Free Bird’.
These were innocent times: our children growing up and the restaurant increasingly successful but still small.
VI
When I started living in Cornwall full time in 1974 I also started playing rugby again. I joined the local team, The Wadebridge Camels: Camels because Wadebridge, like Padstow, is on the River Camel which if course meant that the emblem on our brown and yellow rugby shirts was just that. The team was made up largely of local farmers. Up to then, most of the Cornish people I knew were fishermen. Cornish fishermen are apt to be men of few words, not unfriendly, but rugged characters filled with the harshness of their job, putting up with the all-too-real danger of gale-force winds and mountainous seas. They tend to moan about government intervention and the high price of diesel and the low price of fish, but that’s inevitable because their lives are so precarious. They are the last hunter-gatherers and as such represent a past world where men went out to bring back the food for the family. Sometimes, out with my friend Johnnie Murt, I found it impossible to see why a life on a small, pitching, tossing, wooden boat could be anything but miserable. It’s relentless work, cold, wet and hard, the lifting up of pots over the side of the boat, the rapid removal of lobsters and crabs, the speedy replacement of the old half-eaten bait with a new smelly salted scad. Then, when all the pots are stacked at the back of the boat, the ropes snake across the deck as the string of pots is tossed overboard again with the engine running all the time. This process is repeated maybe 20 times in a day. Then there’s the clean-up – hosing the weed, the crushed whelks, the starfish, out through the scuppers. Maybe a mackerel spinner or two over the stern on the way home, the flurry of gulls above and behind if you were gutting fish. At sea, though, you somehow feel the serenity of it. It’s men without women and, as Hemingway would have said, it’s doing what men have always done.
Fa
rming is tough too, but the difference is you own some land – maybe just as a tenant – but your peace comes from land. I imagined myself leaning on a gate, looking down a field newly green with spring rain in the late afternoon when there was still a brightness in the sky and a chill wind coming down the estuary from the north-east with some pink blossom scattering the ground from a crab apple tree in the hedge. That’s how it felt, for me, with the farmers who formed the Wadebridge Camels. Richard and Robert Hicks, John May, Dave Polkinghorne, Anthony Wills, Ted Wills, John Treglowen, Doug Yelland, Terry Gardener, Al Rowe and Geoff Rowe, who we called Jethro, who was just beginning to make a bit of a name for himself as a very Cornish comedian.
The Camels broadened my understanding of Cornwall. Previously, in my local world, it had been the romantic Cornwall of men of the sea, a sort of amalgam of Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn with a bit of Treasure Island and the rugged fishermen who I met in the pubs of Padstow. Rugby introduced me to a mellower Cornwall. Some of the farmers would actually consider coming to our restaurant and even liked my cooking. For example, the restaurant was always full for the Royal Cornwall Show in June. The same people would come back year after year. Tony Hackett, who had a small caravan at the show selling bull’s sperm, and his friend Michael Rosenberg, who kept a flock of Ash sheep in Devon and was a leading light in The Rare Breeds Survival Trust. The journalists from the Farmers Weekly came too. The show is a very important week in the life of rural Cornwall. It’s still a rare time in the year when the older farmers put on a smart suit, always a nice shade of green and brown tweed, but still with the calloused hands of hard work on the farm.
Michael Rosenberg, who was very well off, had lobster almost every night. He and his friends ordered Dover soles and turbot, and drank our best white Burgundy. They still hold the record for the highest number of plateaux de fruits de mer sold to one table – 17. They spent with abandon and after the Cornwall Show each year we were left with a warm feeling of having done some good business with some really lovely customers who were also our friends.
We also started getting regular visits from a group of holidaying young married people from around Oxford who would appear in late June and virtually take the restaurant for two weeks. The leading lights were Philip Minty and his wife Margaret Anne who, like the show people, took my cooking seriously. Philip, whose family made Minty furniture, worked in the catering industry and knew everyone – Roy Ackerman, Anton Mosimann, Raymond Blanc. He’d been joint owner of The Bear in Woodstock. Mingling with him and his friends made me feel we’d finally arrived.
My brother John had married again. His second wife, Clare, had been a catering student at the Bay Tree in Burford. The owner, Silvia Gray, was a good friend of my parents and part of the pleasure of going there, for me and John, was being served by well-mannered girls learning the industry. Clare, who had big brown eyes and an almost Eastern poise, now worked for Corney & Barrow, one of the smartest City wine merchants around. Their managing director was John Armit who had a legendary palate and who had pioneered the practice of buying wines straight from the growers, most notably those of Château Petrus. He was personal friends with the Leoville Barton family and knew the famous white Burgundy-maker Leflaive, as well as Angelo Gaja, the most admired Barbera-maker in Piedmont.
Clare introduced me to her boss, Richard Peat, whose father had started a modest accountancy business, now one of the world’s biggest – KPMG. When Richard first visited Padstow it was like nobility arriving. Dressed in a suit of some sort of fine country cloth, he drew up in an old Bristol and produced a couple of boxes of wines from its voluminous boot. The taste of these wines had the effect on me of John Donne’s poem ‘The Good-Morrow’:
I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I
Did, till we lov’d? Were we not wean’d till then?
But suck’d on country pleasures, childishly?
Richard was the perfect gentleman. Lean, handsome, impeccable Old Etonian manners, house in Norfolk, fly fisherman. How could I not buy wine and lots of it from such a paragon? He went on buying trips to Europe every year and of course was an astute businessman underneath all the charm. He gave me good advice about how to run things more efficiently but never in a patronising way. He’d produce bottles of Brouilly or Moulin à Vent and Fleurie and discuss the differences between them. Having got used to the fact that, yes, a smart wine merchant was indeed interested in taking on my business, I became slightly more blasé about his fine wines.
All wine merchants greet you with effusiveness. I soon realised that a couple of boxes of samples and a drunken meal paid for by the wine merchant inevitably ended in orders. There is indeed no such thing as a free lunch. When charming experts came to call bearing gifts, I found I couldn’t refuse. The problem is that having a lot of different wine suppliers means lots of accounts and paperwork and lots of lunches.
Two men, one short and a bit plump and the other tall and very plump, started to come frequently to the restaurant. It was clear they liked my cooking, so when I eventually went out from the kitchen to talk to them I was well disposed, and when they told me they were in the wine business I sat down with them. It was like a new chapter in my restaurant life was opening. They were called Charles Reid and Bill Baker. Bill was the leading light of their company, Reid Wines in Bath. He sold wine to Simon Hopkinson, Shaun Hill, Joyce Molyneux at the Carved Angel in Devon and George Perry-Smith at the Riverside in Helford – all chefs whom I was beginning to admire. He made regular trips to Scotland and supplied Grete Hobbs at Inverlochy Castle, David Wilson at Peat Inn in Fife, David and Hilary Brown at La Potinière at Gullane just outside Edinburgh and in Stirling a precocious young chef called Nick Nairn who would go on to be the youngest-ever Michelin star winner in Scotland. Bill ate with them all and remembered everything he ate. Not only that, he had been to every one of the Michelin three-starred restaurants in France – Alain Chapel, the Troisgros Brothers, Bocuse; indeed he had eaten Bocuse’s famous volaille de Bresse truffée en vessie ‘Mère Fillioux’. His wines were sensational; he had an exceptional palate. It turned out that he had been born in Harlyn and retained a love of Cornwall. Whenever Bill came to the restaurant, there was a warm feeling of fun. After cooking, I would sit down with him and share a great wine. Those occasions – with Jill and Bill’s wife Kate – are among the happiest in my life.
Of course, Bill’s discerning taste buds enjoyed fine food as well as fine wines. With us, he’d eat a large lobster, sometimes two, and start with at least half a dozen oysters. He was very overweight but he carried it well. Every morning he walked his Labradors, however late he’d been to bed. He was a character from another age. His good humour, intelligence and forthrightness were endearing; I never heard a bad word said of him by anyone, even his competitors. Richard Peat spoke of him with commendable warmth. The truth was that Bill didn’t reciprocate, he always frowned on my continuing allegiance to Corney & Barrow and, under all the delightful charm, was ruthless in his business dealings. He wanted my whole wine list. In the end I let him write a lot of it, because his comments about wine were always such fun. Not for him the ‘hints of peppermint and cedar’.
I’ve escaped from the kitchen and gone to the table where Bill always stands out, with his vigorously striped shirts and thick green tweed jackets. He wears Church’s brogues with thick soles and steel caps so you can hear him coming miles away. His table is a litter of oyster and lobster shells. He has with him a basket with 12 compartments, different red and white wines. The whites are chilled. Some bottles are opened – he has had a taste already. Others are destined for me.
‘Ricardo! Sit down. Delicious dinner. Try this, it’s a Zind Humbrecht Pinot Blanc. It was fabulous with your scallops. I’ve kept you some.’
I’ve never tasted a Pinot Blanc like it.
‘I was there with Olivier Humbrecht last week. Great dinner at Auberge de l’Ill. I had truffe-sous-la-cendre, a whole truffle wrapped in foie gras, then pastry, then baked in ashes.
Fabulous. But I want you to try this. I’ve just had it with your lobster.’ He then produces a Beaune Clos des Mouches, a white burgundy about which I know nothing. Then follows Montrachet, and he’s saying, ‘I know you buy all your Burgundy from Richard Peat. You are so sweet. But, you know, Raymond Leflaive’s handed it all to his nephew Olivier, and I don’t think he’s any longer making the great wine. Try this.’
‘God Bill, that’s fantastic. What on earth is it?’
‘Ampeau, straight Puligny.’
‘Just ordinary Montrachet? I can’t believe it.’
‘Well, that’s Ampeau for you.’
Needless to say Bill had hit it off with Robert Ampeau and seemed to be able to magic old vintages out of his cellar like no one else.
I have come straight from my kitchen and haven’t eaten anything. By the time we’ve tried a couple of reds, maybe a Guigal Côte Rôtie and a sip or two of Sassicaia, and then a sweet wine like a Muscat from the island of Pantelleria off Sicily, I’d be raving with euphoria, at which point Bill says,
‘Couple of cases, then?’
‘No. Four. And the Clos du Mousches – oh, a couple at least.’
‘And the Rôtie?’ he adds. ‘You know Guigal will only sell me his prize wines if I take plenty of his Côtes du Rhone.’
‘Well, two of the Rôtie and 15 of the Côtes du Rhone.’
Next morning, back in the kitchen, I can’t quite remember what I’d ordered but by the following day the invoice is in the office.
VII
These days newspapers and magazines often ask me to do what they call Q & As. Sometimes the questions have me groaning, things like ‘What would your last meal on earth be?’ If I’m feeling charitable I’ll say langoustines and mayonnaise followed by turbot and hollandaise. If not, I’ll say, ‘Well, I’ll probably be feeding through a tube so does it matter?’ But sometimes the questions fit in with the way I’m feeling. Such was the case when I was asked who I’d most like to have dinner with.