'I didn't want to be a chef'

Fifty years after Rick Stein turned a failed nightclub into his first restaurant, he speaks to Emma Henderson about his Cornish culinary adventures, foodie family and the future

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“For the first, I don’t know, 15 years, we were just hand-tomouth, really. Back then, it was just a job,” says Rick Stein. He’s speaking about The Seafood Restaurant in Padstow, which is celebrating its 50th birthday – a milestone he never expected it to reach. We’re chatting backstage at Cheltenham town hall, ahead of one of his 11 anniversary tour shows across the UK. Despite undergoing lifesaving heart surgery in 2022, there’s little sign of him slowing down. Soon, he’s heading back to Australia, where he lives part of the year with his second wife, Sarah, and will be filming a new TV series.

Stein admits that he never meant to open a restaurant at all. “I didn’t want to be a chef, it just happened accidentally,” he says. He points to a hessian tote bag in the dressing room embroidered with a purple tiger – the name of his mobile disco in the Seventies. He and a friend had opened a nightclub in Padstow after graduating from Oxford, but booze-fuelled brawls led to police shutting it down. Having bought the building, he needed to do something with it. So, in 1975, with Jill Stein – his first wife, whom he met in Padstow – they opened The Seafood Restaurant.

Even now, Jill and Rick remain at the helm. Though they divorced in 2007, they’ve continued to run the family business together. Each of their three sons now has a role in the Rick Stein Group: Ed, the eldest, handles the design and interiors, Jack is the chef director, and Charlie oversees wine and spirits. “Food, hospitality and the dinner table have been a kind of currency in our family,” says Charlie. “It is everything.”

The brothers have big ambitions. “We want to create a generational hospitality business and take it into the next 50 years,” Charlie adds.