Rick Stein: The chef in a pickle, yearning for the simple things in life

Twenty years ago, the news that a middle-aged, balding, provincial chef had left his wife after 27 years of marriage would have raised scarcely a mention in the national press. But the media has changed, and so has the news value of chefs.

Over the past few weeks, the romantic misadventures of Rick Stein have unleashed dozens of column inches, an indication of how Britain has been convulsed by a cultural revolution these past couple of decades. Food has felt those convulsions as much as any aspect of daily life. Remote pubs in the highlands of Scotland, where once you would have been lucky to find a stale bridie, now routinely serve up pan-fried fillets of mahi-mahi on a bed of spiced aubergine fritters.

And Stein, for better or worse, is one of those responsible. Which is ironic, because what he tries to champion, above all, is simplicity. "There's this endless need to justify exorbitant prices by being trendy," he has complained. "You simply can't get good, simple food any more – why can't you go into a restaurant and get two pork chops, or a grilled lemon sole? Why do you have to have it with lemon grass or chilli or kaffir lime leaves?"

Why indeed? The prices at The Seafood Restaurant in Padstow, Cornwall – still the flagship of Stein's ever-burgeoning fleet of businesses – are no less exorbitant than in the restaurants he criticises. Dinner for two with a good bottle of wine does not yield much change from £150. But those of us who pay an annual pilgrimage do so because the cooking, determinedly unfussy, is sublime.

In his new BBC television series, Rick Stein's Food Heroes, which starts on Thursday, Stein travels the country championing local food producers and, in the words of the BBC publicity department, "casting off his nice-guy image" to criticise those hotels and restaurants which either eschew local produce or do risible things with it. In Scotland he found Aberdeen Angus beef garnished with strawberries, yet along the River Test in Hampshire found not a single pub serving local brown trout. Along the Test the indigenous dish seemed to be Thai green chicken curry.

Stein's tirade is welcome. Moreover, if he really wants to cast off his nice-guy image, then he did exactly the right thing by walking out on his 55-year-old wife, Jill, for his 35-year-old Australian lover, Sarah Burns, whom he met five years ago on a book publicity tour. Except that now, according to last weekend's tabloids, he and Sarah have had a monumental tiff. According to at least one newspaper, he yearns to move in with Jill again but she doesn't want him back. "For a man famed for the simplicity of his ingredients, Stein is facing up to a complicated mess entirely of his own making," went one report (the private lives of chefs are always so much fun for the tabloids; there's such rich metaphor potential).

It was further reported last weekend that Stein has just returned from Australia desperate to save his marriage. That convenient source, a "friend", was quoted as saying that "Rick was in such an emotional state that everyone was worried he might be on the verge of some kind of breakdown".

Meanwhile, while Jill stays in Trevone House (their "million-pound home"), he is reportedly renting a "dark, dingy" flat across the River Camel in Port Isaac. Which, with his millions, seems slightly improbable. Still, if Stein doesn't like being the subject of gossip he can at least take consolation in its timing: no publicity is bad publicity when you have a new telly series to promote.

As with Hugh Grant's skirmish with Divine Brown on Sunset Boulevard, some cynics have wondered whether the whole episode has been discreetly stage-managed. At any rate, it is no secret in and around Padstow that the Steins have long had an unconventional marriage. Nor that if Jill is not exactly his soulmate, she is certainly his solemate, no less responsible than he for the success of The Seafood Restaurant. For it is Jill who takes charge of hiring and firing and, as much as the quality of the cooking, it is the unfailingly brilliant service – friendly, attentive, informed, neither subservient nor over-familiar – that elevates the place.

The Steins are not natives of Padstow, as those who are waste no time in pointing out. While the success of The Seafood Restaurant, which now has 13 bedrooms, and the couple's other ventures, latterly the Padstow Seafood School, have manifestly benefited other businesses in the town, plenty of locals still refer to "Ricky" Stein with envious disdain.

But even the crabbiest among them grudgingly concedes that he has worked hard for his empire, and that he is entitled to have built it on the banks of the Camel estuary, which he visited every summer as a child. The family was affluent; his father Eric was a director of Distillers. He was also a manic depressive. When Stein was 18, his father killed himself.

They had never been close. "I suspect that if he had survived until I was in my twenties, our relationship would have improved," Stein has said. He must also have speculated that a streak of melancholy runs in the genes; for all his joviality on screen, Stein in person is a rather diffident presence. You get the impression that he has known sadness. And, for all his travails, he remains gloomy about Britain's relationship with seafood. "The British are not seafood lovers so what's the point?" he has mused. "It will be a long time before we can order half a dozen oysters from the quayside."

After leaving school in Oxfordshire, Stein went to catering college and then, something of a hippy, travelled the world. He worked on a German cargo ship and an Australian railway before returning to read English at New College, Oxford, where he scraped a third.

In his mid-twenties he returned to Padstow, of which he had such fond memories, and used a £10,000 legacy from his Uncle Otto in Dusseldorf (Stein's grandfather had emigrated to Britain from Germany in 1914), to open a nightclub. But fights used to break out frequently, and eventually the police closed it down. Stein lost his public entertainment licence but was allowed to keep his restaurant licence, and so, in 1975, on the site of the ill-fated nightclub, he and Jill opened a fish restaurant. He can afford, now, to be candid about their source of inspiration. "There was another fish restaurant in Padstow at the time," he says, "that, basically, we copied."

Times were hard at first, and Stein was not averse to throwing his weight around, sometimes with customers, often with staff. "In the early days my staff were not good enough to match my aspirations and so I lost my sense of humour. Like on the parade ground, aggression in the kitchen is the norm, so I am keen to have women there to improve everyone's behaviour. But I have never become physically aggressive with anybody."

Gradually, business improved. In 1984, The Seafood Restaurant was voted Egon Ronay Restaurant of the Year. A more effective boost came in 1993. Stein had long been friendly with another West Country restaurateur, Keith Floyd, who had become a television star. The rambunctious Floyd was a natural for telly, Stein much less so, yet when Floyd suggested that his mate might have a cookery series in him, so it proved.

The Seafood Restaurant duly reaped the dividends. Before A Taste of The Sea, it was still possible to get a table simply by turning up; after it, even well-dressed crabs had to book. These days, booking opens on 1 December for the following summer; it is not unknown for a punter to call on 2 December to reserve a table for a Tuesday evening in mid-August the year after, only to be told that already nothing is available before 10pm.

Like most celebrity chefs, however, even those who don't greatly enjoy the limelight, Stein is no longer to be found much in his own kitchen. And although he and Jill have been at pains to emphasise that they will continue as business partners – reportedly addressing the staff together, which must have been an excruciating business – one wonders what will be the fall-out from their discord. The suggestion that they might sell up after all these years is enough to stop the tide entering Padstow harbour, but none of their three sons is showing much inclination to take over.

"My father demanded excellence from his children," Stein once said, "but as far as I'm concerned, whatever my sons want to do is OK by me." It is a comment a psychoanalyst would fall upon like a hungry diner falls upon his fruits de mer. One wonders whether Stein feels pleasure that he has satisfied his late father's requirements.

For that he has achieved excellence there is no doubt. Despite his gloomy prognosis, nobody has done more for the cause of seafood, both the eating and the cooking of it. And that is partly because Stein is in the vanguard of a bunch of educated, middle-class chefs as eloquent as they are dexterous.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when restaurant kitchens were populated by losers. When only dimwits or lost souls went to catering colleges. But then such restaurateurs as Rowley Leigh, of Kensington Place in London, and Alistair Little of the eponymous establishment now in Soho, and Stein himself, Oxbridge men all, began to acquire a following. Another, Shaun Hill, now of The Merchant House in Ludlow, was formerly a research fellow in Classics at Exeter University. All of a sudden, cooking became a middle-class career option. "The English were tickled by the idea that someone who had been to university, and someone cute-looking, like Alistair Little, would cook professionally," says Fay Maschler, doyenne of restaurant critics.

There is nothing very cute-looking about Rick Stein, and yet there are women all over the country who consider him a dish. Almost 70 per cent of his viewers are estimated to be female. Whether they have forgiven him for his sexual shenanigans, the ratings will soon tell.

Life story

Born: Christopher Richard Stein, 4 January 1947, in Oxfordshire

Family: Married Jill Newstead (pictured right) in 1975, currently separated. Three children

Restaurant career: The Seafood Restaurant opened in Padstow, Cornwall, in 1977. Now owns a seafood school, hotel and bistro, café, gift shop, art gallery and delicatessen, all in Padstow (pop: 3,000)

Literary career: English Seafood Cookery, 1988 (Glenfiddich Cook Book of the Year, 1989); Taste of the Sea, 1995 (André Simon Cook Book of the Year, 1996); Fish, 1996; Fruits of the Sea, 1997; Rick Stein's Seafood Odyssey, 1999; The Seafood Lover's Guide, 2000

Television: Rick Stein's Taste of the Sea, 1995; Rick Stein's Fruits of the Sea, 1997; Rick Stein's Seafood Odyssey, 1999; Fresh Food, 1999; The Seafood Lover's Guide, 2000

He says: "Chefs [are] paying far too much attention to novel ideas and not nearly enough to the basic quality of the ingredients"

"If you can talk about food it is a fantastically civilised way of getting to know people"

They say: "Rick Stein's a great philosopher. I really enjoy his programmes, there's no pissing around with pepper mills. He's done wonders for fish in this country"
­ Gordon Ramsay