Jack Stein, Stein Restaurants, Padstow

guy had just come out of the Swiss army and he worked me so hard. After about a month of being really beasted by him, my old man came into the restaurant; I think he’d been away in Australia filming for a month; he came to the pass and asked if I wanted to go for a beer after work. Dominic asked me how I knew him and I was like, “Oh, he’s my dad.” The next day I came into work and usually Dominic hounded me every morning to set up the chopping board, sharpen the section’s knifes, get hot and frozen water, grab a bin… but I came in this morning and the section was already set up for me and there was a piece of chocolate cake on the chopping board! It was very amusing but to be honest, I probably learnt more in that first month of working with Dominic than the rest of the time I spent in a kitchen. He taught me that organisation in the kitchen is vital, so I owe him a lot. Can you see yourself ever taking the Stein restaurants in your own direction in terms of food style? My food style is very similar to Rick’s, fresh seasonal produce, simply cooked. The chefs I admire and who I’m close to are the likes of Neil Rankin, Carl Clarke, Tom Adams from Pitt Cue and others that have trained in Michelin restaurants but have found that that style of cookery is bit too much. They’re all taking great British ingredients and just having fun with them. I think what Rick did with his Food Heroes has been really successful in this country and we’ve really rediscovered our artisan producers. I think the next stage is to get your brilliant meat or fish or veg from the best suppliers you can, then if you want to make hamburgers with it or barbecued food or some kind of mish mash of Mexican or whatever, just do it; the techniques are just the same as Michelin techniques but it’s just a bit more fun. What have you got on the horizon? I’ve also just been out to Albania filming with Rick. It’s a really interesting country because there’s no big corporate industry out there so it’s still very bio diverse. There are some great young chefs and food writers who’ve learnt a lot of what they do from the internet. The series is due out in May 2015 and focuses on the area covered by the old Byzantine Empire. The title for the series will be from Venice to Istanbul. Would I like to have my own restaurant eventually? I don’t know. If something came up, perhaps I’d like to have a restaurant a bit like Bras, out in the middle of nowhere, maybe on the cliffs. I’m interested in archaeology and the idea of combining fine dining and archaeological food would be something I’d like to try my hand at. It would be full-on self-sufficient, somewhere where all you can see is the sea. I’m constantly working on it; I call it my ‘x project’ and I’m constantly driving around in four-by-fours looking at pig sheds or anything that might be a potential site. I don’t know though, I sometimes think it might be a bit like a tattoo; like if I’d got that tattoo when I was travelling around America in 1998, would I still like it now? So in some ways I think I might stick to what I’m doing for the moment.

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