Rick Stein on his new book and the unlikely origins of his restaurant business

"The idea came from a book which I bought in the early 2000s by an American food writer called David Rosengarten, called It's All American Food.

“What he's saying is American food isn't traditional things like Thanksgiving turkey. It's about all the immigrant communities that have arrived in the States over the years. And I just thought, let me apply the same thing to our own country, where very similar things have happened, but also take on board the nation's favourite dishes and amalgamate it to try and paint a picture of where we are now with our food in this country.

"I'm also slightly irritated by the way that people still regard British food as being second-rate – it's the butt of French and American jokes. A Frenchman not so long ago said to me, 'You still eat a lot of boiled meat in England, don't you?'"

Rick's TV show and book aim to show that British food culture is more than just 'beige' dishes.

"It's proved to make it a really good series because we've travelled around the whole country and Ireland as well. Belfast in particular was a particularly special occasion. I discovered there is so much good cooking in the country, and not just good restaurants serving what one might consider to be local cuisine. We've all taken on board Indian, Chinese, Italian, Korean, Nepalese and, in the case of Belfast, Filipino cooking. I feel very privileged to be paid to go around the country and pick up lots of great food."

For Rick, one of the most memorable dishes from recording the show was from a Filipino restaurant in Belfast.

"There was this one restaurant, called KUBO, which was doing Filipino food, and I'd never tasted Filipino food before. The one that springs to mind, and I put in the book, was called pork adobo. It's basically brown sugar, vinegar and soy sauce with lots of spices, cooked down until it clings to the pork. It's a bit like beef rendang in Indonesia, where you preserve the meat by cooking it in spices and then reducing it, taking all the moisture out, so that it keeps for a long time. Having that dish was a bit like the first time you try Thai cooking."

The changing global food scene

Having travelled to Australia, New Zealand and Mexico before he went to university in the 60s, Rick has witnessed many changes to our culinary appetites on a global scale.

“I've definitely noticed it changing, particularly in Australia and New Zealand – Mexico not really. But I think it probably is changing in somewhere like Mexico City, and certainly in the States it's changed. I think it's because of immigration, really.

"The thing is that, you go to somewhere like Phoenix in Arizona, and you can get any food from virtually anywhere in the world. The same in London and Australia. My book is about the British food scene, but it equally could have been about the Australian food scene.

"I started going regularly to Australia in the 80s because I loved the vibrancy of the local food. They were cooking Vietnamese dishes, Italian dishes, mixing it all together."

Rick particularly noticed the changing food scene on his visit to Belfast while shooting Food Stories.

“What's really gratifying travelling around our country is seeing how people are embracing all of these food cultures. Particularly, take that Filipino restaurant – probably about 30 people down the table were from Belfast. Somewhere like Belfast, which obviously had a bit of a troubled past, saying 'look at this fantastic food we've got from the Philippines'; it says something about the way things are going in that city.”

On his unlikely path into seafood restaurants

From his travels around the world, Rick was keen to bring some of these elements into his own cooking, but in the late 60s not many people were as accepting of international cuisines as they are today.

"Because I'd been in Mexico, I did have this feeling of having experienced quite a lot of food overseas. One of the things that I had trouble with in the early days of the seafood restaurant [in Cornwall] was that I always wanted to put on fish curries from India or fish tacos from Mexico. At the time there was this feeling that a good restaurant should only be about local cooking. Funnily enough, now it is also the thing that a good restaurant should be about local cooking."

Yet despite the reputation Rick has garnered from his successful food career over the years, he didn't start out with the express aim of becoming a restaurateur.

"I wanted to run a nightclub in Padstow. We just let anybody in there because we needed the money – that's what caused the trouble. We got, not necessarily undesirables, but a lot of people that weren't used to drinking and it had a late licence at that time in the 70s. So there were a lot of fights.

"Both me and Johnny, my friend, were just rather green behind the ears. We didn't know how to deal with it. And not unnaturally, the police got a bit fed up, so I was declared not a fit and proper person to hold a licence. So we got closed, not closed down, but the licence was taken away from us. But we managed to maintain a restaurant license – I just built it on the back of that.”

Opening his restaurant was a 'way of paying the bills' left over from the failed nightclub and, being in Cornwall, fish seemed like the obvious choice.

"I had some experience as a chef in a London hotel previously. The reality of it was I just started doing fish because it was there. In those days, it was really hard to get produce.

"Nobody had mussels in the UK then. I remember in the early days if I wanted a mussel dish, I used to go out and pick them.”