To visit The Seafood Restaurant in Padstow in 2025, you wouldn’t think that this restaurant, with its languid, buttery fillets of sole, its delicate seafood cocktails and trays laden with langoustines, was born out of a mobile disco. But long before the tinkling of silverware and the clinking of glasses, this waterfront building was the bricks and mortar outpost of The Purple Tiger, a travelling party that had entertained the likes of Eric Clapton and Marianne Faithfull and a host of Cornish locals – young and old – looking for a boogie.
“It was decked out in purple and white. It had some chains hanging from the ceiling over the dance floor. It had a bar with black and white wallpaper behind, and it was built for a clientele that, frankly, wasn’t here,” Rick Stein, owner of The Seafood Restaurant and the subsequent culinary empire it built, tells me. “It was supposed to be a club in the proper sense of the word, where you had to become a member and sign guests in and stuff. But we just let anybody come in, and that really did not go down well with the police. There were a lot of fights, which we really were not very good at controlling.” Unsurprisingly, the short-lived nightclub got closed down, but with a lease still on the building that needed to be paid, Stein started cooking out of the space. And so, The Seafood Restaurant was born.
In this first iteration of the restaurant, Stein was cooking food that was, according to him, ‘very simple’. “I'd had some experience as a chef in a hotel kitchen in London before that. But I really didn't know what I was doing,” he says. What he did know, though, was fish, as that’s what his family cooked at home – and so that's largely what made its way onto the menu. “It was like grilled fish cakes, grilled lobster, crab salads, lobster salads, and just one or two dishes that we picked up from another restaurant in Padstow,” he adds. One of those dishes was lobster thermidor, on the menu at the time for just £2.80.
That was 50 years ago. What followed almost reads like a fairytale of culinary success. In 1988, Rick and Jill Stein opened St Petroc’s Hotel and Bistro, just around the corner from The Seafood Restaurant, and then Rick Stein’s Café in 1994. Not long after, Rick appeared on his first television show, The Taste of the Sea, which catapulted the chef and his restaurants into a new echelon of fame. “It changed everything,” Rick recalls of the television shows. The restaurants had already started to garner national attention, one being awarded best restaurant in England by The Sunday Times in the mid-80s, but Rick’s time on television took that attention stratospheric. The phone, he says, was ringing off the hook.
After that, the openings just kept coming, largely around Cornwall until 2014 when Rick Stein’s Winchester opened, sparking a wave of new restaurants around the country, all of them bringing a slice of the Cornish coast with them wherever they went. The Steins became so associated with Padstow, putting this once sleepy fishing village on the map in a way the locals never expected, that it garnered the nickname ‘Padstein’, drawing visitors from around the world. “It’s interesting,” Rick notes. “That whole idea of Padstein, it’s not really something that’s in the town. I don't think anyone is particularly bothered about it. I wish they hadn’t coined it, but I actually don't think the locals are particularly interested. And I certainly don’t think there’s that much antagonism towards us.”
Antagonism or not, walking around Padstow, it’s impossible to ignore Stein’s presence. There’s The Seafood Restaurant, sitting pretty on the harbourfront. There’s the fish and chip shop, and the fishmongers downstairs from the Stein’s Cookery School in a disused railway station at the head of the Camel Trail. Up St Edmunds Lane, you’ll find St Petroc’s Bistro and rooms. Around the corner, there is more accommodation in St Edmunds House. As you head into town past the bookshop, you’ll see Stein’s face plastered on books in the window, before strolling into Stein’s Coffee Shop for a cuppa, or Stein’s Gift Shop to nab some of Jill and Kate Stein’s beautiful homewares and rearranging your suitcase to make space for a hefty ceramic lobster jug or a handful of tea towels.
Rick Stein's time on television took that attention stratospheric
It’s almost impossible to conceive of the town without Rick Stein. But while he might be synonymous with the place now, there was a time when Padstow was lined with fish and chip shops, tackle stores and Cornish pasty vendors. When, as Jill Stein puts it, “Cornwall was the wild frontier” and you could hardly get a sprig of parsley at the local shop, let alone the ingredients to cook an Indonesian fish curry, one of the dishes that has been a mainstay on The Seafood Restaurant menu for years. “We grew all that – coriander, sorrel, French tarragon, basil. I can’t even really recall when supermarkets started selling those sorts of herbs,” Rick tells me. “Even though I was doing Indian fish curries, we were very much tied to local ingredients, because it was all we could get. Therefore, all the veg and all the fish and all the meat, all came locally. I suppose 90% of what we were selling in the restaurant, probably even more, came from within a 20-mile radius of the restaurant.”
He remembers a food writer friend visiting from London in the mid-80s and, while touring some of the local farms, becoming enamoured with a particular style of potato he found growing. So much so that he wrote a piece about them for one of the national papers. As Rick says, you wouldn’t blink an eye if someone did that now (in fact, many similar pieces have been published in this magazine over the years) but, back then, it was well ahead of its time – much like The Seafood Restaurant’s locality which grew out of necessity more than any kind of blue sky dream, and yet is commonplace these days with any chef truly wanting to make an impact.
A lot has changed in the five decades since The Seafood Restaurant opened. The digital camera had only just been invented, and the World Wide Web was just a glimmer in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye. House prices in Padstow have skyrocketed, and Cornwall has become a food destination drawing visitors from around the world. It makes sense, then, that Rick has changed, too, from chef to global name, and from a small business owner to the face of one of the country’s biggest hospitality success stories. He has also gotten older. And so, the company begins to look to its next generation. Luckily for Jill and Rick Stein, they have three sons, all of whom have developed passions that perfectly and separately complement the family business.
Rick Stein with his sons Ed, Jack and Charlie
Sam Harris
Rick and Jack Stein
James Ram
Ed Stein, the oldest of the three, took a gap year to study sculpting in Tuscany, a move that spurred on a career path in construction and design. He now works as project manager for the Stein group, overseeing all renovations and new constructions. He also keeps bees and makes his own cider from apples grown on the grounds of Lanherne convent in Mawgan. Middle sibling Jack started working in the Stein kitchens as a teenager and, after a quick hiatus doing his degree in Cardiff, has been on the pans ever since, working at kitchens around the world before returning to take on the role of chef director of the Stein group in 2017 and publishing his first cookbook, World on a Plate, in 2018. Then you have youngest son Charlie, who took up the drinks mantle, moving to London to work with The Vintner and going on to set up the incredibly successful drinks arm of the business, including house bottles made in collaboration with vineyards across Europe, and robust, expansive wine lists across all the Stein group restaurants.
“I tried to persuade them not to,” Rick tells me when I ask about the experience of handing the business over to his sons. “But they’ve all decided to come into it of their own volition, so it’s nice. The thing is that you can trust them. They’re loyal, because it’s a family business and that’s terribly important.” He attributes one of the reasons the restaurant has not just survived for this long, but thrived, to the ability they have to pass it on to their sons.
Wandering the coast, it's easy to see why a fish-focused chef would find his nirvana here
“My dad summited what was possible with cuisine,” Ed Stein tells me over lunch and glasses of his own cider at The Cornish Arms, the Stein-owned pub on Padstow’s outskirts that the family painstakingly renovated and expanded. “So I didn’t feel like I wanted to try and meet that,” he adds. At a cooking class later that day, fish supplier Matthew Stevens – who has worked with the Stein group for 48 years – echoes Ed’s sentiments, saying that Rick Stein “really lifted the profile of fish” to the point that Stevens feels like he’s “almost now in the luxury food market.” You only need to look at the price of lobster thermidor, now on the menu for £69.95, for proof of that.
The following morning, I head for a stroll and an ice-cold, loin-girding dip at St George’s Cove. Wandering down the South West Coast Path, the sun just skimming the horizon as a fishing boat chugs out of the harbour into the glassy waters of the Camel Estuary beyond, it’s easy to see why a fish-focused chef would find his nirvana here. The world may have changed dramatically in the intervening five decades since nightclub brawls and lobster thermidor were the catalysts for a restaurant that would go on to launch a global brand, but there’s some comfort in knowing that sitting down at a table at The Seafood Restaurant, you’re eating much of the same food you would have been back in 1975, from many of the same boats. That’s a legacy worth cracking a lobster claw for.
