05-04-2025
The Padstow restaurant with rooms that launched Rick Stein's empire
I'm on my feet, dancing. So are dozens of others, to a stream of Seventies hits.
Rick Stein is manning the turntables of his mobile discotheque; the strobe lights are flashing, the glitterball is glittering and there's no chance of a brawl breaking out at the Seafood Restaurant in Padstow, celebrating its 50th anniversary in style.
It had started, you see, as a nightclub, where Rick and his then-wife Jill witnessed so many brawls that it was closed down by the authorities. 'Back then,' says Jill, 'Cornwall felt separate, like frontier land; it's much more cosmopolitan today.'
In place of the nightclub, armed with nothing more than hope over experience, she and Rick decided to open a fish restaurant. Here we all are, half a century on, celebrating not just the original restaurant with rooms but the mini-empire (four restaurants plus bar, cookery school, shops and hotel accommodation in Padstow and six restaurants elsewhere) that the Steins have created and still run today.
Very occasionally, a young couple starts out in hospitality, not knowing where their adventure will take them but with complimentary skills and a magic touch that enables them to become pillars of the industry. Robin and Judy Hutson (The Pig hotels) and Tim and Kit Kemp (Firmdale Hotels) had what it took and so did Rick and Jill Stein.
In their case, not even a bitter divorce in 2007 and Rick's remarriage ended their endeavour. Here they are tonight, in front of Rick's Purple Tiger disco, taking a bow. With them are their three sons, Ed, Jack and Charlie, all now working in the family business and intent on carrying it forward, hopefully for another 50 years.
For me, there are a handful of truly memorable dining rooms and the Seafood Restaurant is one of them. On my family's summer bucket and spade holidays at Daymer Bay in the Eighties and Nineties, the great annual treat was to find a babysitter, catch the ferry from Rock to Padstow and blow our money in the scintillating, all-white, eclectic, art-filled Seafood Restaurant, going home on a high.
Does it matter that it never won a Michelin star? No: fish is best served fresh and simple and it was the ambience, the glamour and the buzz that counted – and still does. One criticism: the rather dreary breakfast buffet. No complaints about St Petroc's Bistro (French), the Café (dishes with an Asian twist) or the blue and white tiled Fish and Chip Shop for eating in and taking out.
The restaurant was created, like the 36 bedrooms across three different Padstow properties, by Jill Stein, hardly the better known of the pair but nonetheless with a crucial role. 'There are few well-known women in hospitality,' says Jill, who began by offering bed and breakfast at home at the same time as running the nightclub.
Like Judy Hutson and Kit Kemp, she believes in comfort first and my room above the Seafood Restaurant was just that, as well as cleverly timeless, with the bonus of a fabulous estuary-facing terrace. The prettily packaged, locally made Porthleven bath products are hers too.
Nowadays Jill works with her daughter-in-law Kate Stein, who has designed textiles, ceramics and homeware for the brand. Their next project will be six 'fishing shack' bedrooms. My favourite of Jill's existing rooms, divided between the Seafood Restaurant, St Edmunds House and St Petroc's Bistro are those, elegant and seaside-chic, above the Bistro, which is also a delight, with views on to a secret garden. And downstairs is Ruby's, Jill's charming evocation of a Cornish smugglers' bar.
Of course, it was Rick Stein's success as a TV chef that propelled his restaurants and rooms to fame and fortune. But 50 years on, despite all that, this is still a family-run enterprise with plenty of challenges, not least the current economic climate. Its various outlets are embedded in pretty Padstow, once dubbed 'Padstein'. It's still an occasion to eat in the Seafood Restaurant, the lucky ones with lobster thermidor or fruits de mer on ice (£120 for two) piled up in front of them.
In 2003 Rick Stein was awarded the OBE for services to tourism in Cornwall. Ten years later, Jill also received one, for services to the hospitality industry. 'I'm proud of that,' she says, 'but it's not my greatest achievement.' Which is? 'That I'm still here.'
