Smashed #15

The UKs restaurant and food scene digested

We Need to Talk About Rick

I love Rick Stein. I’ve enjoyed countless family holidays in Padstow because, in 1995, I saw Taste of the Sea, his debut TV series that was filmed in the Cornish fishing port. I’ve watched everything he’s made since. I’ve eaten in his restaurants and I cook regularly from his cookbooks. He’s great on camera, his recipes work and I love that he’s a grumpy old git (he is delightfully bad tempered throughout the Long Weekends series in particular) and that he wouldn’t stop reading poetry even if his director wrestled him to the ground and gagged him. The three recent series of Rick Stein’s Cornwall are among his best telly work. He’s still got it. So why do I feel so uncomfortable watching his new show Rick Stein’s Food Stories?

If you haven’t seen it, the blurb on the BBC iPlayer says, ‘A mouth-watering melting pot. Rick Stein tucks into the nation's cook book, savouring the UK's favourite food. From farm to fork, he explores age-old traditions and modern tastes.’ In the introduction to each episode, Rick says, ‘I’ve been a chef for over 50 years and I’ve come to realise that the food we eat tells a story about who we are. So I’m on a mission to find out what we all like to eat today.’ It’s a vague enough mission-statement to allow the programme makers to hang pretty much anything on it. Pick a location, find some growers, producers and chefs, stand Rick in front of them and roll camera. Edit in a couple of cooking sketches shot in Rick’s home kitchen and, Bob’s yer uncle, that’s 15 x 29 minutes of ‘Early Peak’ TV gold.

The show goes out of its way to reflect the diversity of the UK’s food scene which is one of the best things about it, but also its Achilles heel. On the one hand, it’s great to see places like Kubo, a Filipino food stall in Belfast’s Trademarket, Bundobust, a modern Gujarati restaurant in Leeds, and Houria cafe in Bristol, which, according to their website, is run by an ‘Afrikan catering company’ dedicated to ‘training, safe employment and a sense of belonging to migrant women, who are often female survivors of slavery’. On the other hand, all that diversity is being presented to the viewing public by a white, privileged male, the least diverse presenter option of all.

Was there a meeting of the BBC Daytime and Early Peak Commissioning Team where they sat around and said, ‘The food scene in this country is changing. There’s a whole new generation transforming how we eat, what we eat, even where we eat. We need to reflect that, we’re the BBC after all, goddamnit. It’s new, it’s young, it’s urban, it’s exciting, there’s only one person who could front such a show - a 77 year old, upper-middle class Englishman that went to prep school!’. High fives all round chaps.

I know, it’s not that simple. The BBC didn’t create the show, it’s made by Shine, Banijay and Rick Stein Productions, so they don’t get to say, ‘Yeah, we love the concept, we just think it needs a different presenter’. The BBC has run out of money, every show they now commission has to pay for itself with overseas sales (Alan Yentob’s Imagine series has just been axed due to lack of overseas interest for example). Rick Stein is a big name with an established audience and can guarantee viewers. That’s a bonus for the businesses featured too; none of them will be complaining about the exposure they receive by being on a Rick Stein programme.

Stein and his producers have also had the good sense to engage local ‘fixers’ as guides to some of the local food scenes and put them on screen; food writer Gurdeep Loyal shows Stein around Leicester for example. But that doesn’t stop me from thinking the whole time I’m watching that someone else really should be fronting this; that’s there’s a painfully obvious disconnect between the subject matter and the main presenter.

It wouldn’t be such a problem if Rick Stein’s Food Stories was just one of a whole roster of BBC food programmes with a diverse presenting line up. But a look at the food category on the iPlayer reveals Saturday Kitchen with Matt Tebbutt and Olly Smith Masterchef with John Torode and Gregg Wallace, The Hairy Bikers with Si King and Dave Myers, Marcus Wareing’s Tales from a Kitchen Garden with Marcus Wareing and The Hidden World of Hospitality with Tom Kerridge. Male, pale and stale as the saying goes, although there is Nadiya Hussain’s Simple Spices and Andi Oliver and Nish Katona on Great British Menu to balance things up a bit.

ITV’s 12 Dishes in 12 Hours with Big Zuu proves that there is life in food programming yet. The Guardian called it ‘the freshest, most irresistible food TV in years’. I agree. If you haven’t seen it, it’s available on ITVX. How the BBC let that one get away is anyone’s guess as his first show Big Zuu’s Big Eats was shown on BBC Three (he is however making a programme about Mecca and his Islamic faith for BBC Two).

Getting a 28 year old London-born grime artist with a West African and Lebanese heritage to front a food programme is precisely the sort of thing the BBC should be doing. Part of their remit is ‘Representing the UK, its nations, regions and communities’. Like Rick Stein, I am an old, grumpy white man that loves Cornwall, cooking and poetry. I feel represented; I’m sure there are many BBC viewers who do not.

I’m not calling for Stein et al to be cancelled, although Christ knows it’s time for Saturday Kitchen to have a shake up -surely someone has had another idea in the twenty years since they came up with food heaven or food hell. You need a safe pair of hands, especially for live TV, and that sort of confidence only comes with experience which should be respected and cherished. I’m not being ageist either, I’ll watch Rick Stein until he uses his last breath to utter one final line of Betjeman. But, in the 80’s, the BBC boldly commissioned series from the then unknown Ken Hom and Madhur Jaffrey. Between them, they helped revolutionise British home cooking. Radical changes in viewing habits since then means it would be impossible to pull off the same trick twice, but nevertheless, this generation’s Hom and Jaffrey are out there. It’s in the BBC’s remit to find them and put them on screen. Go on, earn your licence fee before it’s too late.

The Reviews

William Sitwell, The Telegraph
Paro, London

A little tip for you. If you ever find you’ve started a sentence with the word ‘indeed’, smash your computer to pieces and never write another word again in your life. Do something with your hands - landscape gardening is very rewarding I’ve heard. I’m joking or course! All you have to do is delete the word ‘indeed’ and get on with your life. No one will ever know that you had the bad taste to write it in the first place and it will make literally zero difference to the meaning of the sentence. Unfortunately, no one has let Willian Sitwell into this little secret.

‘Indeed it’s one of the great revelations I’ve had when it comes to Indian food in recent years’. Let’s try that again shall we. ‘It’s one of the great revelations I’ve had when it comes to Indian food in recent years’. That’s better. Carry on.

In his review Sitwell is unnecessarily rude about Bangladeshi-owned high street curry houses, calling them an ‘insult to Indian food that enables you to walk into any curry house in the UK and order exactly the same dish’. God, how awful. Imagine that. It would be like going to a burger chain restaurant and being able to get your favourite thing no matter where you are in the country. There’s no future in that, obviously. The British curry house was a stroke of genius; an easily replicable business model that could provide a good living to an immigrant population and that was hugely popular with its customer base and therefore commercially successful.

People sneer at curry houses and their ubiquitous ‘base sauce’, but that’s one of the reasons they are so loved. In her excellent 2017 Guardian feature ‘Who killed the great British curry house?’ Bee Wilson says, ‘Was any food ever so thoughtfully designed to please its audience as the early curry house menus? Each day, the chefs cooked up a gigantic vat of “base sauce” which could be adjusted to varying degrees of hotness and creaminess to suit the diners’ tastes. This sauce consisted of onions and carrots simmered with ginger, garlic, turmeric and other spices into an all-purpose orangey gravy . . . . If red peppers and green chillis were added, it became a jalfrezi. With yoghurt, garam masala and almonds, the same sauce transformed into a pasanda.’

Classical French cooking uses exactly the same principle. Chefs cook up vats of stock and smaller pots of demi-glace and shove in a bit of port and Madeira for a Madeira sauce, add truffles to that and you’ve got Perigueux sauce, and so on. More expensive ingredients, different accent, less sneering.

But let’s not be too beastly to him; Sitwell has suffered this week. He visited a recently opened Indian restaurant in the same building at The Lyceum theatre in London’s glittering West End. According to the press release that Sitwell quotes, Paro is a ‘love letter to Calcutta’ but the critic found it to be ‘more poison pen than affectionate missive’. Instead of the ‘modern interpretation of traditional Indian flavours of West Bengal’ promised by the aforementioned release, he found ‘bowl after bowl of indeterminate slop’ that included ‘a heavy heave of chewy lamb chunks in a thick, stagnant pond-green grey’ daal that was ‘stiff and unsoupy’ and rotis that ‘crumbled at the touch’.

The kitchen is headed up by 23 year old chef Niaz Caan. I could tell you a story about chef Caan but I wouldn’t want to get anyone into trouble. Let’s just say he sounds like the ambitious type. If Sitwell’s review is accurate, it seems like he’s got a way to go before he achieves the success he apparently craves.

Best line: ‘you arrive in a place of dark brown panelling, cheap wobbly tables and uncomfortable chairs; a room with all the charm of a bailiff’s storage facility’
Worst line: ‘the staff rush around in a spirit that is more like crossing a busy road in Hanoi than the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’. Sitwell is reviewing an Indian restaurant that is co-located with the theatre where The Lion King is staged, not a Vietnamese restaurant in the Royal Opera House. It wouldn’t have taken too much effort to tweak the initial thought to make it more appropriate to the subject at hand.
Did the review make me want to book a table: I hate myself, but not that much.

Subscribe now to continue reading Smashed #15 where the round up of reviews continues and you can find out where the critics were reviewing a year, 5 years and 10 years ago in the ‘For Old Dines Sake’ feature.