Jack Stein: Life and Travel Lessons from Rick Stein, Captaining The Stein Ship into Future Waters, Vanilla Bass & The Dangers of 1% Improvement, Surfing and Cooking

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2:01Hey guys, you are in for an absolute treat. This episode with Jack Stein is amazing. Jack is incredibly well read. He is super smart. He is the perfect partner for a perfect podcast conversation. We go so much into this. Jack has literally taken over the reins from his father, Rick, Rick Stein, who I'm sure we all know, they have built an absolute empire of a business and have kind of changed the game. Without Rick, there would have been no massive surge in people opening restaurants in Cornwall. So we go lots into kind of the wisdom of Rick, what he's passed on to Jack, how Jack forges his own path and identity from his old man.

2:43He's got loads of interesting stuff on this. We talk about surfing and the parallels to running kitchens and building businesses. There's loads about how they found their unique way of doing things at the Stein Group. You know, they've got this David Bowie style council where they really check their brand and making sure their brand is bang on, which I absolutely loved. We talk about the danger of the 1 % improvement rule. Everyone talks about improve 1%, improve 1%. There's actually hidden dangers in that. And Jack gives a great example of this vanilla bass dish they were cooking tons of leadership lessons in there tons of travel lessons obviously rick and jack have traveled all over the globe i absolutely love this i'm currently in lisbon at the minute and i've applied some of these lessons to what i'm going around traveling is absolutely insane um you're gonna love this i'd be super grateful if you could please share it if you enjoy it anyway enjoy this episode with the wonderful jack stein

3:44so Jack Stein thank you so much for coming on the podcast mate thanks for having me very grateful that we're doing this especially on May Day down in Padstow when it's absolutely rammo I've just been driving around and thinking fucking hell what's going on here yeah the town's going to be it'll be bouncing in a few hours that's for sure there's some ciders going out there what time are we on well it's about what is it it's morning too early well there's already people outside the boozers when I was driving around I was thinking this is it's a big day for the town and yeah it's a good day to be here it's great I mean it's so much fun I said to an Aussie guy who's threatened to go back to London today I'm like just stay for half an hour if you like it you know you'll be here all day and you'll be going home tomorrow with a hangover well that's basically what I was thinking I was meant to be going back today but when I oh don't the stars aligned I was thinking wow don't watch it man it's crazy it's good fun and it's like you know it's not um it's not like sort of throwing tar barrels around it's just good fun but by the by the evening you'll make a lot of friends why is the um because mayday's big in oxford as well isn't it yeah why is it big in padstow in oxford what's the so like as in it's way bigger than any other part of the country so one of uh i think like i don't know i mean i'm i tried to do this in my master's dissertation i remember like asking my um my coordinator if i could do like the history of like these kind of festivals and he sort of said like it's like you You know, you don't like, it's difficult because there's a lot of it, it's hard to pin down what it's about.

5:12Like, obviously, May is spring festival in the same way as Halloween is the, you know, is the winter sort of like, make sure you've got all your food in, make sure, because, you know, you could die, you know, over the winter back in the day, you know. So this is much more like, I'm just explaining it to my kids, like, you know, as in like, you know, like, we're talking about like animals being born at this time of the year because there's going to be a lot of food around. so I guess it's just simply a celebration of like I mean the lyrics to the song are like summers are coming today and it's basically like a kind of May you know it's welcome to summer let's celebrate and it's a chance for like you know all the stuff that usually goes on I don't know if you've ever seen the film sorry the play Jerusalem you know the Mark Ryland's play if anyone's seen that they actually sing the May song in that the same May song is in Padstow with the same lyrics and I'm convinced actually I know for a fact he must have come down here because in that there's there's just so many similarities to this so it happens i think there's quite a few but oxford's a big one and i'm sure there's a lot i mean around around europe it's just i think a celebration summer but you know there'll be you know in the same way as harvest festivals a celebration of like the bounty of the harvest and like making sure you've got enough stocks for the winter this is kind of um and you know all the young young like you know everyone has their first kiss at mayday you know yeah yeah yeah yeah well it's a great story thing and one of the things i want to talk to you about um is kind of cornwall and and storytelling because i think that the two are kind of inextricably intertwined and we'll get on to that but i um what i want to start with is i know well in the kind of research i've done is that i know you're an avid um surfer yeah and i was listening to do you know led hamilton yeah listen to his podcast on the way down with rick rubin who's the music guy really interesting like the two peppers producer and that yeah he did uh He's just started to surf, isn't he?

7:05He's like, he's just, yeah, he's just jumped in. And he's, I mean, he's, he's one of those guys a bit like that all or nothing. Both of them are. So listening to them on a podcast was, was perfect. But what he was talking about is the cross, cross section of disciplines, which I thought was really interesting. It's like, you can learn one, like one thing can teach you something completely about a different thing. If you really like line everything up. and i'd love to know what is what has surfing and the discipline of surfing taught you about like running a kitchen or cooking i think that's quite interesting like it's a good way good jump off spot um i think like obviously like the you could very very basically like it's respect for the ocean i guess it's like you that the first thing you learn when you're a surfer when you if you if you go up around the ocean you're not like a born again surfer i don't mean that in a kind of pejorative sense i mean more like you'll get like people that learn to surf check that don't worry yeah you'll get people who learn stuff like rick a bit later in life and they just love it because it feels something that's like in their kind of psyche or like something that really speaks to them like you said like this crossover and actually it's um and then you get the people that have learned to surf from a young age just grew up by the ocean right so i've grown up by the ocean so i know the ocean like the back of my hand like lead would right lead you know anyone in hawaii like hawaiians have got as many words for the ocean as uh as like inuit america like inuit people have for snow you know like um and people like here in padstow the fishermen surfers anybody who's around the ocean like you just kind of get to and not i wouldn't say this i don't find it in any way spiritual like a lot of people do i don't i just do it for um for my mental health and i only i actually realized this till i did a ski season i was in verbi for a year for a season um and i was cooking out there and it was six months i didn't see the ocean like and i've never been i've been away from way longer than six months but always by the ocean you know i got to the point after five months i had to get down to lake geneva and kind of put my hands around my head and imagine it was the ocean and then i and my dad swims every morning in the ocean and i do as well like cold water swimming and whatever and just have done for years so i think if you live by the ocean that's like like it's like a chef that gets taught from like a really young age right so like a apprentice who comes through the system right and is and understands like everything about being a really young chef and how you know like all the brigade and everything like that and then you get like people who come like i and again like so i'm a surfer from a young age but i'm a chef from an older age so i went to university so i came into the kitchen from a perspective of tertiary education and like you know ferran adria and heston and this kind of like demystification of food through science and i loved that because i did a physiology and psychology degree um and i find i found that interesting um so i was like a kind of like a like a convert to cooking right as in the same way as rick rubin is a convert to surfing so in I see both sides.

10:13And I think in a brigade in a kitchen, I think it's really important that you have both types of chefs. You need to have chefs that are just going to go, that have all that knowledge built up from 16, going to catering college, knowing the repertoire, knowing all the different garnishes. But you can ask them any question about anything, right? About food. And they'll understand it because they've been taught it and they've learnt it. On the other side, you'll have people like Heston who've come from a different background. but I've gone and read about the science of Harold McGee's, the science of cooking is like a seminal text in this.

10:48And I used to read it like religiously because I didn't, even though my mum and dad had a restaurant and I was a kitchen porter and I can go for all of that. But actually I was, I'd come, I had a master's degree. And when I came into our kitchen, we had James Nathan, who was in MasterChef and he was a solicitor, he was a barrister. We're trained to be a barrister and he switched. And you're getting this a lot now. so i guess to answer your question is like surfing is for me is a discipline of of understanding the basics of your environment like you have to understand the basics right but you also have to you know you have to have people around you that understand don't go out in the sea today like for instance so i was down at the beach at constantine last winter and it was it was a solid day and this is going to sound very geeky like again it was a solid day it was clean like it was big clean so when you say clean like the waves are just like groom no white horses didn't look stormy right inviting it was sunny right but i look at that beat and it's like so it's eight foot so eight foot to a surfer like is it's not like an eight foot person it's like say triple overhead so you talking about 12 foot faces it's weird the way they measure waves is weird doesn't make any sense it's fucking massive massive fucking huge right there's a guy coming down there with this and he's a learner and there's these rip currents going out and like they are lethal like these rip council you'll be out you'll be gone and nobody will see you like in the middle of winter and even though like you know you see that kind of surf on a surfing competition in like hawaii where like they've got all like oh a laird's from you have all these different like reefs and the oceanography the bathymetry of the waves is all different and it's all like perfect in constantine it's not perfect around here we have such a like the the ocean shelf goes like really like slowly out whereas in hawaii it just drops off so when you say the shelf the so the waves pick up on the the bottom of the as the wave comes in it picks up and picks up and slows down by interacting with the the sea bed yeah so when in hawaii it comes from like 400 meters deep to like really shallow so you can go out you know not far and no wave will break on you you'll never see a wave you could sit there all day at like 20 foot hawaii and you won't get wet you know and there'll be channels you can paddle out in whereas in cornwall you could be sat there and a wave can break 20 meters out beyond you right so this guy was there and i went up to him i said dude like i like i don't think i don't think it's a good idea going in today and he said um what do you mean it's perfect i said like honestly i said i've lived in my whole life and um i there's no way I'd go in and he was just like looked at me funny I said look mate if the lifeguards were here like I'm trying to make it more simple the lifeguards were here the beach would be closed like 100 % closed and he sort of like I said go around to Haaland which is around the corner it's like more protected that's where everyone's surfing today like there's no one here no one in the water for a reason and then I walked off and I turned around and he was he put his surfboard down and I was like oh there we go like that and then he went for a swim and I was just like fucking hell like if you want to go out there mate take your fucking board at least you got something to cling on to so yeah i think like the so the i think surfing is like isn't it the the similarities are like you have to respect where you you know you have to respect the people you're around you with you have to show respect to like knowledge and expertise and people that know more than you but you're also like it's also individual and and cooking can be individual sometimes you can be like in the shit in like cooking and the worst you can do is like when you were like so we've got we do big numbers here and you obviously would have heard people like in the weeds going down when you have a sensory overload and you have to be very present in surfing and in the kitchen when it's you cooking and you're like in control this is during service yeah like if you're in like say my so my dad used to do sauce and seafood so in our business like that's the number one section so i did it like last good friday i was in there and i've you know i haven't cooked for a while and i was like oh fuck it i'm going in so i said i said the guy you have the day off i'm in here like you know so i did this i did like lunch and dinner and i haven't cooked like i've cooked a lot but like on the past tasting not like just this is me because you control the tempo of the kitchen you control the tempo of you you're telling four minutes on this five minutes on that and there becomes a point where you've got like like in surfing where you've got a moment where the adrenaline's going like i had it in indonesia once i like was fucking hung over i shouldn't have gone out and like i went out it's like eight foot day at this place called scar reef i remember paddling over this wave and like all these aussies are just fucking going get out fucking paddle paddle paddle and like there's a wave coming towards me and that's like it's like being in service when you're like this is on me like survival instinct like if i fuck this up like i know in the kitchen you're gonna die but you could in the water but if i fuck this up like the kitchen's going down like if i if i don't get through this little period or through this free wave set then the kitchen is fucked for the next half an hour and everyone's going to complain and it's your fault the thing with me in the kitchen is is like i don't know if a lot of chefs are like this but like that if it's my fault i get fucking angry but i don't get angry with anyone else but myself like i don't shout i don't swear i mean i fucking of course i swear but like i don't like i know i don't agree with like putting the blame on other people like and i know a lot of chefs will they'll be like that guy is fucking so slow that's why we're slow it's like nah like this is on me right so that i think those those are the sort of similarities and differences really like you're out there on your own like at the end of the day you've got to pull yourself up by your bootstraps when you're in a kitchen and when you're surfing like if you get into trouble and you're on your own you're on your fucking own if you choose to go out in the water on your own and you drown you've got no one to blame but yourself and if you go down the similarities in on in a kitchen you know that's your that's on you and you know if you haven't done enough prep quite often you'll find in a kitchen the worst services the ones where you've got 50 in as opposed to 150 in you're 150 in like you're in early you're like on it on it on it you have 50 people on you're kind of doing a bit of staff tea in the back you're just sort of doing some other jobs you've and then like suddenly you'll get like a you could get as many people in half an hour as you get in 150 night but just only for half an hour um and then you're in the fucking shit and then that you know but you know what like i say like that's on you and i think servings taught me like you know to like when you get like really when that day at Sky Reef in Indonesia, when I was under, I was like, oh, I was ready.

17:11I was gone. Like I was 100. Sorry, this wave comes down and does it in basically. Yeah, like, and then, and. What's the feeling when you're underwater and you're just. Normally you're like, normally you get, you normally you're just like, I'm going to come out of this, fine. Like it's, but this is, this is a, this is a day of consequence. Like, you know, I wouldn't paddle out on a day like that now I've got kids, no way. But I remember, but I got to a point where I was underwater for so long and you got a thing you know you know i was paddling like fucking like as fast as i could paddle to try and get under this thing but the reef kind of sucks you in because the water's like draining off it and i am and i couldn't do anything and i was fucked and the aussies because the aussies are quicker than paddling and i was really hung over and they were like fucking screaming at me like you know anyway i went i went under um the first wave actually wasn't too bad but the second wave was worse because i've been dragged further into the reef um and you're bouncing off coral and stuff like that which is a bit painful but i got to a point i was under for so long i just gave up like i'm like 100 like we'd been to the gillies which is an island and there's a party island and then there's like they're kind of like romantic island and we'd stop to the romantic island is that near columbia gillie island no it's in it's just like in indonesia sorry yeah i'm thinking of bocus like yeah yeah and um and all the boys are on the back of the boat like come on let's go to the fucking party island like and about three or four in the morning like we were like and we were surfing by seven do you know what i mean i mean i remember waking up at seven hearing these waves i've never seen waves like it and just going i'm going out in the first boat like and then i think i was still half pissed to be honest and then like i got out there and this this happened and i was underwater and i remember just thinking to myself this is it you've gone like you you're not you're not coming out of this you're definitely going to pass out like i could feel myself passing out never been underwater for that long never been like that like everything's going a bit and then suddenly i just thought to myself fuck man you should have just gone party island you know could have at least fucking partied and like then died as opposed to the romantic island since sunset and had like a few beers so but i mean i came out of it and like you know i came back with like i mean again these things a lot of big wave surfers will say that will happen to you and that the fact you survived it means you know you can survive it like actually a lot of you don't like people do die surfing but it's not like skiing like you know like you know when you're skiing like you know on my ski season there's like 20 people died in that season like it's like hectic so but yeah yeah the skiing things no one talks about because it's uh i think i listened to joe rogan he's like he spilled it out because everyone thinks i'll go skiing or you know it's kind of going to the folly douche getting wanked on that slope i've been there you know and that slope afterwards that's fucked like that is so dangerous but no one talks about people think i was skiing you know you know it's kind of like a um elitist thing where it's but the fact you're saying um surfing's easier but i think the um one of the threads i'm trying to link between this this food and surfing's i think what you've you've said there jackson saying there's so many different like i think the knowing your environment so like you've grown up with the sea and you can kind of feel that and then obviously you're saying you know you didn't come straight into food but there are people who have kind of grown up with the um the vegetables or you understand like i interviewed tommy banks he's an example of that he's a racist like he'd literally feel like his whole vein arteries are like linked into the into the surrounding area so i think that's fascinating but then also this kind of solo adrenaline rush um which you know obviously dropping into an eight foot wave is going to give you it's going to give you a buzz and i interviewed a guy called will store last week who um he's written like three books the status game the science of storytelling and selfie but he went as a sergeant um a kitchen in australia yeah we'll talk about your time in australia in a sec but he just said i've never in my life experienced a buzz like it yeah he goes it is the most addictive thing because on on this kind of outside looking you about why would you want to put yourself through that long shifts yeah long hours i would love to know what has been the best wave you've ever caught which has given you that feeling of like less of you having it yeah and then what's been one of those services um or a service at a time in one of the restaurants you've worked at or run where either your back was against the wall but that kind of feeling you're kind of getting that same feeling as you as you are when you're surfing that wave i think like i mean there's been a load i mean like obviously like like when you get like barreled like when you go inside the way does that's everyone is everyone hunts for that like that's like your it's very like again i'm not a religious person at all but like when when when all you can see and you can feel you can hear it goes like there's this noise when the wave goes over the top of you and then there's this it sounds like it's i guess it's like you're just so close to the edge you know you're so close to this the whole ocean is moving over you um and it's you know it's like it's very like it's hard to describe and then there's this and as the pressure in the wave because the water's all kind of going behind you and it's like a you know it's eventually gonna go needs to go somewhere it spits out like it goes like whoosh past you and that's the feeling that you just think so that happened to me once uh um in a place called uh it's race tracks it's a it's a break near padang padang in indonesia and i was surfing there and it was a big day rob michado was in who's been on like rogan's show and like uh shane dorian and there's a few like pros in there that day and i was out there and i was like literally like shoulder hopping which was like when you're not nowhere near a wave and then this guy just called me into one and this wave is like a it's not like a wave you turn on you just when you say call you in does that mean he just goes go he's like no he just like he so so normally there's like a so in surfing there's like you know like locals and pros will probably get most of the good waves but there is actually like a kind of etiquette like if you're closer you are to where the wave starts to break that should be your wave right so you wait long enough you'll end up because everyone takes waves you'll end up in that spot and i sat next to a guy who was a local pro and he called me in on one because i hadn't caught a wave and he'd know he knows i hadn't caught away but i knew what i was doing like you can just tell when somebody knows what to do it i paddle into it and just like solid like overhead and just this wave is called racetracks because you don't turn you just stand there and you just go as quick as you can and i just got like the best and i remember was it i I think it may have been Rob, Michelle, or somebody was just down the line.

23:28And when you're seeing something like that, you just have this instant, like you just shout at them, like, ooh, like, because it's just like, yes, like it doesn't matter who they are. Like they could be your worst enemy, but you still, you don't want them to fall off because then you're going to hit the reef and you're probably going to end up, you know, with some beer. They call it like a barley tattoo, but basically you get, the coral gets in your skin and you get big scarring and stuff. So, but yeah, that was like, that was just, and that was insane, but that was just like, if he hadn't called me in, I was never going for that wave.

23:55because I just was like, nah, but because he did it, I'm like, yeah, I can do this. What's the feeling, Jack? It's just like, I don't know, like again, it's just like any adrenaline, like you talk to anyone who's real, like, you know, real adrenaline junkies and that they can really break it down a lot better than I can. But like, it's that feeling of like, you're so close to the edge that you know that any mistake is going to be costly. And that, but when you make it, you feel a sense of achievement, but it's like it in surfing. it's like they'll claim claiming is like a big thing when you come out you just like just in this state of euphoria i suppose and i guess that relinks into my service so i did service my first service on sauce at the seafood is my most memorable one because again it was like it's very similar so my chef to party which is the guy that was a commie and i'm like oh he's like you need to start cooking on sauce you know it's so just describe listeners the sauce i know obviously it's making the sauce yeah but like that is that like a particular um what why is that kind of harder than other sections or is it harder than other sections so it's the hardest section or it's the most senior section in most kitchens that like you can get to without being a sous chef or a head chef sure so and that's also what dad used to cook so in our company it's like that's rick's section so we always like to if you start as a commie and you learn to cook sauce you know as a commie you've done like you know you're already ahead because you must be better than say the chef to parties or demi chefs because you've you know and i was a commie at the time and this guy really wanted me to cook sauce and obviously or in the day when you're doing prep you're making sauces which is obviously really technical and it's like very involved but in service you control the speed of the main section right so what you're doing is you're making so you're doing all the all the dishes that you're that take the longest so braising all the dishes that are like um that require the kind of the longest time so you're basically controlling so there's four people on main so you've got a sauce section a fish section and a garnish and then a plating up person and so you're kind of controlling three other people so if you don't go quick then everyone slows down and the thing breaks down so my my chef to party was saying to me um i was like i'll cook like a lunch you know like 20 cover lunch or a 30 cover lunch and he said nah fuck that he said cook saturday night like 150 people because if you cook 20 lunch it's like surfing if you catch a little tiny wave down the end down there you're gonna regret you know and actually this reminds me of a guy that i was surfing at jake's point which is a slab in western australia which i look at now and i can't believe i surfed it and the guy i was about i was like i was looking i was like i don't know if i want to paddle out and he's like yeah you could not i was we're gonna go to monkey me to see some dolphins with my ex-girlfriend and he goes yeah you could go and see some fucking dolphins or you could paddle out here you know go and see the dolphins regret it for the rest of your life or fucking paddle out and i paddled out caught some waves and and never forget it so it was a bit like that this guy said you could cook lunch for 20 or you could saturday lunch for 150 so i did and i went in there and i was in the shit like and it was like that wave it was like i was way beyond my skill set but i'm like gonna do it i'm fucking i'm i'm up for it like and at the back was a guy ben towel who was one of uh he'd come from le manoir um he'd like you know he's you know he went on to work for gordon at the london in new york he now got his own restaurants over there on the east coast he's and he was really hard on me like and he used to say things to me like you won't forget this and he's like fuck you i will fuck you i'll forget you tomorrow you're a proper cunt but actually i don't forget a lot of things he taught me i still do to this day anyway just quickly on that so what has he taught you that you still imply like like just like how you set your section up like cleaning like all the just the little little basics that like you know like putting like a piece of tea towel under a chopping board like making sure you've got a little bin and some and a thing to wash your section down make like just like just ways of working like little like things that he because he had been trained from a young age um and he just but he taught it to me in a real kind of like hardcore way in the same way as like you know a doctor you could do five years of medical training and then you'd probably learn more in your first six months in a hospital than you do in your training because you actually have to do stuff rather than read it in books and this guy ben was on the back section on float and i'm on mains and i've gone i'm cooking i've got the first 75 covers out the way and i'm like euphoric I'm like and there is shit everywhere because I haven't been like cleaning as I go I'm like literally cooking like like in what that surfing day I'm like literally on the on the edge of my toes clinging on for dear life and I come out the other end like I came out of that wave and I and I'm just turning around and I'm going right I'm gonna clean down now like blah blah and the moment I just had that thought Ben was straight on to me like what the fuck is this you like it's a fucking your section shit and i remember thinking to myself this is so unfair this is so unfair because if you'd come five seconds later you'd see me start to clean down it wasn't like i was like i couldn't physically do anything else i just stopped cooking my last and i knew i had a break in the checks and i'm just getting my tea towel and my whatnot to clean down and then he nailed me i thought you fucking prick um but actually like i don't think that because like what he was you know afterwards like in and like in a kitchen it's i'm sure lots of people told you before like what happens in the kitchen in service is just forgotten about and we and him had a beer afterwards and he was like you did really well he goes you just i didn't want you to forget i didn't want you to sit there and be like it'd be like me coming off that wave and sitting there and just standing there and sitting in the ocean going i'm so good because you if you don't start paddling back out you're going to get washed up the reef do you know i mean you know so so that's kind of like the two are kind of both big adrenaline rushes and you and you're doing something that you don't think you could do but once you've done it and i think what the chef was doing was when he said cook 150 rather than 20 is like once you've about boxed off 150 you'll never look back so once i've caught that big wave at racetracks i'll never look back i know i can do it you know rather than just keep building yourself up in little like which is important when you're learning something but if you can already do it and he knew i could already do it because you know fuck's sake my dad's rick stein and i've known you know like i i should be able to if i can't fucking do it get the fuck out so yeah very i mean like i say but again the adrenaline rush of being in service and stuff is and that's why people come that's why people come to it like it's not like an industry you'd want to be in if you like for the money or for the hours but like there's nothing like it like i've worked in offices i worked you know i did work experience at um willis in the in the city and during 9-11 as well i mean it's fucking hectic and like you know office based work and no i just it's not me yeah it's not the um i and actually funny enough um that kind of teased me up nicely rory southern when one of the podcasts came and said the best mba is either a kitchen porter or working in a um like a corner shop yeah and the reason he says this is basically in in kind of big corporate world where you go in and you're siloed so it's like you're in the finance department or you're in the marketing department or in the sales department whereas when you when you work as a kitchen porter or and or in a corner shop is what he's been yeah great way of saying is you basically see the sum of everything moving all in intertwined yeah and he says you can't get that you can only get that experience um that's why so many people who go into like a a specific role really struggle they try and set their own business because they're like thinking fucking hell like how do i do it he's basically saying from the kitchen porter you actually see the full full spectrum what are some of those lessons you you took from being a kitchen porter that you because you know you're now chef director that you still think are kind of applicable today yeah as you now look after the whole stein you know i think like there's a few i mean he's right you know like i mean kitchen port is like the most important role in the kitchen my mum and dad have always rewarded the kitchen porters with like higher level of tips you know than the rest of the kitchen because they understand that it's a it's like without the kitchen porter you break down the kitchen breaks down and i started as a kitchen porter when i was young like 14 years old and um i mean obviously early doors i learned that the old man used to fire people on the spot which you don't do anymore um you know because we would be in there watching him like and he was you know he's a you know amazing guy great cook but like probably not the best organized uh chef in the world because he's you know again when you're running a business this you've got you've got a lot of spinning plates so i used to watch him cook and way interacted with the front of house and this that and the other but i think the thing with the kitchen porter is you do see you interact with every aspect so in the morning you've got the chambermaids and the room guys and girls and you've got the people doing breakfast and then you know then the front of house staff come in it's you're interacting between both and also you're hearing from the front of house because they will often talk as they drop in the plate stuff about table 12's a prick or table nine's really nice or table eight's got like a you know you see you you understand you know if you're siloed in a kitchen it's like the food is everything you know and if you're siloed in the in the front of house you like service is everything you know you know so like and that's and the kitchen port links both because you know you you realize that out there beyond those swing doors is a bunch of people and when i left kitchen port to become a front of house person i realized and that's why i think i've got much a good rounded perspective when i'm in a kitchen and that's why it really winds me up when people send food back and it's a complaint and chefs stand around for fucking five minutes just like disputing the complaint it's like fucking hell if you got that like i remember seeing this like this plant this beer base like a fish stew come back and person said it's raw and i was i was um on the stills I was doing coffees at the time.

33:53So I've just graduated from kitchen porter to coffees, but same sort of thing, like ancillary roll, but still. How old are you at this age? Like 15 maybe. Cool. And this comes back and the chef's going, like they say there's five bits of fish, right? Two bits are clearly raw. And I knew it. I mean, raw fish looks like. And he goes, well, that bit's all right. And I thought to myself, yeah, but those bits aren't. And it's not really about that. it's about like saying yeah okay we'll get another one on if you had spent the time it took you to argue the point with the front of house person that this person's not happy with their food and it just put another dish on that rear base would be halfway cooked by now and the person would be fed in you know five minutes as opposed to sitting there trying to prove your point because you think the food's everything and you think you know better than the front of house and the customer and that's what you see like being kitchen kitchen porter and front of house i think both those those sides help the chefs understand that the business is it's not just about your silo and kitchen porters go between the two and then business owners if they can and this is what um um marco talks about uh in one of his shows that he does on you've seen on youtube like the early shows about um no it's actually a boiling point when he's talking about gordon about gordon going for his three stars about when you go for your three stars it's not about the food it's about everything you have to be able to expand and look at everything and i think that's a really interesting point that roy brings up is that kitchen porters are that and it's really and actually most good chefs have been the kitchen porters and actually like look at noma like noma have given their kitchen porter like equity in the company you know like and he's been there since day one you know so yeah i think it's i think the marco point is really interesting because i think he's got a quote with bourdain uh when bourdain goes to see him i don't know the hotels escape me but is like people think of restaurants the food first and he goes it's setting service food that's what marco says in that order and i suppose what the kitchen porter can do is thread the needle through those three things because he or she is kind of like the octopus yeah they see everything yeah seeing the whole thing and that's the thing you know that's the thing you know as a kitchen porter there are people out there called customers and every single customer coming back every plate coming back is a story they like the food and that's another thing you know you're seeing plates of food that are completely empty you talk with the kitchen porter so we did a thing um where we used to put send out sides with every dish every main course so just like new potatoes and a green veg you know it was just costed into the menu and the kitchen porter came up to me and once he said do you know how much of those that we throw away i said what do you mean and he said i just it's just ridiculous he said the amount of potatoes you're just throwing straight in the bin because you're sending them out to people that don't want them yeah and we listened to that so then we just said right what we'll do is we'll take the cost of the side out of the dish and then we'll make a side dish which is cost like you pay for and then and within a week the guy's like you're wasting half as much if like people are just because people happen to buy the potatoes so they're going to eat them as opposed to just getting given them for nothing um so things like that you know you learn a lot from the kitchen porters you you know if you want to design a kitchen tomorrow and you've got a kitchen you're going to say right we're going to knock down this kitchen start again talk to the kitchen porters first because they'll be the ones that know like we had a classic a absolute classic case in the in the cafe is that we we redid the cafe and the drain so when you at the end of the night you mop the floors and then you squeegee them like you know with like it's like you'd use on a like window you know like a window screen wiper so they're big long things you squeegee the water into the drains and the drain in the cafe was put and it went uphill right and the kitchen portal we had this like night you know we always have nights with the family like a few drinks and that and then the kitchen porter said to the old man he's like yeah the old man's gone oh how's the new kitchen the cafe and the old man and the kitchen porter's gone um yeah it's really good it's just that the drains shame the drains go up and the old man's closed the kitchen straight away and just said listen like you know i'm not you know i've been there at one in the morning cleaning a floor and if i thought that the floor was if the drain was higher than the fall of the floor i would think this company doesn't appreciate me so he closed it and we redid it cost us thousands but like it was a really important thing and that came from kitchen board so yeah i mean again it's there you know anyway any chef who cooks at home who's got a wife or partner or boyfriend or whatever that that um has to clean up after them will know that chefs use kitchen porters a lot because i use about 20 000 things in the kitchen at home when i'm cooking the um yeah i think there's it's a great lesson across just everything in terms of the i think someone um william kendall who's the guy did green and blacks and a really interesting guy based up in suffolk he said the most important employee in the business is the newest one yeah because they see things that no one else sees yeah and actually you know most people think i'll look after the senior leadership team which is important but actually seeing that other person you talked um i think earlier you said you know i'm rick stein's fucking son i should be able to make some more i'd love i'd love to talk about um you know i listened to a couple of podcasts you'd you'd been on the namaste one which was brilliant um i'd love to you you speak obviously incredibly highly of him but i'd love to know how you're kind of um i think you both said you're kind of both chaotic a little bit which i relate to massively um and i would love to know how your kind of creative process is similar yet different and maybe we could talk i think you talked about like a it was a miso uh what was the fish dish of the turbo miso with ham like that maybe we can use that as a kind of like i think like the the jump off point really here with that is you know like he's his style of food has been built up over years and years of like us traveling and and like getting inspiration from france initially and then Asia and you know all over now anywhere and um but also we've got pad so here the ports right here you know the fishing fleets right here we get fish and shellfish to the back door and that's kind of really unique to us here in pad so so and his his sort of um maxim is like fresh fish simply cooked right and you know when I was in my you know after I'd done my training initially I went off to do stages everywhere and and i really was trying to kind of test the null hypothesis that simple food is the best kind of food i guess what was i doing you know i was trying to say like can i find any evidence out there that i would prefer to be in a three-star michelin kitchen or i'd rather be in a you know any other type of kitchen yeah and i did i went out and did stages at places and then came back and realized that actually i really like the food that we do i really like the kind of that kind of buzzy food that's you know not like trying to be too much too pretentious but also means you get like a decent work-life balance and and all that kind of stuff which is i think important especially in a family business you know where where you work with your family you know and we know the people that work for us aren't you know you know some of them a guy said it really like i don't know if you ever seen the remember the littlest hobo it was a show about a an alsatian that i think mike myers's first ever tv show appearance and it's a weird show but it was like about an alsatian and it like goes and helps somebody for the day she's got a problem like a kid or whatever and then it will move on and the whole point is at the end of the day it never stays like they always want it to stay and then it's just there's some song and it's like yeah yeah and then he buzzes off somewhere else and me we sat there with a couple of guys and were in the pub and they were leaving um to go to their next i think it was going to gordon's or wherever or the fat duck or somewhere and um and and he said he said oh you must get this all the time and i said what do you mean he goes well like you know people leave and you stay and i think yeah that's true like it is like you know and i said this to dad and he's like yeah like the amount of people that have come and then and gone because we 50 years the restaurants that being open next year like that's a long old time and and then i just realized that i actually really like what i do and i really like what dad does and mom does i really like their style of food and then suddenly i realized that lots of people in london were like having the same kind of like the coming out ofst john and river cafe and those those great restaurants and like really revering like simon hopkinson roly lee you know like you know now like people like you know jeremy covardis these you know the the restaurant in track the london restaurants that these kind of simple places like you think like that devonshire now like is a good example of like of like how much people like just love simplicity and you don't necessarily have to go for michelin you don't have to you know the time i spent in like on stage michelle brass like picking through like flowers for their gargoyle which is like still to this day one of like the best dishes i've ever seen and like when i seen it being done in front of me and i got to be part of that i was like so happy but it was like happiness that i'd seen it but also realization that it wasn't me and i think that's where i like really kind of came back to dad and mom you know because she's as much part of this restaurant as he is and and said you know what like i just want to work with you guys i want to like push to keep this brand going and like i i like it you know and it's interesting because i was at michelle brass between um where like michelle and sebastian so michelle was handing over to sebastian they did this michelle brass is in paris uh no in laggy old and oldbrack down in the south so is that like is that a three that's the reason okay I know you because you did three yeah I did that yeah I did the stage in Paris but that was at a bistro but okay yeah so this was so yeah where those really nice steak knives come from so I was down there and um if you think of like um chef's table and we're on a tangent here but I'm gonna keep going yeah chef's table um if you look at like that Netflix um documentary style of of of food tv right that started in my mind and so I'm sure like people who know better than me will might have a different opinion but that kind of depth of field look of like cinematic food that you get now on all those shows on netflix started with two two things and i think it was the same guy but they're very similar looking so one was um jiro i dream of sushi about the three mission star sushi guy who's like in his 80s in an underground station in in in tokyo and i've been there it's fucking unbelievable but like the most expensive meal because it goes about 25 minutes and costs about 500 quid but it's just like also you just don't let's don't you just eat what you're given and you get the fuck out of there that's it um the other one is um was an entree labrass so between the brass and that was between sebastian and michelle and they were they were handing over so for me being there at the same time the film was just released and uh was interesting because he was handing it over to his son which is what dad's doing with us right now and um and it was really like a three star and it's blah blah blah and it's you know like it was amazing like honestly like one of the best experiences of my life but i came back thinking like i want to take over for my dad like sebastian's taking over for michelle but i don't want to do that kind of food and weirdly three years later a few years later sebastian handed back the stars that his dad had had three stars since like the you know mid 80s or whatever um and then it's changed and he's gone simple and i'm not saying that that speaks to like what we do but my view of my dad is that he just likes things to be like simple you know where you like i spend more time talking to fishes fishermen farmers you know growers dairies you know going out and seeing product because i've grown up here like when when the merts bring shellfish into the back door the merts are a family right now on mayday they're in their ossies they'll be right at the front they you know pete mert is the head chef in the seafood restaurant johnny mert brings crabs and lobsters to the back door johnny mert's granddad and my granddad bought a boat together my granddad had a manic depression i never met him he committed suicide and um he but his therapy was to go out on a fishing boat and go lobster fishing which you speak to johnny mert and johnny's like if you think that was fucking therapy but like but so like we're so interconnected to this community um that actually like from for me it's not just about me and my family it's about all the families in padstow and being here on mayday really makes you feel that because they're all celebrating today but i'm not padstonian so i won't be i didn't get involved in that way i'll go out get pissed with them but like i'm not like this is their day and this is the kind of thing that my dad goes on about a lot the fishing community here the farming community we're into a lot with them and i'd rather be that and be a multi-generational restaurant business that just gets on with everybody and just like like keeps everyone like selling good lobsters good crabs and everything like that keeps the fishing fleet going then trying to become a three mission star chef because it's just that it's more that's more about you yeah this and also it's what we you know we alluded to at the beginning with the surfing it's like being in the environment yeah here you can you're really as you say you're kind of interwoven with with the fishermen so so this this the similarity or the or the link is is this simplicity yeah what how do you and how do you create your own kind of flair because i think um like a lot of people who've had a really successful like father they can often not struggle but like the obvious the example i heard is um eddie hearn right where he's gone off and done his own own thing how did you forge your own path but how have you done that do you know what i mean because i think um i think it was in the namaste podcast where the the lady said like it's like oh you're rick stein's son how do you shake that off do you mean you've done that i think like the best example so the best thing i could say so there's a so my uncle uh is a neuroscientist at oxford he's actually here today he said he's a model and he studies uh like magnocellular theory of dyslexia and uh things like um uh like uh dementia things like that like very interesting very deep guy right he's got he he had a colleague called blakeford colin blakeford and his daughter now is a very famous psychologist psychiatrist some physiologist whatever she deals with people teenage stuff right and i was listening to her on a on a on radio four and she said how do you ever get away from the fact that your dad was this really famous neuroscientist and you know you're in the same sort of field and she said well first and foremost there's nothing you don't you do about it you know your dad's your dad your mom's mum secondly but secondly that's just got her um she's been very lucky very fortunate and you've got her access to things like she might not be able to get access to so i doubt i would have been able to get a stage at michelle brass without dad or a stage at you know wherever i've been without that so i'm very fortunate but also i i like i respect the way that he's been with like like trying to like make sure the the british really like kind of take real ownership of their great producers and great suppliers and his food hero show that he did like in the late 90s about not wanting like like the british kind of little small cottage industries to vanish because of all the pressure from you know the big business and like supermarkets and stuff like all that stuff is really impressive and it is hard like you know you can't get away from the fact that people in my early tv career we're like can you get rick and rick come on and then we'll give you the show and like you know we did a couple you know like but now it's not like that anymore you know like i've got you know but and it but at the end of the day you know he's so famous i don't mean this in the like not saying he's that famous but like he's been on every saturday kitchen that's ever been on he's been on food tv since 1995 he is there's nothing you can you can't get away from him you You know, even if I wanted to just do something completely different, you're always going to...

49:50And the thing is that I wouldn't want to do something different to be different. And I don't think Eddie Hearn's done that either. I think Eddie Hearn is very like, you know, when you see him and his dad talking together, they're actually very, very similar. He just did his own business and does it his own way. And I run my business. I run the kitchens in my own way. Like nothing like dad. I mean, dad, they're nothing, nothing like... the way the kitchen's run now is nothing like, but that's because I've also, the industry's moved on. Yeah. And I've, like, you know, like you, things that Eddie Hearn's dad would have done, Eddie couldn't do now because, you know, like for, you know, like it's a different industry.

50:30Like we, you know, the idea, like that's what I said, like dad used to like fire people on the spot. You can't do it anymore. You know, we've got HR departments and anyone who says, oh, we wish, you know, if he was, if Rick was here right now and said, oh, you know, somebody was to say, I wish you'd go back to the way things used to be right for instance like buying fish we used to buy fish for cash at the back door right you know okay fair enough yeah it's very romantic handing cash over to a but you know like in a business that's got you know that turns over the amount of money we turn up you can't start like having giving commies cash to give to fishermen it just doesn't yeah yeah and there's romantic it's romantic but it's like it's chaos you know and like businesses have to become more organized and that's because the rules that get set around like sustainability and like money laundering and all this stuff like these and people say are your businesses like our business is corporate but you like what's the alternative to a corporate structure that basically means that you've got an hr department which means that you cannot know anymore do the x y and z that you should be able to get away with and a lot of the things that are bad in our industry have happened because it you it's the it's the dark recesses of the industry like in any industry where things are like people don't have a voice people don't have a person to go and talk to we're not particularly heavily unionized industry there's that so like the fact that we've got an hr department that looks after our people and make sure that people aren't getting mistreated i'm all for it like you know because you can't be everywhere if i saw something bad happening i'd always call it out but you can't be everywhere when you've got 700 employees it's just not possible so like i think like you know i would like you know part of me have always been you know i'd like to do something of my own and and this that and the other but there's also part of me that says that you know like to make a success of the next generation like i need to know the business inside and out and i've done that i could you could i could go right now and do any section not front of house i'm sorry not just in the kitchen but front of house not in accounts don't put me up there or like i couldn't do that any service based and probably not chambered not being a chamber person because i can't make a bed for fucking toffee but like i could do any front-facing service section retail whatever and so i know the business inside now and also like it's been part of my life since i can remember and like i wouldn't want to i feel like i've got i i owe it my kind of my all my sort of you know my cognitive and physical effort because i love it it keeps me like i don't know what i do without it like i i can think of a few things i might do without it but like they never really like make me think i'm gonna leave like yeah it's um funny because you talked about uh the devonshire we i interviewed oshan the other week yeah lovely guy but he was basically saying that this is a people think it's an irish pub and he's like it's not an irish pub it's a london pub with an irish accent and i think what you're saying to me there is is like it's almost like this is a i'm the stein kind of um kind of institution that's been going for so long but you can add the kind of the jack accent or you know and with your brothers that is that new accent i think it's really interesting way of looking at it because also the reason i was asking that is i've got um uh you you seem to be at peace with it but i've got mates who are working for their parents company and it's like they're they're their feeling is constantly trying to like prove prove something whereas it feels like you've got your own kind of your own way of doing things which which seems really yeah i think i think it's down to the fact that like we don't like we're not a competitive family yes sure like i think that's i think that's like where some are yeah and i think i know and that's the thing like when you set like you know when you set the next generation off against each other a bit like in succession like it's hyper hyper realized kind of version of what you could say you know multi-generational family businesses are but i think what the point of that succession is trying to make is that your next generation is always going to be vying for the attention of the parents right and if the parents are prepared to to allow that competition to go in a kind of like you know like a kind of winner takes all fight even if it's on a very low level like and um then that is going to make that transition more difficult for you know various people so that us three brothers we're all very different like my brother my older brother um and my younger brother both approach the business in a different way so and also like the business is mature enough and big enough and also the biggest like again the biggest thing for me is that we we we accept criticism like we're like i think the dad can be a little bit dogmatic from time to time but like as in the next generation like when you say dogmatic how so like as in like you know like he wants it the way he wants it you know and sometimes he's away for time filming he doesn't want things to change when he's away but the thing is that he trusts us now we've been you know i've been working here since 2000 so over 20 years you know like it's he knows that i'm if you know we you know we're handing out he's handing over to us you know over the next year he knows we're not going to change much you know like i said to me the other day i said those three things i've changed straight away so firstly your salt and pepper mix is shit like you put on steaks it's shit it's like he's got this salt so it's salt pepper chili flakes and and we buy this meat from warren's butchers right which is in lawson it's amazing butchers like the best butchers in the country serve everybody all the big big guns in london and you've got this amazing steak and then he puts his pepper mix on which a and a pepper in my opinion shouldn't go on a steak before it's cooked because it just fucking burns it's bitter but then you've chili on it as well and i'm eating the steak and this is fucking waste and i said that to him and he goes take it off

56:40I said rather than just searing on a planter because it gives it more depth of flavour. It's a delicious, not drug supposition, but kind of a symbiotic relationship between the old, as you say, dogmatic with the new kind of way. And that's what keeps it evolving. Those little bits of reinvention that keep it fresh. Tiny, tiny, exactly. Because I remember saying, so when the old man was being like, say 10 years ago, it was really difficult. He'd be away filming or be in Australia and come back and like you'd sort of like, he'd come around the kitchen all jet lagged and be like, I don't know why you've done this done this, done this, and then you just think to yourself, right I'm like, I'm going to cook you, so we have a sea bass and vanilla dish from your book, and I'm going to cook you the version that's been like in your restaurant for the last year and it's been changed from the Chinese whispers, but it's not Chinese whispers, it's chefs coming through and going, I'm going to slightly improve that, I'm going to change that and it's not big changes, the dish is still the same but it's now like perfect and your book recipe was just your book recipe is a home cooked recipe it's not a kitchen recipe so this happens all the time and chefs so many chefs have come through our place and have changed dishes not like change them so that they but they've improved them because chefs essentially when they're in work they want to improve now you have to keep an eye on this because they can do things like like you know like foaming butter is like chefs like crack you know every chef wants to be stood there with like so when you make like dover sole manier which is like a skinned over sole seasoned flour sear it in on each side in like a bit of oil and then add butter and then it goes brown and you foam the butter and you kind of paste it and you make a burn was that very classic repertoire dish from france one of the best but you've honestly man you like one chef one year uses say two lumps of butter the next year next guy's using for girls using four but like and at one point we i think they were getting like 100 grams of butter in there and they were foaming it with like ladles you know like and he's gone in he's like this like and it's like all that is is like human beings want to try and improve all the time and this is the point i make all the time like um about about fast food right mccas or whatever if you want to draw a direct line between mcdonald's and the brazilian rainforest you're missing out a fucking lot of stuff in there that it's not just here's mcdonald's i want to destroy the rainforest it's not it's here's mcdonald's i want to get a burger to somebody for a reasonable price here's a meat supplier in america okay it's xyz we can get a meat a bit cheaper it's coming from you know from south america but it's same quality then the next generation oh okay and then the brazilians go it's a bit expensive to make it here so we're going to start and before long they're knocking down rainforest to do it which is obviously terrible but it's not like maccas have told them to do it it's just humans make little changes little changes to everything because they want to improve because that's part of the human condition.

59:37I remember we had this guy and he worked for us and he didn't give a fuck about quality. He was just about price. And as in like... As in was he quite senior or was he... Yeah, but like in his personal life. You'd see him in Tesco's and that. Buy and get one free. He wouldn't care about free range or fucking battery. He didn't give a fuck. He just wanted to save money. Fair enough. That's his vibe. And he saved us loads of money for electricity and logistics and buying vans and rental contracts and everything like that. But you would never leave him in charge of buying like fucking fish, you know, because he'd be buying it from bookers.

1:00:10I know, disrespect to bookers, but you know, like buying it from a wholesaler, not from a fisherman, right? His dad was a fisherman as well. It's strange. And I remember we had these chickens, free range chickens down at the Cornish and we were like using the eggs and it was all kind of like, you know. And I remember him saying like, you know, we only had a certain amount of area and we're running out of eggs. And he said, why don't we put another layer on the chickens? Like, so you have two layers. chickens right so you've gone from having basically free-range chickens to like slightly caged chickens and i was thinking to myself and if we'd gone yeah that's a great idea so we doubled our egg export right our eggs we've gone from five eggs a day to 10 eggs a day or whatever and imagine the next guy comes into that role we we recruit for the same role we we but this guy's left we want the same set of skill on somebody exactly like him and he looks at those chickens and goes you know what you could you divide that by four right and after a few times you've got a battery farm down there do you know what I mean mate it's such something but I haven't thought it's such a good I've never thought of this and it's such a good insight in that there's this say you've got the and this is the North Star in any business or brand or anything right and I think what you've said there of the vanilla fish dish the vanilla perturbation I think it was yeah blast sorry humans are trying to improve there's quite a deep thing but how piece of fish can tell us this right but it's like but actually we're just trying to improve but before you know it by so many incremental improvements suddenly you can be way over here yeah yeah and i think that's uh it's something i've never thought about before it's that one that's almost like that as you say humans are constantly trying to one percent evolve but if you're not careful you can be you know suddenly you're going from a big mac to fucking tearing down yeah yeah and you have to and that's where dad and that's where my that's my role is to oversee that process but also to to facilitate the process because you know um you know like place like the fat duck is really interesting if you speak to like jockeys to work there or like any of them um remember like we you know like if it improves the product like you should like to give it a go you know like as in like little improvements it's when it takes away from the product and this is where like my big beef with um we're not with the industry like it's not beef for the industry at all but it's what the industry was in like the 2010s there was this like period of time when it was just like you know like everyone like was like there's a lot of money going into the industry a lot of venture capital going in a lot of like people going like we can like scale your business and blah blah blah we've never taken any outside funding and like you know you see like corbin and king what happened with them and like you see corbin and king like the wolseley and like and that when that you know when when you get money coming in from other people and you lose control and the old man's always been like watch that from from a far but one of the things that vc money i don't know no disrespect i've got a lot of people i know a lot of friends who are in in that kind of thing but i was having a conversation with um one of the founders of pret actually he was in my chalet and sinclair was in um in verbier and we're talking about just the future and he's like you know because he's obviously set up pret and then um obviously then they sold a bit and they stayed in the board and like blah blah blah and then he bought the hoxton and kind of went off and did something else but still you know like it's really interesting to hear about how these things actually work and our current chairman now richard banks is you know he's a banker he's called britain's most ethical banker um and he's been he's seen it all the thing that really why used to wind me up is if you offer a chef a load of money to to scale the business or to do like 20 sites or to do this blah blah blah and then you what what these people that are in the know tell me about the way these people work this money stuff works is they'll put money into your business because they know in five years it'll be worth more than putting it into a bank or the share share you know it's going to be worth say they make 10 or 12 as opposed to six or eight percent but the problem is the way that they make more money is they start to ask you to buy a cheaper product or buy fish from here or can you stop using Matthew Stevens we've used Matthew Stevens 20 years if somebody came into our business tomorrow and told us the way you know the industry's in a tough time the best thing you could do is to buy frozen fish from you know from someone that's not a fisherman that we've known for years we'd say no like we'd rather we'd rather make no money than than compromise on quality but the you know and the butchers and the the the farm up the road that does our vegetables and stuff.

1:04:40Fuck that. We didn't like, honestly, we'd like, I'd rather make, I'd rather make no money than that because it's, it, because it destroys you. It's brand destroying. If you start to, if you start to make those decisions that are like based on, on money alone, like quality is fine. Like we'll pay for it. Um, because we, because what we do is we take fishermen's or farmers, hard work, and we just put it on a plate with a bit of sauce. It's not much, you know, but to to look our customers in their eye and say this is you know fresh fish simply cooked when it's you know it's you know some sort of like farmed catfish from the meek on like fuck that like it's not gonna happen like you know the reality of sustainability you can make an argument for the actual you know the the reality of sustainability is incredibly difficult um and there's you know there is difficult conversations to be had with everybody but at the end of the day you know that's that is our brand and that is that's that's what i think the um these little incremental changes you make to dishes in the restaurant are one thing but when you try and make changes to a business that's that's whole brand is about quality then you just like then you're in real danger of just being yeah yeah there's a guy i've interviewed called david hyatt who does hyatt denim he's based but he basically built a brand sold it to um howie's which was like a skate brand sold that to timberland and then basically realized the same thing fuckers vultures came in extracted all the money ruined the business so now now he's got this thing and one of his what kind of puts a bow around what you're saying is scale kills magic yeah and all the magic of going to the fishermen and then you get some big vc coming in you know cracking the whip it just ruins things what but that would just sorry just to interrupt you there but the one thing that that you know we if we took external more money into this business right now we could you know our balance sheet with our with rick we'd have they're knocked the door down like you could literally like you could take money and expand this business by we could make 10 times as much money in five years yeah but the the people that run those fishing boats out there would would hate us and we live in this community you know because we wouldn't be buying the lobster and crab off these guys anymore we'd be buying frozen canadian lobsters from you know from a from a wholesaler that'd been flown into heathrow like it's not and like it's just not you know there's everyone needs to make money somebody said to me the other day and he he deals with a lot of big boards like you know like you know the biggest boards coca-cola and you know you know whatever the big ones yeah yeah and he said that you know you can either be a brand that you know wants to sell and you want to do something different and you want to put your money somewhere else or you can be a lifestyle brand and your family family business like local golf club here owned by the gamins they've got loads and loads of land like millions of pounds of land and amazing like and they run the business they just enjoy themselves you know they they have fun they you know and that's like us we don't need to make millions and millions of pounds in profit we just need to make sure we've got really good staff that are well looked after and they're gonna that gonna the next generation is gonna be able to do the work you know and that's the big question question which we haven't got to yet yeah it's uh it's wildly fascinating what i want to go back to is this say again kind of maybe we're using the the vanilla bass we've said that right yeah uh dish is kind of the the the example here but like there's the dogmatic line of this is how we want things to be done then you've got the as and this is you talk about the chefs coming with the butter yeah of making things you know one percent better and it seems like there's a there's a as a leader there's a kind of an art and a dance here it's like we need to be dogmatic in some respects and like this is for loads of businesses right if you got a brand but then you want your employees to be pushing getting one percent better yeah the employee wants to get one percent better like because i think you know the big part of i used to work for a peanut butter business like a startup and you're constantly trying to learn and evolve how do you as a leader this could help a lot of people like navigate that dance between i want you to come here and try and get better each day but then when you go and say oh sorry mate you've that dish has gone way too kind of left field yeah so that really a really good example so the guy we talked about earlier that worked at the man while ben um he used to be he was one of these guys who was very driven right so anytime you could say to me i've got a dish i want you guys to taste right anybody i want it yeah i want to put something up in front of you or the old man it doesn't matter either of us right and we will always be like yeah brilliant like anyone who wants to put a dish up for you know an idea a dish put it up and because you'll get feedback like as in coming coming to the seafood at 10 yeah on the pass yeah we'll all taste it take a photo of it and we'll say what we think of it right and ben used to do this all the time and i'm fair play to him because some of the dishes at the beginning weren't very good like you know what i mean but like he learned and the thing is that you've got a guiding principle of the business we've got cultures we've got values we've got you know people understand what we are you know we've done a lot of work in kind of like in the management team on this kind of cultures values piece about the family business that we've got like a whole set of values people understand who we are and our customers understand that right they're coming for rick's food at the end of the day but like there are dishes on the menu that are not rick's that people have come up with some of our most famous dishes rick didn't do you know and but that's because the people that did them would put them up and we'd give them honest feedback i mean we've had a couple of dishes that dad's gone this is absolutely like you've got like like not in a bad way but sometimes you do actually have to be like this is fucking shit like this is really bad like as in like how do i say how do i he'd be like how do i tell this person it's shit say fucking tell him it's shit because if like if you don't sugarcoat it because they've got 12 elements right on a dish and our most complicated dish our most complicated dish has got five so they've already had misunderstood our food inherently right but then you you know you say look this is really not our not like in fucking whiplash it's not my tempo which is what we say not my tempo um and so when you say not my tempo it's like not my style it's not like it's not like it's not our it's not our kind of type of food but like it's a really good dish but this is why it doesn't work right and the next dish might have eight elements and the thing with with young chefs especially is it's so it's it's like artists or music people or fucking filmmakers it's like it's so easy to over produce and over analyze over paint to be able to just sit there and go i'm happy that this is like i always think with art it's like when do you know it's done when you look at a picture and go like i'm done like like peter blake who's a friend of dad's will say like he knows when his paintings are done because he knows he just doesn't want to do anything more to them and they but the more the older he's got the simpler his paintings become and it's the same with us you know and that's and also i think that like young chefs have to have a creative outlook outlet in a business which is basically quite dogmatic i.e the menus are rick's menus people coming to eat rick's food they're not like if so-and-so wants to put a fucking molecular gastronomy dish on it's not going to work because people can be like that doesn't fit with what we think of as rick so you have to be able to bring people along with you but give them the outlet and like i say we we do it all the time we have a thing called the style council like the david bowie back our band and that's like a place where we all sit and we just talk about style like simplicity does this fit with our brand if you see something you see a bit of like marketing and it says like i think like bite bits and dips or something like that we're like that doesn't like we don't say those that if we don't say it as a family is we shouldn't be putting out on social media because it's you know the the tone of a business the style of a business the type of food of it needs to be within kind of parameters but within that parameters you can try loads of different stuff and we'll try anything we don't we're not we we you know we you know marginal gains or you know continuous improvement whatever you want to call it but that's that's how our business has gone to nearly 50 years about 50 years next year is because we have evolved but actually if you go into the seafood restaurant from this from 2024 to 2020 2020 to 1995 the food doesn't change that much i love the idea of a style council uh i think that's what you said the style council i think that's it that is the balance of the kind of the stoic this is the way we do things around here this is the tone but then you get chefs like uh tom i think it was you can reinvent things right yeah i want so i read your dad's book under a mackerel sky um it's actually fucking weird we're doing this because i stayed i i was working for my job but i've just started this podcast about a year in i stayed at the shepherd's hut yeah so i was like i need to get just get out of this job yeah so stayed there for three days my ones was like um just sort of plotting plotting things out literally left left cornwall had my noticing and then just went full full full tilt with this so it's quite weird um kind of full circle doing this today mate but the um one of the things i was i was in one of the shepherd's huts of the cornish arms amazing one thing i'd love to to talk about is is your dad in that in that book is he he talks about turning the seafood restaurant was it was a nightclub wasn't it i I think.

1:14:05But in the book, he says he was kind of, like, as you said, he would fire people on the spot. He's like quite, he was not harsh is the wrong word, but he's like a bit old school in that regard. What are sides do you think that people don't see of Rick that you kind of see on the TV that you see that have been, that people here will see day to day that are really important for being around for kind of, was it, well, 50 years? I mean I think like I mean again I think like I think the 70s and the 80s were a different time in the industry you know like it was like throwing people out of the restaurants and all that does because they were mum and dad like they didn't know what they were doing they just they had a nightclub that got closed down they became a restaurant you know it was like they didn't know they didn't have a deep desire to be restaurateurs or like they learnt on the job they were like mum says they were like you know keen kind of amateurs you know like and but like i think the thing that he's you know both of them being very good at is that they've been very like they've obviously bought property which is like obviously the foundation of the business and they and rooms i think like i think again like having the rooms with the restaurant is probably the thing that's kept us going really if you're being honest the tv's really helped but in the like in the early it's the rooms have just been a constant source of of and i think that entrepreneurial spirit to turn any little bit of the build of the of the of pad so they could buy into a room that they can charge 100 quid a night back in the day or 200 pound 300 pound now it's really kind of like helped them a lot and i think with him and with with both of them actually it's like they they just they've always surrounded themselves with as good a people as they can find and they've and they've always like tried to do things that they just that they want to do and i guess i think to be an entrepreneur to do things that the whole point is you're doing things that you want to do right you know you you've made a decision to become to set up a peanut butter factory or peanut butter business or you've set up a podcast or whatever it's going to be and i think when you've made that decision like you say it's scary and this is the thing that we don't get my generation of our family don't get we don't get that sense of fear that mum and dad had of failing we do have a sense of failure because we could fuck it all up but what i mean is that there's not that like hand to mouth like um we've got 20 grand left in the bank and and we never thought we'd get that we got it in covid because we had 35 grand in the bank in march 2020 and we were fucked and it was you know that after that i've said to mum i now know what you must have felt like because you know it was hectic but they were just you know what i think that spurred them on i think they're and also like being in cornwall um and like you know bringing cornwall along with them as well like mom and dad are very like they don't get involved in like you know any of the kind of like politics or anything like that they just want to be successful business people and i think that that's like another thing that you look at them and say yeah like when you see rick on the tv he's very laid back he is very laid back He used to be a shouty guy, but he's always been, he's not like a mean person.

1:17:25Everyone gets, when your kitchen's, when you've got no covers and you've got 20 grand left in the bank and somebody's thrown a whole piece of fish in the bin, you're going to get pissed off. But I think he's enabled the business to become where it is because he trusts people. He trusts people. When he trusts people, he trusts people to run the business for him. And that's what you need to do when you're off doing TV. and you know and the tv's been you can't deny it's been like life-changing for all of us um but yeah i suppose like i think he is he set out his store with all of his managers what he wants and then he just lets them get on with it you know he will not micromanage but he will tinker with stuff especially if he's been somewhere and he's really enthusiastic but people like enthusiasm you know and i think that's what they both bring a level of enthusiasm they're both as enthusiastic about our industry as they've you know dad will phone me on a daily basis talking about you know where he's just eating or where like what's you know what do you think of this where should i try in london or whatever you know is there like a recent example of that where he's been or well he's been he's been to devonshire that's for sure but that's just but everyone's been there but um have you been there yeah i've been there yeah so i know because ashley and like we knew we know actually for years like when he was at dark and that dinner and actually we've sent a lot of um like ed cook who's the exec there now is he started in the same week as me and the seafood and we've had i think we've had two two of our alumni have been exec head chefs at dinner we've had one we've had one who was head chef now exec chef at the dark you know we've and there's been a lot of kind of like nathan outlaw was nathan outlaw was here like you know a lot of yeah we've had it i mean if you're just a general alumni of the restaurant yeah like james knapp it read we've had a whole heap of them but um he he's just actually been in in sydney and he's so i recommended we went to this place uh called um oh what's uh chin chin which is like a pan asian restaurant which everybody all the chefs go to after you know you know after filming master chef and all this kind of stuff and we went there and we had a really good time with jeremy goering from the goering hotel in london just in sydney and you know he's like i've never been here and then he sent me to a place davis pavilion which was really really good and that was you know i've been just not just got back from australia but just in in got back in february so yeah like again and also just like little things you'll pick up on little little things you'll be like oh like the guinness glasses at the devinche everyone's talking about them and um you know yeah it's interesting seeing this constant from both your relationships where i want to kind of wrap like is we're talking about this kind of handover and those little phone calls as you say daily are a delicious kind of insight into you're both kind of being super curious and then feeding each other in i think it's a it's going to like pass the baton on very nicely yeah it's this it's interesting if you watch that entree le brass which i really do recommend it's that there's a bit where they're doing where him and the dad they set the him the son and the dad up on a section they're making probably is the gargoyle the vegetable dish and that and the dad is watching him and he's like no no no no like like he's really like kind of like quite um saying like you're doing it wrong you're doing it wrong and the son's like i'm not i'm not and you're doing it like it's very kind of not tense it's kind of beautiful when you're talking three star it's different it's easy for me to say to dad i'm going to cut parsing this way today versus that way because no one's yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah but like um i think like like he he will never like he will never retire you know like he'll always be on the phone to the day he dies saying this is what i've just found this one and the thing is like i love that like i want that like i don't want like i don't want like when we take over the business like it's not like we're gonna suddenly like stop taking phone calls from mom and dad about style and about things that they've seen and little i've just been in a mom will be like i've been in a hotel in miami i've seen this i really like this kind of idea for x y and z or like we're just like we're like we're looking at doing a fish chip shop in central london at the moment so we're all discussing what makes the best fish finger sandwich and like you know like you know kind of you know it's just like it's very like but all we talk about is food and and like i know and in some ways our entire relationship is you know our partners will always say all you do is talk about the restaurant but it's not it's food and i think anyone we were the prototypical kind of foodie family if you want to say like you know a family that that took their kids to like india and thailand and did all this travel but in the 80s before like like nowadays everyone does it you know like and you see all these kind of like tiktokers and vloggers and what you know they're doing what we did but at the end of the day we've the reason we do it is because we love food and my kids love food because i'm extremely passionate about food and mom and dad i love food because my parents were passionate about food and the reason and it's like you know remember when singapore for the first time when i was like four five i remember going to a hawker center and having like singapore chili crab or whatever it was and just being like whoa this place is really hot and weird and what the hell's going on but my mom and dad are really happy and they're really engaged in this product and like that's the reason that so our language is through food and it's through restaurants i'm not just like food food and drink cocktails coffee you know anything like fishermen like mom and dad mom and dad will be talking to the fishermen today like literally i just like dropped my kids i picked my kids up from dad's just this morning and there was like all the mertz family there there's probably five of them like right outside dad's house and they're all yelling in rick only notes today because they've got their charity boxes you know and i've come up in the car and nearly took them all out i didn't obviously but like i just stopped i said jesus christ boys if i'd carried on i'd have wiped out half the crabbing fleet like and it's just like those little things and that they were like all right rick will be around later on make sure you got your notes like because obviously like they're they're charity boxes they don't want coins because they and it's just you know all those little interactions they're things that will never go away like dad will and dad loves it like he mum does as well they both love it and they'll never our industry is really amazing and if you're an owner operator of a business you never need to retire dad can just sit in the restaurant and have a glass of wine and a piece of turbo and talk to people it's that thing right at the beginning of like knowing your environment with being in the water with the surfing it's that we've kind of moved into how it is with the food i want to talk about your mum um because she's she's as equally important to this business as you said because she does more of the interiors and the design and the rooms and you said the rooms are kind of super important for yeah that's why you're here that's what it's yeah how's talk about your mum how she impacted impacted you and what she taught you that you think you'll you'll pass on yeah so mum's like yeah again she came from you know she didn't she left school early moved down did like a kind of summer down here in cornwall and like loved it she was from from manchester from leeds originally but moved to manchester when she was young and um she's got that kind of northern determination hard work ethic dad's very like he went to oxford he's very kind of like um intelligent not so mum's not intelligent but like he reads like he's big into poetry and stuff like that my mum's loves literature and art and everything like that but she's also a bit of a grafter and a bit like she's quite um you know like if the if you had to go if you had to take either of them somewhere and you had nothing she would do better than dad because she's a she's a street fighter you know she's you know she's she's working class she's just she's pulled herself up by her bootstraps and she's been very successful and and her and her sister her older sister who's our sommelier who's a much you know they're getting into their like mid to late 70s she still worked my auntie's still the sommelier restaurant imagine being those two women in like the 80s and you know early 90s in our industry i mean the stories they tell of just some of the stories of especially like my auntie ronnie about some of the men that just like kind of speak to the sommelier and she turns up like no the actual sommelier you know i am the sommelier like there'll be a woman you can't be you know, that kind of like, yeah, but like, but then it was, you know, she was like, it was just normal.

1:25:25So I think mum's like given me a very strong work ethic and just, and also like, you know, like that Northern, that Northern side of her is like very, like also very, like, like not so much worried about where you went to school or this, you know, it's like, she doesn't really, she's like, you know, she's very, very well for herself, but she surrounds herself with normal people. Like not saying that dad doesn't, but dad's famous. so it's slightly different. But mum's friends are very down to earth. Sometimes you do meet people that are, she's from a working class background and would always remember that.

1:26:02She would never pretend to be, would never be like, oh, we're going to send you a lot to eat. And so she's always been very level-headed, keeps me grounded. And actually one of the reasons that I don't find myself getting, I'm not an angry person, I don't get angry in the kitchen, is that because of her, she's very calm, very like you know just she's just got a kind of like what the attitude is just like work hard and like you know things will come to you if you you know as long as you just put the out put the effort in you know this may be a hard question so if you don't want to go tell me to fuck off i will um so your parents spit up how did that affect you and the business because i think again it's a it's an example of like it's it's working very well but i'd love to know how that impacts well like i think i mean i was older you know i was at uni by that point i it wasn't okay so it wasn't you know i was 20 23 24 maybe like i was you know it was it didn't really affect me obviously it's not great but like you know i understood that these things happened and you know they were together for a long long time and that was great for us growing up and um but yeah i think from the business perspective it's not effective because they're still in business together you know it's people find it unusual but um it's their business it's not like you know i think people have this misconception that it's like rick's business and jill was his wife and therefore when mum and dad split up like she would obviously like leave and do something different but she's that she's been as she's like and the one thing you i would always say is mum and neither of them will make a decision about the business without talking to the other one like so they're such really good friends yeah like they don't like they would never they would never make a business decision and actually i've watched them in board meetings before the way they interact the way they talk to each other they've known each other for so long that and they just trust each other and again it's the same thing like we're saying with dad he trusts people around him the people to run the business and he obviously trusts us because we're his sons to take over the business but you know you trust mum's judgment even though they're not together that you know it is what it is you know life goes on life goes on you know and actually i think if mum had left the business you know when they'd split up i don't think it would be doing as well as it's doing now because a lot of those like you know like sandbanks you know the restaurant we've got in sandbanks which is you know which is as busy and as profitable as any restaurant we've got and that was her she found that you know like you know she was there and she found the site and she you know she did the design so you know i think that and i think they both know that so you know it's obviously from uh from our perspective you know we we kind of you know you you adapt i mean lots of like we're not the first people to have had parents that divorce but it's quite unusual i think that they're still in business together but that's because my mom's like yeah it's my business as much as his you know it's the one thing that was in a lot of your dad's but and actually just even in the in the in the programs and you you your whole family seems to have um storytelling at kind of the the epic like a lot of as you said your dad reads poetry yeah the art on the uh in the walls and in the seafood restaurant on sunday it's like very like impact ing that's the right way of saying it impactful the cornwall as you say there's painters painters artists all synonymous with this part of the country more so than anywhere else i think what and oshin was saying this to me at the devonshire last week is he was basically saying that the currency of our restaurant of the devonshire is storytelling yeah it's like we having a pint with the mate storytelling like the forks a story everything everything's a thousand little stories and then that's kind of he says that's the growth of this how and what are sort of what role does storytelling play in in everything you're trying to do um and what are some of the ways you can the levers you can pull to tell them whether it's the rooms the food i think like so first and foremost the old man used to read us bedtime stories like and he made up a whole like story about this boat called the elmsley that these kids basically took from padstow and they went out and they end up in the tropics and it's all kind of crazy but like he like it's very like imagination is very important actually if you talk to heston's lot like ed my my mate used to who's their exec chef they storytelling i'm sure like i'm sure like um ashley at devonshire the same like when he was at dinner like again storytelling like it's really important again it comes down to like that whole why are you doing what you do like you know you're telling stories for you know to your customers all the time and i think for us down here it's like you know we're telling the story of Cornwall again obviously dad's done tv shows about this but you write the art you know the kind of the romanticism you got like John Betjeman over there you've got like all the artists down at St.

1:30:36Ives and Newland my cousin Lucy she's down at St. Just like the big art community down there they're you know the the fishermen like fishermen tell the most amazing stories you know like you just sit in the pub and talk to a fisherman for a while the the rhythm the cadence of the cornish kind of like like not language the the the dialect the way you know you could listen to them for hours and i think that's what brings people down here what brought mom and dad down here what my grandparents down here um you know that's why granddad bought the the boat with johnny merp and that all these stories link into us as being part of the community you know even know we're not from corn when i was born here but like i wouldn't consider myself cornish like a lot of the people in town today are but um so i think it's like it's also telling the stories of like the product and being like this you know we know the bass fishermen that bring sea bass in you know we know the the lobster fishermen we know ross at padster kitchen garden you know and it actually those little like things that you can tell a customer the journey as they come in and they've got a picture of Matthew Stevens the fish supplier on the wall or they've got a picture of you know the Mertz or the Bates or the lobster fisherman and this that and the other they're all like it's all just adding to why we're here why like why would you set up a restaurant in Padstow you know why would you set up you know a restaurant that's not just one restaurant now there's 10 restaurants and it's you know turns over tens of millions of pounds but it's not about the money it's about like why you've decided to do it in the first place and I think the story about the nightclub and being closed down and having to start up a restaurant that just shows that they didn't come down here on purpose to do it like and no disrespect to the people that do like i can understand why like paul ainsworth who's an amazing chef like the best food in the world like for me he makes and nathan again like they've come here because they love that to be close to the products like mom and dad did but mom and dad didn't come down here to set up a restaurant they came down here to to just to just try and do something like a bar or you know try and do anything and it's become what it's become and i think corn was helped because it's such a it's such a creative place to be and for me like my creativity comes from the ocean i'm surfing and that's why i express myself as a creative like it's it's in and it sounds really lame but like you know in the ocean and that's what i really like and then it's just about maintaining what they've done here and improving but at the end of the day it's not hard because cornwall is it's just such a lovely place to be to be from and i wouldn't want to live anywhere else there's the sea is the the sea and creativity is something that intrigues me massively i don't there's so many parallels like the flow yeah um just the kind of especially here because you can't get like a i was walking on those um you know that walk up there when i got here it's because weather's been shit last two days but the first day i got here when i before i came to the restaurant i did that walk you know just banged straight up there yeah and i'm right out through the estuary and i was just thinking like the magnetism of the of the of the view yeah it's just like it just makes you realize how small and and insignificant you are but in like a in a delicious way yeah yeah stick yourself on a trawler and you'll realize i mean i don't like boats i mean i don't go i'm not a boat person at all i wouldn't go out on a trawler but i mean i mean you think of i mean i remember when we lost in in the space of a couple of weeks a lot of fishermen here dad was filming a show at the time it's actually one of his early shows when you said what they drowned yeah the trot went down a load of guys that died on the doom but i think it was like and they were really like you know it was it really affected the community and when you think about like you think about what the struggles and strains i've got in my life putting a piece of fish on a plate and what you imagine what they're getting up to out there you just think jesus like i you know it's a tough job like you know and this is why you know my my point about sustainability is about you know like you have to like fish sustainably right but you also have to sustain the fishing communities and if you're not buying product off them as long as they're not like doing anything that's like completely like out there like you have to remember like it's easy to sit and say oh don't like there's a year we were we took sea bass off the menu for a year because we were told asked to by like somebody some you know and the guys that catch sea bass here they're catching it online you know like it's not trawled or anything and they were like really upset and they and it was really affecting them and we just sort of said like after a year we did do it for a year and we just sort of said you know what like these people uh this is a community you have to sustain communities as well as sustain the stocks these are human beings they've got livelihoods you know this is more than just like some guide um in london that says don't buy sea bass this is like you know this is you know there's not many restaurants that take sea bass on the back door like we do so you know it's kind of you're right the ocean and the people that work it and they're like our bread and butter and i like i enjoy myself in it um but yeah i couldn't do what they do you said some of the struggles and strifes in your life like what what are some of those you know just like everybody you know like everyone it's just you know what the industry is in a real tough spot at the moment like you know there's no getting away around it you know we've had brexit which has been a fucking disaster we've had covid which is a fucking nightmare then we've had like you know you know we've had the all the stuff with all the energy pricing and you know i don't want to get too political about it but like you know like when you think of like you know some plane sailing weather would just be nice you know like you know like and i'm not saying this is because it was a government but like the late 90s you know when we everything was just you know like pretty cruisy and like you know everyone was sort of like you know we just need some we just need so what we really need and this is like my only political point i'm going to make i'm not going to say anything about like any other stuff but we just need somebody in the government that's like we we really value um we we lobbied for like a minister like a junior minister that's in control of hospitality because it's such a big to the exchequer it's such a big big take big tax take and like i don't even know where we sit some deffer or i don't know like we're not like we're like our voice is not we haven't even got a minister a junior minister like bringing stuff about us to whether it's that that help or rate reductions or whether it's you know stuff with staffing immigration whatever it is like we just we're not we just don't have it and i think that's really out of order and one other thing that i'll say my mum says this really fucking winds her up is when they call us unskilled like we were labeled by one of the conservative people was but said that we were unskilled workers because you know we therefore we didn't qualify for some visa for you know people coming from outside the country and that really winds mum up because yeah she left school without any qualifications but to call her unskilled when she's set up a business that's worth like you know millions and millions of quid like you'd just be like it's just so unfair to it to everyone that works hard and i think something that the industry needs to really look at you know and government hopefully look if there's a new government they'll start to take us a bit more seriously because we're really important yeah it's the it's i spoke to there's a rest there's a really funny i've linked david bowie or Bowie, however you say it.

1:37:51Again, based up north, called the Carterford Inn. Have you ever heard of that? Banging place. Really sick. The food's delicious. But the guys, family business as well. So I actually did interview the dad, all three of them basically. And they were just saying the VAT relief, the fact there's no VAT relief is just crushing them. And it's just, it's absurd. This is, yeah. It's going to, it's also it's going to get a lot worse i mean the the problem is is that there are people are carrying a lot of debt from covid like we were lucky we've paid off all our covid debt and stuff but there's just there's nothing there's nothing coming down the track in my opinion like this whole thing now with the brexit through other the the added cost of brexit like that's going to come through now to increase prices again like there's there's you know you can only push your prices so far yeah how are you navigating that like because because without constantly jumping the price up on the menus we're it's a nightmare i mean it's a you know like we you know like energy contracts there's a whole like that there's a whole thing there about like you know fixed pricing and how that was all done and it was like a lot of stuff you know you've been told stuff that you know now in hindsight you know it's not true but you will believe in it you're jumping into contracts that cost you hundreds of thousands of pounds a year that was one thing you've got obviously Brexit's been a you know I mean it's going to be it's been a disaster for the fishermen you know I don't like you know and and and the farmers I think are gonna you know now now gonna start feeling the effects of it as well and it's just I don't know everything there's just been it's just been one thing after another and you keep going because the industry is hard working and we'll get through it you know but there'll be a lot of casualties and people can argue you know you can say well maybe there was it was oversupply and you weren't paying your staff enough and this that and the other and like they're all there are arguments on both sides i'm not but it's like you know i just think of myself going on going to paris going down to laggy and starging down there and not have to worry about visas and just all that kind of stuff i'm more like on you know and like you know the french products that we get you know like this idea that like we yeah we have fish here but fuck man like most stuff comes from rungis market like let's not beat around the bush you know like you know like a lot of like products come from europe like it's you know like you'd be silly i don't know like in some ways like dad and keith and keith floyd and these are probably made a lot of people think that we can somehow grow everything that we need within this country we can we can help the farmers and we can grow more we can eat more british fish and we can you know we can there's a lot of things we can do but fuck like be realistic about the about the food like you know when you're in when you're in a when you get to a certain level you realize that the industry's you know it's quite you know it's not in trouble but it's definitely it's going to take it's going to take a few years to get out of it and it's going to need some direct help from the government because at a certain point sorry at a certain point you you go listen i'm just a chef right i'm a chef but i've got to understand geopolitics sustainability you know you know european politics well but like i don't like have this fucking time you know just if government if the government if a new government came in and said we're going to give you a food and tourism or food minister like whatever hospitality minister junior level whatever and that person you're able to talk to direct and you can go and speak to them a couple of times a year and say this is what we need this is why we need it you just feel at least listened to and even if they turned around said there's nothing we can do then that's fine but to know to like for you to be lumped in with fucking food i don't know where the hell we sit anyway that's it my little the uh no no i think i appreciate that we'll a few more things mate then we'll wrap this up um one thing i want to talk about is you did a psychology degree and a uh was ancient history yeah i think the psychology of food and the links between that obviously roy's this is what i talked to i think it's endlessly fascinating what are some of the lessons that you took from from kind of those or maybe let's start with psychology that you are kind of kind of kind of apply to the way you run things here i think like um i mean there's obviously like people who've done like postgraduate psychology directly on you know like these in these things that would be able to you know mine's kind of just you know things have changed a lot since i was at uni too but like i would say by and large it's like um like a lot about i i found it really fascinating about this like your view of yourself sense of self and what you want and what how you perceive yourself versus how other people perceive you i think it's really important like and i think that's relevant to businesses like how businesses perceive you as a business i'm sorry how your punters perceive you as a business um and i think it's maybe you have to be as accurate about your sense of self and what you what you are and why you're doing it i think those things are really key to business like i think you can you can connect with customers through um through through leading them through like storytelling journey like all that stuff people love it and with social media now even more so than just table talkers which like you know the little cards on the table saying we are the seafood restaurant like we used to have now you've got the social media i think it's i think that's really important and i think it's also understanding kind of um you know not so much like your people like not so much the the individual like needs of your people but also the needs to put you know to put like like to put make sure your staff are your number one priority like again and like typically you'll hear the customer's always right now that fails to take into consideration that if your staff aren't looked after that you know if people don't feel valued in an organization they won't they won't perform and you can do anything to your customers you can give them free food if you want but if it's being served by grumpy people then that will never that will never happen so i think that whole like and this isn't really directly from my psychology degree but there are i can see like when rory talks or when like simon sinek whatever his name is talks about these things i can see the direct link from work that you see in psychology that's really boring you know you'd read a social psychology journal it's fucking dull you know and that's why people aren't interested in like you know when you like talk about like you know covid and all this stuff about like you know you read a fucking medical journal they're so boring and if you don't understand what they're saying but but for people like simon and rory to be able to bring that research and actually make it into like relevant research you know about how you prime people in advertising or how you you know all these things are really interesting like how you can you know when you look at you watch mad men you think of these ad men in like london and you know how they're like that it's so clever but it's all using psychology but like my level of psychology was very much about understanding the stats and it wasn't really like the your but your bachelor of science undergraduate degree in psychology doesn't even on my mom will say oh you're a psychologist you should i'm not i'm not a psychologist and i can't make anything but i think you're understanding understanding of people generally how they what makes them tick and the sense of self and self-worth and i think the sense of self is really important because it's people value it very highly they have a very highly evolved perception themselves it may they may be completely wrong like a donald trump but they do so therefore in business you have to appeal to people's sense of self and sense of what their self-worth is and where they want to spend their money or who they want to work for and that's kind of the basics and then everything sort of splits off on that and that's when you get into like the why of it and all that sort of the this so that guy will store wrote a book called selfie which is what how the is called how the west became self-obsessed he's then written a book called the science of storytelling um and he basically says uh and then the other one is the status game yeah there's three books and he says like this this we became um kind of so obsessed with self i mean we're going down rabbit hole here but like post thatcher and regan like 1980s neoliberalism all that like the get better get better get better like the the self but what he says is that brands and restaurants this guy's weirdly obsessed with food right so he goes um so that's how i got him on the podcast but he was basically saying that the brands if you if you understand basically what you're saying jack is that a person is kind of sees sees themselves highly you can inject a story around that and and elevate that that feeling of self i think the thing with the psychology and like all that you know what i would say is there's also nowadays with social media and stuff i think the level of psychological manipulation that can happen i think is quite worrying i think some of the things are supercharged by like an over developed sense of self i think it's gone that the sort of genies out of the bottle slightly when you look at kind of the extreme examples of like andrew tate and stuff but even like lesser examples that where like you're just like almost the more kind like it's you know like there's a really good video i watched the other day and it was like you may have seen it it's like a guy who's got all these diamonds tiny little diamonds and he's sweeping them all up you know and you can see all the he's a gem guy like he's got his little eyepiece and all these diamonds everywhere and then and he sweeps them all up they're tiny little diamonds and he leaves one there right and then it just the video ends and it's been like it just people react to it mentally because they're like you left a diamond you left like it's like this it's almost like people are using the psychology of like social media uses psychology in a way that's kind of like even for me as somebody that understands the technology i'm a bit like oh i don't know where this is going i'm not sure how our business is going to be able to fit into this is it all just disposable content like and the good thing is like podcasts are a good example of like how it's gone the other way actually and i know that they're chopped up and put on tiktok and stuff but i actually podcasts weirdly and audiobooks have been one way of people i've seen recently of people going i should slow it down a bit like let's have a longer form conversation and i'm not saying like joe rogan is an example but like it is an example whether or you but you like him or not is an example of where people can sit down and talk for a long time but yeah i don't know it's it's it's you know the more people find out and like you said this individualism selfishness self the idea of the self as being really important can go like too far but just as a business you're trying to harness enough of it to make people want to come and eat with you um but then when restaurants say don't take pictures of food i'm like like you know go to the fat duck and you get your camera out they're like yeah mate of course help yourself like we want you to show the world what you're doing like the people that don't i'm going i don't know about that like you fucking do you know what i mean let people take a picture of their food who gives a fuck find a couple of things we um so i know you talked about i've read a couple of articles where you said like bourdain was kind of a you'd love to have cooked for him i think you said yeah i think he's a fucking legend like his favorite one of my favorite quotes by him is your body is uh your body is not a temple it's a theme park enjoy the ride um uh what what he did so well is he taught he would talk about a plate of food but actually that is telling a story about a different culture yeah which i think he just the way he did it was just genius you've obviously done loads of traveling with your family what are what's some of the craziest or like is there a really poignant place you've been to and had a dish that kind of made you think or see the world kind of differently or change the the lens ever so slightly do you know what i mean it's i guess it's hard i mean bourdain's amazing because he basically was slaving away at la hall for years and then got picked up um after his book and the book is just brutal and like and the thing i love about him is he's he's like one and again i'm not going to say like whether i like or dislike these people i'm just make the point of a type of person like a kind of a clerks and kind of person that can just say what the fuck they want like you know and And like people will react to it because it's like in today's culture, it's like you've got to be careful what you say.

1:49:51You don't want to be cancelled and all this kind of stuff. And I don't like, I'm not saying I'm not anti-woke at all. I think it's really important that people are listened to and I don't have much of a strong opinion either way. But Bordeng was able to say exactly, he was able to have a fucking beer. I mean, I remember him being in La Halle having a fucking dart out the back of the restaurant. I'm not saying you should be able to smoke in a restaurant. Obviously you shouldn't. But it was that like, if I can turn the camera off, I'm having a cigarette. but that's like real, like, he's just very real.

1:50:17And I think when you've got a real, real person that you believe that, and again, Rick's like this, he's like he is on TV, but like he's slightly more of a cuddly toy than Anthony was. But when you look at him, you just go, fuck man, whatever you say, I believe. Like, and I'm not saying that like, I believe you, like he's got his problems, he's had his issues. He's like fucking, like, he's not perfect. But I like, he's a lens I want to see the world through. When I see him eat in the restaurant or in a, not in a restaurant, in like a street food place or he's out in fucking here there and everywhere i'm always like i'm into it like you know and like i'm the same myself and i i've been traveling and eating off the street since i was four or five years old with mom and dad and like you know i didn't eat in a michelin restaurant until with dad i've eaten in loads of my own but until we i was nearly 30 you know went to arzac in san sebastian and so for me like i've always again like my early memories of food travel will be in asia thailand singapore for me asia is just like i just love it i love everything about it like i did the stars up in japan i've spent a lot of time in asia indonesia you know hong kong you know all over like anywhere i can get i'm never happier than being like slightly hung like slightly jet lagged with a beer in a night market like i'm really not like and that's because of mum and dad so like it's so many of them but like i remember that we had like this hot and sour like fish soup uh in like in bangkok that was like fucking blew your head off and like i remember that was the spiciest thing i'd ever eaten and that really like i think thai food especially is is really interesting because for even somebody who's not got like a particularly developed palate it's really in your face like so as a child the hot the sour the sweet all those like hot sour sweet mixed together like whether it's you know fish sauce lime juice and sugar or if it's tamarind and fucking soy sauce and you know whatever it might honey or whatever you all these balances of like sweet sour and hot and then just the chili you just like it's it blows your mind so those would be like like early memories and all of them would be but it's not just about the food it's about where you are it's about the people you're eating it with and like the fact that you go and eat at the places that the locals eat and like it sounds really twee to say it now but like that's where we would go and that's what dad would chase down and that's and and also like you can travel anywhere i've been in like little villages in in africa and sri lanka and central america and wherever like when you know that oh even fucking getting in an uber in london right and you meet somebody for eritrea like and you and you say i'm a chef what's your what's your national dish and you talk about food you and you and you can get in with anybody I firmly believe you could be in a really fucking tough spot in the world and you start talking about food and you at least have a chance of making it out because everyone needs to eat.

1:53:04You know, it's the thing that everything we do is over food, like everything, like memories of over food. And Paul Rosen, a psychologist, does a really, it's a really interesting study about memory and food and how we, you know, we eat, you know, arguments over Christmas dinner, your first day, Halloween, Valentine's Day. you know you know all these things like you know you know things happen over food and i think that's the one thing i would say that one thing that my mom dad taught me about more than anything and i think this is something that our business does because we all do the same thing is you need to sit down and eat with your family and your friends you know you need to sit down and that's where restaurants will always have that advantage that they will you probably not be able to get an ai version of that too soon yeah yeah like as in and i think like you know people don't always what paul rosen's work does people don't always remember what they ate you say what's your favorite ever meal and they'll be like oh we're at this place little place in italy blah blah blah but who was there i was there was so and so and so and so what did you talk about i we did this this and this they remember who they were with and what they what they talked about and the feeling it gave them and that that was really they were really happy you're asking they might remember the main course they might remember but the food's not as important as the fact that we're you're exchanging ideas or exchanging like relationships or you know whatever so like for me like yeah i mean asia would be the place that like i would always be like that started my journey and flip my flip my um on switch onto food because it's just and it still is the place that you like i say you you will never find me more happy than like like and that's why i love bourdain like the 48 hour show it's like i've been that guy who's like in bangkok and he's just like phones up a mate who's a chef and like i'm coming down like we're in a bar and then we're in this restaurant under a bridge it's got no name and we're eating like blood lab and just like the happiest mark you know these are like things you'll never forget um and this is why i think food so people love food and why food so big on tiktok and instagram is because people want to experience that because actually when you experienced it when you're very young you take it for granted but it's the same with surfing i did that from a young age i took it for granted but when i see an older surfer now and they're at the beach and you go to like the wave in bristol it's like this indoor like inland wave and you got all these people who are new to it and they're like oh this and the other end you i some part of me thinks fucking hell it's like people going to the gym and saying how good the fucking gym is but i also think you know what you're experiencing it for the first time fucking enjoy it so you bought it it's like a ride you know it's like the bill hicks line you know fucking the uh the the what you said there about the food is like what's really interesting jack is the food you don't necessarily remember the food you remember the ideas and it's almost the food the magnet and food punctuates things yeah i just listened to a podcast with jimmy carr the other day and he says it's a great quote which is you can't smell the roses from a galloping horse which is basically like we're all fucking moving so fast but what but what he says is people don't want more time in life we think we want more time we actually want more unique experiences because that slows things down it's when you're doing the same train to london the same that time goes like that but if you do lots of different things and i think with this food if you can go and find whether it's a unique experience you know eating la blood la ponder a bridge in fucking thailand bangkok um yeah so let's wrap this up in a set mate there's a few things um it what's the craziest kind of um place you you've been like because it's almost like your dad was doing the bourdain thing before that was a bourdain thing yeah what's the craziest place you've been to do you think oh like i mean japan like when i was in japan this was 2007 like i found that quite crazy that's because it but that was because i was working out there and like i was in a stage and i didn't really have like any frame of reference and like you know when you've been to a lot of asian cities like hong kong and bangkok singapore wherever like you and you speak english it's like you can always get by but out there it's like you know like it was full on and like the and everywhere you go inside that what in the nelson translation the bill murray character is getting that kind of like you just feel punch drunk everywhere you go but the food was unbelievable like as in like like i think japanese like flavors and the way they understand taste and textures and the fish and everything like that for them for me it was like the craziest places there's not i mean i've been to like you know like eating like you know freaking trenches and lao and shit but like like that's not for me it was more about me as a chef just being there like that this would what it'd be like to be dropped somewhere you don't speak the language you've you've got your chef knives you've got your chef whites you've got a place to go and work and you've got no frame reference and you lose your fucking passport on the way in because you're pissed off the plane and uh and uh and they and they handed my my passport came back to me and i went and worked at this place and you know what it was just like it was just a really like yeah it's just like full-on like crazy dreamlike you know and like i have never really experienced that before because i've always sort of been able to like get like you know i've been to a lot of places and i kind of but there i was just like it was just me and and this completely amazing city with unbelievable food and every day i was just like i need to try something different and i was just but i was totally self-guided there was no internet i mean there was the internet was 2006 but like there was no like you know it wasn't it was like you know a lot of kind of like sitting in an internet cafe and we're like what what the fuck is ramen or what the you know where's sushi where's skiji fish market you know i end up going down to skiji fish market in a fucking tvr like at four in the morning i hadn't been to sleep and it was like brilliant so yeah like that was for me was like the place that just blew my mind and i've been back a few times since and it's always the same you know you can probably get by a bit better like with like you know with translating and stuff nowadays but like yeah i loved it what was what did you learn from the kitchen because i don't understand how you'd speak how did they kind of know the guy was australian yeah it was like it wasn't like a japanese kitchen it was just like a bar and grill but i was a i was in a tetsu and they were they they sent me out there like just for like it just I went to Japan in 2019 for the World Cup for the Rugby World Cup it was like unreal like the fact that each place has its own unique specialisms you go to the katsu place do you know what I mean final thing mate so I ask this to all guests who've got kids but what's one kind of piece of advice that Rick's taught you that you think you'll pass on to your kids so he taught me how to cut bread yeah slice bread I mean he didn't really teach me a lot when we were younger but I was doing my GCSE revision and he'd been out for a couple of, he'd had a few shandies and come back like, and he was making himself a sandwich and he was like, lad, no, he never calls me lad.

1:59:33And then he's like, I'll teach you how to cut bread. I'm like, I'm 15. Do you know what I mean? I know how to cut bread. I'm probably fucking stoned at the time. And then he was just like, right. He goes, he showed me how to cut bread and he was just like, and he was like, saw the soaring motion. And I was like, actually, it's a really fucking good way of cutting bread, honestly, like, like, like long strokes like that. But, So that's the only thing you actually ever officially taught me. But I think the one piece of advice I'd give is like, it's just like, it's like, don't necessarily, when you go to a country, like when you travel, travel with the idea of eating, like travel with food in mind and understand what their local dish is, what their favorite dish is, because you can talk to, so say Babi Galung in Indonesia.

2:00:14My wife's in Indonesia, dad's like, Babi Galung. Like the first time I went, I've been, it's like a small suckling roast baby pig. It's like their roast dinner, right? so it'd be like coming to england and be like fish and chips or roast dinner right so you go to indonesia and you sit there and you're talking to somebody or in a taxi or any situation and any time you feel you know and you go travel around the world you might feel a little bit like i don't know i'm not sure about the area like you're in a taxi start going for a bit of a dodgy area start talking about food and people always talk about food so my my piece of advice to them is it's just it's learn about the local food because you're never going to learn the local language but food's a universal language jack mate thank you so much i love i've absolutely loved that it's uh said beautiful kind of to come down here um understand these stories the depth behind it i had a gorgeous meal on at the restaurant on uh on sunday so mate thank you so much get yourself into mayday today and have a few have a few jars stay the night and you'll um yeah tonight's a beautiful time to be in pads though so thanks thank you so so much for listening to the podcast i really really do appreciate it if you like that episode only if you liked it please do give it five stars subscribe tell all your friends families foes next door but one cat dog whatever please tell everyone about this podcast it means the world to me and i really want to understand what your pain points are as the new wave of challenger food and drink brands please do hit me up on linkedin search dan pope and hopefully we can together create a more meaningful and powerful podcast for the next wave of challenger food and drink brands thank you so much