What’s All The Fuss Over Nando’s Using McCain Frozen Chips – Top Restaurants Are At It As Well

Anyone who has ever eaten at Nando’s will know the chips are the soft, puffy, mulchy sort that bring back unpleasant memories of school dinners. You know that sort of half-baked, oven chip taste. A film of jaundiced, fried potato barely holding in a pillow of tasteless white mush.

So, it is perhaps no surprise that the chicken chain has admitted using McCain frozen chips in its restaurants. It came after a student working at Nando’s grassed them up to the Leicester Mercury newspaper, and other media outlets lifted, I mean followed up, the story.

Nando’s was quick to point out that these were not the sort of McCain chips you might bung in the oven at home. But instead were a “specific recipe” exclusively made for the chain – which does make you wonder just how much effort went into making the chips as unpleasant as they are.

It hardly needs to be said that the outrage over this damning indictment caused much merriment and vitriol on Twitter and other social media dungeons, perhaps more so than usual because the snow meant more people than normal were sitting in their underpants, firing off tweets that no-one would ever read, rather than braving two inches of snow and struggling into work.

I haven’t the fortitude of character to bother checking whether there is now a chipgate hashtag in circulation, as I suspect there probably is. Just a handful of quoted tweets, for what now passes as journalism on the BBC website, was enough to put me off, with one moronic tweeter going as far as describing it as the “revelation of the year”.

KFC staff caught gobbing into chicken buckets or McDonald’s workers filling salt sachets with ricin might be worthy contenders for revelations, perhaps even of the year. But buying in chips from McCain is hardly a hanging offence, and Nando’s could help itself much more by simply training its kitchen staff to cook the chips properly.

To say the story is overdone is an understatement. What I find interesting is the attention these reports about what goes on in the kitchens of budget restaurants get. You can sense a definite snobbery and delight in middle-class foodie circles (i.e. foodie circles), presumably from people who would never lower themselves to eat in Nando’s or KFC, or at least would never admit to doing so. The schadenfreude at such ‘revelations’ is palpable among those who dine in far more expensive restaurants.

What I have never understood is how this level of outraged, puritan scrutiny rarely targets the top restaurants. Perhaps these places are just far better at concealing their tracks? Surely it is far more of a crime to pay ten times more than you would at Nando’s and then be served bought-in food.

At Rick Stein’s Seafood Restaurant, the chips arrived in sealed plastic bags ready to be fried – or at least they did when I worked there. They are not from McCain. Instead they are made at an industrial estate on the outskirts of Padstow, by Stein’s staff who also churn out all the Cornish pasties and chutneys that have made him one of the richest men in Cornwall - upsetting the locals no end (and not for just using the wrong type of pastry).

He can hardly be criticised for that. The explanation when I asked was that it was a space-saving ploy and there was not enough room in the seafood restaurant’s large, airy kitchen to peel potatoes and hand cut chips. Same as much of the other veg.

However, what did slightly irk was seeing other food come directly out of a jar or packet. As I say, you’d forgive this in a café selling £6 or £7 lunches, but not in a restaurant that charges Michelin star prices, without actually having one.

When I did my brief stint in the kitchen there (admittedly a long time ago, but I’d be surprised if much has changed), if you ordered the potted shrimp, all the chef had to do was open a bought-in pot and put the contents on a plate with (home-made) toast. You could have saved yourself a small fortune just by going to Asda. The seafood pasta dish was almost as easy. But for that price you might think Stein’s staff were making the pasta themselves. Instead, they just boiled up packets of dried De Cecco linguine, which is a very good one, but you take my point.

I have heard countless tales from chefs working in many of the top restaurants in Britain, who can tell similar stories. Even the three-star Fat Duck was no stranger to the practice. The bread arrived each morning, supplied by a boutique baker, which is forgivable given the size of Heston Blumenthal’s coffin-sized kitchen. And Waitrose helped out with the sardine on toast sorbet. The pastry chefs could never have been accused of shouting it from the rooftops, and you got the feeling that any bought-in food would have been kept under lock and key away from prying eyes, as the great and the good were sometime given tours of the kitchens.

It was only when the pastry cooks on ice cream duty said they had run out of tinned sardines one day, that a hapless chef was sent off to the nearby Waitrose in Maidenhead for a few tins of own-brand fish, that it became obvious. 

Being Wined And Steined In Padstow

Guest post by Dom Bailey

Never look a gift horse in the mouth. Whatever that means. I wouldn't know how to cook one either. But it's that birthday time of year again, and with the kids safely in the hands of in-laws, I was whisked away to Cornwall (well, I had to drive five hours before I was told exactly where we were staying.)

I think Lennie may have mentioned Padstein once or twice and has a few tales to tell about a stage in Stein’s Seafood Restaurant kitchen. But this birthday treat meant I had the chance to sample Rick Stein’s kingdom from the other side of the pass.

The expense came courtesy of a now deceased maiden aunt who enjoyed the good things in life and was a regular at Thornbury Castle. A fitting way to spend the money she'd left my wife (my wife thought) and what's a birthday present if you can't share it?

The £435 winter getaway package included two nights at St Edmunds House - sea view, four poster bed, attic bathroom, free standing bath and Molten Brown shampoo (we are easily impressed) and some good eating to boot.

The deal was a three-course meal at St Petroc's Bistro, breakfast (twice) at the flagship Seafood Restaurant, with a three course meal there in between. Buy your own drinks. Now when something is "all included" or "anything you like" I am suspicious. We looked at the menus - and again - and wondered if it really was anything from the menu.

Could we have a starter and then share the chateaubriand for two at £45? I saw the lunchtime meal deal of three courses for £19, that must be it. "You’re a mini-break booker, sir? This way please wa ha ha haar..."

But no. Just as the Seafood Restaurant does what it says on the tin (33 seafood dishes, only three non-fish options, and only one is a main - it's fish, ok?) the three course option was anything you like. Kids in a sweet shop. But do you go for the most expensive dish just because you can?

"I'm having steak," said my wife. "It's £25." Apparently you do. I realised it had all been worked out and the restaurant knew what the maximum damage would be, but sometimes you can't help feeling a little greedy, over extravagant maybe.

A little taster to start - bruschetta of mackerel escabeche. Fresh, lightly pickled fish with crunchy onion and carrot on a piece of fried bread. A taste of fast receding memories of a Cornish summer.

Starters: my good wife had scallops. Chivey topping and on a bed of seaweed (for decoration only, she discovered.) I went for the wood pigeon salad (pic below). The tender pigeon, on watercress, was nicely peppered - which did remind me of Kampot pepper and the fact that Rick Stein has "done" Cambodia on his travels.

On to the steaks. For a little variety (yes we lean over to taste each other’s food - unless it's scallops, then I get a sharp fork on the knuckles) my wife had sirloin and I had bavette. I'm not really a steak man. Beef, like chicken, is usually the last option from the meat counter, farm shop or menu, unless you're talking koo dut (pic below). There are so many more meats, especially wild ones, to choose from. Textures and tastes from venison and boar for example I believe outrank beef.

But here was a cut I hadn't tried, and beef – 28 day dry-aged Aberdeen Angus - was the only meat from the grill. Bavette, the waitress informed me, is "like the skirt you have in stews". You could only have it medium rare or rare. I like those kinds of instructions on a menu. I admit I was tempted to ask for it well done - just to see what happened. But I behaved.

The bavette bordelaise was served with pommes coq d'or (thin slices of potato cooked in chicken stock with garlic), baby gem lettuce, shallots and a rich, well-seasoned cabernet sauvignon vinegar sauce. The meat wasn't melt in your mouth tender but was full of flavour, and went down a little better with crispy chips sneaked from my wife's 14oz sirloin and chive butter dish than the soft pommes.

Desserts. Spanish cheese cake. No contest. There is no base and it is slightly thicker and drier than you might expect, but a great cross somewhere between cake, creaminess and cheese with a baked brown edge of goodness. And that’s before you taste it with the poached pear slices lightly spiced with vanilla. My wife had a sundae - chocolate and vanilla ice-cream with clotted cream that would have seen her well into Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday if we didn't have a booking at the Seafood Restaurant...

We'd done the turf, now the surf was up. On a Monday as well. Sorry Anthony Bourdain. There is almost too much to choose from on the menu. Still three courses to choose, but what to go for? Something expensive, unusual, familiar?

Dover sole, sea bass, fish pie, monkfish vindaloo, crab, the list went on. Bouillabaisse, turbot, brill, fish and chips...or duck. My wife did break from tradition and forgo the scallops, and had crab with Russian salad followed by a rich lobster thermidor (pic above). I just fancied lobster, straight up, no fuss. So steamed lobster it was for me (pic below). "Small or medium lobster sir?" Let me think for a second, yes definitely medium please.

For my starter, I was tempted by the fruits de mer - razor clams, oyster, crab, lobster - a little rock pool on ice. In fact I was tempted by a lot. But oysters are my favourite. So are spicy sausages. And here they were in the same dish.

A bite of creamy fresh oyster, a chunk of sausage - a bit of chilli but not too much paprika - and a slurp of cold white wine. It was a beautiful starter. The lobster was as simple as you can get but what could be better? Steamed, rich meat from the body, lighter, sweet meat from the claws and flecks of red roe. It came with mayonnaise, which I prefer a bit lemonier and left most of it, but the lobster was enough on its own.

For the desserts, the filling lobster certainly ruled out cheeses. But before I had got to the bottom of the list, my wife suggested: "Why don't you have the tarte, then I can have the crème brûlée?" Too stuffed to argue, I had the drum roll pear tarte tatin with scrumpy ice cream. Gooey, syrupy...and my turn to wrap knuckles. The crème brûlée was delicious, apparently. I can only confirm the pistachio biscotti was good.

The restaurant was fairly busy for a Monday. It's a large room with a massive bar whacked in the middle covered in bathroomy tiles - maybe a job lot left over from all the Stein luxury accommodation dotted around town? I thought I'd overdone the pre-meal drinks as the ceiling above the bar seemed to glow neon pink, then green. But no, it was intentional apparently, if a little odd.

Mind you, we were sitting below a painting of a pig in a nurse’s outfit. Looking around the room, it was like some mad curator had thrown up a gallery's leftovers. A huge painting that seemed to show the inside of an Arabian tent with tagines and cushions had a copy of Rick Stein's Mediterranean Escapes peeping out. Another subtle reminder, in case you needed one, of whose gaff it is.

The waiting staff were all friendly and not too overbearing. They must get sick of the "where's Rick?" question, but I'm sure I heard it asked twice. So two nights and four meals later, we had been truly wined and Steined. I don't think our steak and lobster choices would have hit the profits too hard, and I think Aunt Grace would have approved.

:: Dom Bailey is a writer and singer-songwriter. His songs are here at domssongs.blogspot.com.

Celebrity Chef Enters Kitchen Shock

It seemed absurd to me, yet on the outside – in the media world - Rick Stein appeared quite a nervous, hunched up figure. Quiet and deferential. But he grew into a bear as he entered his old lair. It was like a fish being returned to water. He frowned a few times as he scanned the kitchen. Then his eyes fell on me, and he began squinting. He said something to the fawning Italian and pointed.

From the look on his face, I was sure he’d been told about the pasties. I kept my head down and carried on chopping. Long minutes past as Stein worked his way through the kitchen. He walked past the stove area, looked in at the pastry section, and I was praying he was going to carry on through the fish prep area and disappear up the stairs, when he turned on his heels and strolled towards me.

I sped up the chopping like I was in an Indonesian sweat shop, partly out of nerves, partly out of a lunatic attempt to make it look like I knew what I was doing. I got a glimpse of his shadow and then he was next to me.

“So how are you finding it? Hard work?”

I looked up pretending to see him for the first time, and gave him my best grin. He didn’t return it. I studied his face, looking for clues. All I could think about was those fucking pasties.

“It’s excellent,” I said. “I’m learning a huge amount. I really appreciate the chance you’ve given me.”

He looked surprised. We chatted for a few more seconds, but the conversation was stilted and I couldn’t think of what to say, so I asked him what he was doing the next day.

“I’m flying to Australia…as you do,” he answered. “Anyway good luck with it, and I’m glad you managed to arrange the week so…quickly.”

He let the sentence float in mid-air, and I knew it wasn’t just Jimmy who was suspicious of me.
:: This blog eventually became a bestselling book, called Down And Out In Padstow And London by Alex Watts, about my disastrous attempt to train as a chef, including stints at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck and Rick Stein's kitchens in Padstow. You might like it if you're a foodie or have ever entertained the ridiculous idea of entering the padded asylum of professional cooking. It's here on Amazon as a paperback or Kindle book if you want a read...

Why Didn’t You Do The Cornish Pasties?

It was all going well. I’d have an early night, get up at 5am; shower, shave, and drive up to Rick Stein’s industrial unit for a day learning about Cornish pasties and successful side-crimping.

Then the phone rang. It was Colin, a pap I knew from the paper. He’d rung the day before and said he was doing a piece on the ‘snob yobs’ that pillage the village of Rock – that favourite summertime haunt of Princes William and Harry. He was in a pub at the harbour and had already got me a drink in. I promised myself it would only be one or two and walked back down the hill.

Colin was fishing cockles from a jar, listening to a folk band. He leapt up when he saw me and crushed my hand. He had cockle juice in his beard and looked like he’d been there some time. He wanted to hear all about my day at Stein’s, and kept running off to the bar to refill our glasses.

“What are you worrying about?” he kept saying. “Chefs don’t sleep! If they did, they wouldn’t have a social life!”

A posh old lunatic with his trousers tucked into his socks walked in, and made horn sounds with his fist clenched to his mouth. He danced around the pub, shouting: “Do you like hunting? I do!”

He had an altercation with the band, and then sat next to us.

“These folk lot are so bloody serious aren’t they!” He scrunched up his face and impersonated a constipated cat. “No fun at all! One of them – that woman making that hideous sound with the violin – was bending down, showing her thong to the pub...and all I said was ‘I can see your shitty bootlace!’ No sense of humour...”

“Sure it wasn’t her G-string?” I asked.

The mad bastard wasn’t listening. He was one of those barstool boors whose lives are one long, befuddled monologue.

“That’s the trouble with these folk lot - I know how it should be sung. They’re too nasal – they should sing like this…” He burst into a powerful bass-tenor. “Bella was young and Bella was fair with bright blue eyes and golden hair. Not…” He sang the lyrics again in a flat, nasal voice, his teeth protruding like a demented vole.

“What are you doing in here listening to this shit anyway,” he yelled. “You young people should be out binge-drinking and fighting.”

He introduced himself as Roger and claimed he owned 1,000 acres up the coast. He said he used to be addicted to amphetamines, and spent his twenties drinking and fighting. He could barely remember his thirties.

“Do you know Simon Cursley?” he said suddenly. We shook our heads. “You would if you knew him – I bit his nose off!”

He got louder and drunker, and insulted everyone who walked past. “I bet she was quite pretty once,” he shouted at one woman. And when a plump barmaid arrived to collect glasses, he yelled: “My word that woman has a body on her!”

I slouched lower in my seat, but Colin was loving it. A nearby drinker tried to intervene, but our drinking companion would not be silenced. “Have you ever been burdened by the ravages of intelligence?” Roger screamed at him.

Later, a small, tattooed man sat next to us, and clinked glasses. I asked him how he knew Roger. “I met him in a toilet – think it was in a prison,” he laughed. He said they used to make a living dynamiting salmon in rivers.

“But you had to know when they were going past. I’d be in a wet-suit dynamiting them, and he’d be on the bank fishing them out! We used to flog them to restaurants in the West End...”

At some point, I crawled up the hill to my room. I was too drunk to remember my alarm, and woke at nine with a stinking headache. I don’t know what happened, but bleary-headed, and embarrassed by the thought of going in late, I found myself agreeing to go on a fishing trip with Colin. I was braving my first cigarette of the day on the quayside when Raymond phoned. He sounded confused, and slightly hurt.

“I just wanted to know you were alright,” he explained, almost apologetically.

My head was still thumping, and I babbled about my friend coming down and how I’d promised him a fishing trip. A few minutes past, then Jimmy phoned. He was Stein’s executive chef, and far more direct.

“Why dinnae you dae the fuckin pasties this mornin?”


:: This blog eventually became a bestselling book, called Down And Out In Padstow And London by Alex Watts, about my disastrous attempt to train as a chef, including stints at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck and Rick Stein's kitchens in Padstow.

You might like it if you're a foodie or have ever entertained the ridiculous idea of entering the padded asylum of professional cooking. It's here on Amazon as a paperback or Kindle book if you want a read...

The Seafood Restaurant

Rick Stein’s PA phoned the next day, and I drove down the M4 for a week's work experience at his Seafood Restaurant in Padstow. I rented a room within walking distance of the restaurant, and went on a tour of the local pubs to get a flavour of the place. I was nervous and thought a few beers would help.

Most of the locals rolled their eyes when I brought up the TV chef’s name. I could see why they called it Padstein; he had four restaurants, 40 rooms, a deli, patisserie, gift shop and a cookery school - all in a fishing village with a population of less than 4,000. You could hardly look in a shop window without seeing his face beaming back at you. There were Rick Stein tea towels, oven gloves, mugs and grab bags, marmalade, chutneys, fudge, pickled onions, olive oil and spices.

There didn’t seem to be a thing he hadn’t turned his hand to. He was even selling jars of salt for £3 each. His Cornish pasties alone had irked the locals, who were appalled at him using puff pastry, let alone smoked haddock or crab. “It’s bloody Scaarwtch mist he’s selling in them jars,” one old boy said. The way they saw it, it was as obnoxious an insult to their treasured Celtic heritage as Ginsters. Bleach in the brooks, destroying the mystical vibes of Cornwall.

Stein, apparently, hated the name Padstein, and liked to say “I’ve just got a few modest businesses – it’s not like I own the whole town.” They blamed him for driving up property prices – forcing their children to move somewhere cheaper, where they might stand a chance of buying a home.

But there was no way you could doubt that the TV chef and his rough-haired Jack Russell Chalky had put the place on the map. And I wasn’t sure how much those old fishermen had grumbled when hordes of grockles and emmets descended, blocking up the narrow lanes, and handing over 250,000 notes for tiny ‘ideal weekend retreat’ cottages. I bet they couldn’t stop rubbing their hands.

Some remembered him in the early days – and how despite his overwhelming passion for food, he hadn’t always harboured ambitions of being a chef. The Seafood Restaurant had started out as a nightclub, and he’d gone into cooking when it failed.

There were tales of his legendary tempers in the kitchen, most of which I can’t publish. Even his old friends described him as “very volatile in the early days” and “pretty fiery and stressed out”. Stein, himself, admits he was “hot and bothered and fucking angry a lot of the time”.

It was hard to reconcile those fervid eruptions with the quiet, unassuming man I’d met in London. But then, by his own admittance, he’d mellowed significantly over the years. The books, TV deals, vineyard and house in Australia, meant he rarely ventured into the kitchen. As with Gordon Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal, he’d trained up staff so he could leave behind the heat and exhaustion for the cosy media world, while still trading off his own name. It was strange to think I was doing it in reverse. I was clearly insane, but then, apparently, you had to be mad to be a good chef.

An old waitress, who’d been there in the early days, said deep down Stein was a shy man. It reminded me of his words in a documentary: “I always seem to be quite lively and enjoying myself, but actually I’m taking pleasure in my food and the fact people are enjoying it. I’m not making a big fuss about it. I think that’s the core of what being a restaurateur is all about – actually taking pleasure in other people’s happiness.”

I admired him for that, and his philosophy that "nothing is more joyful or exhilarating than fresh fish simply cooked". It was what thrilled me about cooking too; it was that sort of cheffing I wanted to learn. Brilliant ingredients cooked in a simple manner. There is nothing worse than our scourge of chic hotels and gastro pubs blindly trying to imitate far more skilled, boundary-stretching chefs. Menus littered with pretentious monstrosities like elderberry candyfloss, anchovy popcorn, almond fluid gels, and lavender jus. What is wrong with steak and kidney pudding? It also means they think they can charge £28 for a badly-cooked fillet of sea bass.

The waitress told me when Stein opened the restaurant in 1975, the dishes were really simple: sea bass and samphire with beurre blanc, mackerel with dill and new potatoes, clam marsala, clam chowder with razor clams from the Camel estuary, moules marinieres, skate with black butter, and that hallmark of all fish restaurants – Provencal fish soup.

He won awards, but he didn’t hit the big time until Keith Floyd became a regular visitor, and convinced his director David Pritchard to include Stein in one of the ‘Floyd on Fish’ programmes. After that the phone didn’t stop ringing. Floyd showed him how to make a good bouillabaisse, and now I was going to learn those skills myself. I went to bed proud and extremely nervous.

The next morning, I walked down the hill and looked out at the fishing boats in the harbour, and the green sea beyond. It was worth going to work just for the view. The briny air was filled with the ‘kee-ow’ screams of gulls. Out in the bay, a fishing vessel was heading home, surrounded by what looked like tiny scraps of white tissue. For some reason, I thought of Eric Cantona’s famous footballing quote: “When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.”

I had a last cigarette, and walked round the harbour to the restaurant, past the spot where they’d filmed Stein eating roast bass on a trawler with Floyd as they went off to sea. Dinner jackets, a starched linen tablecloth, and silverware knives and forks. It was the spirit of adventure in Floyd’s programmes that had attracted Stein to the TV world. I wondered what fish I hoped to get by following Stein’s trawler. But then, I thought, as I walked up to the door – the sea hath fish for every man.


:: This blog eventually became a bestselling book, called Down And Out In Padstow And London by Alex Watts, about my disastrous attempt to train as a chef, including stints at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck and Rick Stein's kitchens in Padstow.

You might like it if you're a foodie or have ever entertained the ridiculous idea of entering the padded asylum of professional cooking. It's here on Amazon as a paperback or Kindle book if you want a read...

From Keith Floyd To Rick Stein

Before I start, I should explain why I’m writing this blog. Two years ago, something strange happened to me. There was no epiphany moment involving oysters and swords, or indeed anything to herald the fact I was to become a changed man. But change I did - drastically.

And when I disburden the facts, like some navel-gazing adolescent looking for praise and understanding, you’ll be able to see whether it was for better or worse. And more importantly, I hope you make more sense of it than I do. Maybe something similar has happened to you, maybe not. But I’d like to hear all the same. It’d mean a lot to me. We might even become friends. Because I still don’t know why I gave up everything I had and started a new life in a sleepy fishing village on the west coast of England.

At first I put it down to some sort of hormonal lopsidedness, but at 41 it was unlikely to be the male menopause. And it wasn’t a mid-life crisis because I’d had that in my early 30s, when I started riding motorbikes again. I threw myself on the judgement of counsellors, fortune tellers, psychics, and other end-of-the-pier specialists, but they didn’t have a clue either.

In short, there were three key changes: I became utterly bored with my life, I developed a disturbing case of insomnia, and I became obsessed with the idea that I should retrain as a chef.

I had an interesting enough job – I worked as a newspaper hack in London, and the money and hours weren’t too bad either. But I was too comfortable – I needed to kick off the slippers and feel alive again. I knew cheffing was hard – I’d heard the tales of brandings and hurled saucepans, and assaults in the cellar. Knife fights with saucepan lids for shields. And maybe that was it. Maybe I wanted to prove myself, show the world I could take anything, and find a segment of salvation through suffering. Perhaps, as no doubt certain chefs think, it was like the SAS – and I could prove I was a man by crawling on my hands and knees across Dartmoor.

In truth, the cheffing idea was not something new. I’d always loved tinkering in the kitchen, reading cook books and trying out recipes, but that was no longer enough. I wanted to find out how the professionals do it. I wanted the blurred-action knife skills you see on TV. I wanted to learn from the best, and own a restaurant overlooking the sea. But most of all, I wanted to do something with my life. Be the one being interviewed, not the one holding the Dictaphone; the flame, not the fat moth wheezing round it.

It was a big ask, whichever way you looked at it. I’d only worked in a professional kitchen once in my life. It was after university, in between working at a garden centre and joining the paper. A wind-blown corpse of a pub, so empty it made a buffet bar at a lepers’ colony look busy. The customers looked like extras from Deliverance. You know the sort – web-footed types that play the banjo, and boast how their father is the best kisser in the village.

But I got sacked on the second night for burning a saucepan of rice. The landlord couldn’t cook either – but next to me he was Auguste Escoffier himself. It was a painful lesson. The world was filled with amateur cooks able to quote chunks of Larousse Gastronomique - but put them in a professional kitchen, and they’d last as long as a green salad in a deep-fat fryer.

That’s why I wasn’t going to be one of those suckers who think they can run a place without experience. That’s why I’d start at the bottom, getting my arse kicked around all day as a commis (the lowest rung in the chefs’ hierarchy, and a term freely interchangeable with slave, grunt, or dog’s body.) After all, it would only be for a year or so, two max.

I handed in my notice at the paper, and got an alarm clock as a leaving present. I spent the first days lounging around, watching re-runs of Keith Floyd on the telly, and wondering how the hell a 41-year-old man went about training as a chef. Then Harriet, a showbiz reporter I knew, phoned. She was interviewing Rick Stein for a feature, and wanted help compiling a list of questions. I thought about it for a while, knowing she wouldn't like it, but asked the question anyway.

“Do you mind if I come along as well? I’ve always wanted to meet him…” I said, trailing off in mid-sentence. I was right - she wasn't keen.

“I thought you hated all celebrity chefs!”

“Not Stein!” He was second only to Floyd in my book.

“Well only if you don’t upset him, and only speak to him after I’ve interviewed him.” She had become business-like all of a sudden. Gone was the fluffy exterior - you had to be tough in showbiz.

I went along for the interview, and found myself in a swanky bar in Mayfair. Stein looked shaky and tired as though his blood had been replaced with salad cream.

“This is the acquaintance of mine I was telling you about,” Harriet told him after she’d finished the interview. “He wants to have a quick chat with you…”

I shook the TV chef’s hand and began blurting out a load of nonsense. He took a step back, staring into the eyes of a madman.

“I’ve always been into cooking, and well…I love cooking fish…in fact, it’s my favourite…and I just wanted to pick your brains about being…well, about being a chef…”

He told me he would have a quick chat afterwards. I waited for him to finish the rest of the interviews, and listened as he churned out the same anecdotes to each journalist. Harriet came over at one point. “Don’t be too pushy. I don’t care because I’ll never see him again. Just think of something specific you can ask him.”

I stood there confused, wondering what the hell I was doing there. I started babbling again.

“Well, why don’t you ask him if you can do a week in his restaurant,” she chimed.

I waited for an hour, and mid-way through Stein’s PR woman slid up and tried her best to get rid of me. It was obvious she saw me as an unhinged interloper who’d do nothing to promote his new book.

“We’ve got a car arriving soon,” she said finally, “so I don’t know if Rick will have time to talk to you.”

As the last camera crew began packing up, she muttered something to the celebrity chef, and pointed at her watch.

“No, I’ll see him,” Stein said, beckoning me over.

This time I knew exactly what to say. The confusion left his face immediately, and he agreed to let me do a week in his kitchen. He wrote my name down in a tatty notebook, warned me he was very forgetful, and said I should ring his PA if I hadn’t heard anything in a couple of days.

I was excited, terrified, and alive. I stood at the bar for a long time afterwards, glowing in the thought of what had taken place. Maybe my luck was finally changing. If it wasn’t just talk, I was to spend a week in one of the most famous restaurants in Britain. Then I thought of something I’d long ago locked away. That clichéd moment in movies when they gaze up and remember a childhood memory...and it all goes soft-focused and hazy…

I could almost smell the sea again, feel the sun on my skin. I was five-years-old, running round rock-pools, bucket in hand, when I spotted a scallop gleaming like a pink, fiery beacon. I took it back to our tent and handed it to my mother. But she hadn’t got a clue what to do with it, so she gave it to the French family next door. They cooked it with bacon and other secrets, and served it to me in the shell. I think at that moment, as I sat there realising there was more to life than Angel Delight and Jammy Dodgers, I decided to become a chef. But it’s funny how easy it is to get distracted.

Three decades later, I was about to embark on that pilgrimage – a long, hard journey filled with toil and hardship. And just as the scallop was the emblem of the pilgrims that walked to Santiago de Compostella, it would become mine too. Where they suffered blisters and aching feet, mine would be burns, cuts, long hours and bad pay.

It was a splendid, romantic notion and would make a mention in the blog at least. I ordered another drink, keen not to let the alcoholic, afternoon steel ooze away, and leave me with the nagging doubt that it was all a ridiculous idea, and I’d never do it.

:: This blog eventually became a bestselling book, called Down And Out In Padstow And London by Alex Watts, about my disastrous attempt to train as a chef, including stints at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck and Rick Stein's kitchens in Padstow.

You might like it if you're a foodie or have ever entertained the ridiculous idea of entering the padded asylum of professional cooking. It's here on Amazon as a paperback or Kindle book if you want a read...