A Message In A Bottle To Rick Stein

You
meet some very strange people in Cambodia . It’s a place full of misfits and
loners. Expats escaping from something, or looking for something, and nearly
always reinventing themselves in the process. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever
come across such a high concentration of alcoholics, junkies, perverts, arseholes,
and compulsive liars.




For
instance, I met a guy the other day who said he was the executive chef of a
group of luxury hotels. He walked into the bar, introduced himself, and then held
court on his barstool telling us how difficult it was drumming the basics of
hygiene into his Cambodian cooks. We got chatting and I told him about my dismal
failure retraining as a chef and the book, Down And Out In Padstow And London ,
I’d written about my experiences.




I
told him how the cheffing door had been opened when Rick Stein agreed to let me
do a week in his Seafood Restaurant in Cornwall. The executive chef suddenly
butted in.




“He’s
one of my best friends!” he beamed. “He even sent me a long email when Chalky
died. He loved that dog. He was devastated.”




He
told me they’d done their chef training together in France, and hinted at the
drunken nights they’d had. I listened on, but was thinking of something else. I’d
been wanting to send the celebrity chef an email thanking him again for the
opportunity he gave me, and how if he hadn’t, my book would probably never have
been written.




But
I’d lost Stein’s email address and knew if I sent a message through his PR
people it would probably never get to him. I’d have more chance of sending him
a message in a bottle from one of Cambodia’s soon-to-be-developed Robinson Crusoe
islands.




So
when the executive chef eventually paused to take a swig of beer, I asked if he’d
mind passing my thank you letter on to the TV chef. He handed me a smart
business card with his email on it.




“Not
a problem,” he said, “Oh, we had some times together!”




Then
he stopped suddenly and looked slightly angry and bitter.




“Do
you know the difference between him and me? Do you know how he got to where he
is and I didn’t?” He didn’t wait for an answer: “Luck!”




A couple
of days later I wrote a thank you letter to Stein and emailed it to the executive
chef. I didn’t hear anything back. Not even anything to say he’d got it. Then a
couple of weeks passed and my suspicions were finally confirmed when I was back
in the same Irish bar talking to the owner Ronan.




He
told me the executive chef had been in a few days before and tried some of his
Irish stew - a dish tongue-in-cheekily described in his bar adverts as “the
best Irish stew in Cambodia”.




We’d
been chatting about the best way to cook it because the price of lamb out here
- $47 for a small frozen leg imported from New Zealand - makes it impossible to
make. At least at a price the cheapskate losers in Sihanoukville are prepared
to shell out for. Goat would have been the next best option, but we couldn’t
get hold of that, and when I jokingly suggested dog meat Ronan looked appalled.




“My
dog would smell it! He’d never come near me again!” he whimpered.




So
I told him to use beef instead, but to throw in a few anchovies to give it a richer
flavour. He made the stew with the usual chunks of carrots, potatoes and
onions, and then showed me his secret of mashing up a few of the spuds and
putting them in a thin layer in the bottom of each bowl, and pouring the stew
on top. It was a nice touch and kept the broth high in the bowl while allowing
people to thicken the thin liquor to their liking.




He told
me the executive chef had raved about it in the pub. Tom began laughing, his
arched eyebrows wiggling away.




“’Oh,
he said, that’s a lovely bit of lamb! Where did you get the neck fillet from?’
Fucking lamb! And he’s an executive chef! People were listening, so I just
played on. What the fuck could I do? I said: ‘Oh, I get it from this butcher...’
‘I love lamb!’ he says. ‘It’s my favourite fucking meat.’ What the fuck! You
couldn’t make that up now could you!”




No
wonder the bloke hadn’t replied to my email. It probably wasn’t even his
business card. The real executive chef was probably thinking who the hell is
this idiot. I had to get the letter to Stein myself. The next day, I searched
through my contacts list again for the TV cook’s email, and then decided to
send a message to his press department, asking them if they would mind passing
my letter on to Stein in between dunking digestives.




Surprisingly,
I got an email from his PA the next day. She said she had forwarded the letter to
Stein. And a week or so later, an email arrived from the celebrity chef,
thanking me for my letter and saying: “I've heard a lot about the book and am
ordering it.”




I
can’t tell you how pleased I was. I’ve always liked the man. I know I rant
about celebrity chefs and say they should all be napalmed, but like Fergus
Henderson or the late Keith Floyd , who sparked the pandemic of TV cooks, he’s
so different from the morons that plague our screens, newspapers, magazines,
billboards, government campaigns, and stock cube adverts. He’s got a brain for
a start.




Can
you imagine Gordon Ramsay , James Martin , Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall or Gary Rhodes even talking to you unless there was something in it for them, let alone
arranging for a stranger and complete novice to do a week in one of their restaurants?
And the lesser known TV chefs trying to squeeze their way up the rat cage walls
are even worse.




I
wonder what Stein will think of my book? I think he comes across pretty well,
even if I do mention him in my tirade about celebrity chefs never actually
being in the kitchen. I know he’s touchy about the name Padstein too, and there’s
plenty on that.




But
I’m far harsher on other TV chefs like Heston Blumenthal , who I only saw once
in the three weeks I worked at the Fat Duck, and that was just a glimpse of him
on the stairs as he took a break from filming in the lab. He didn’t even come down
to the prep room to shake our hands and thank us for working for free in his
restaurant. I wonder if that nutter in the bar knows him as well?




Book
Update:





I
want to apologise for the very poor delivery times of the paperback version of my
book Down And Out In Padstow And London. For reasons that are beyond me, Amazon
have had problems distributing recent batches. It’s something to do with the
wrong metadata being input, whatever that means. But Completely Novel who print
my book have promised they are trying to sort it out.




I
don’t know how long it will continue, but I’ve been told that books ordered
through Amazon will arrive soon, and they will obviously not take your money
until they do post the book to your address. To help remedy this, an eBay page
has been set up to sell my book. So if you want the book in the next few days, then cancel
your order at Amazon and buy the book HERE ...