Rick and Jill Stein are marking the anniversary with a special lunch menu built around prime Cornish seafood inclusive of dishes from the original 1975 Seafood Restaurant menu such as seafood thermidor, baked crab, moules marinière and thunder and lightening dessert.
The menu will run from Monday 1st November through to Friday 24th December 2010, seven days a week from 12pm until 2.30pm.
Rick Stein comments: “Little did Jill and I know when we opened a small seafood bistro on the harbourside in Padstow in 1975 with red checked tablecloths and candles in Verdicchio bottles that the business would grow into six restaurants, 40 bedrooms, four shops, a cookery school and a pub. We didn’t have a masterplan. It just happened.”
When the restaurant opened in 1975 it employed just five staff, with Rick leading a kitchen team of two and Jill heading up their three-strong front of house team. The business has since grown to employ a total of 374 staff in Cornwall, across sites in Padstow, Falmouth and
St Merryn.
Rick attributes the success of all this to a simple observation ‘nothing is more exhilarating than fresh fish, simply cooked.’ It was this enthusiasm for seafood that led him to make his first TV cookery series Taste of the Sea in 1995, twenty years after The Seafood Restaurant opened. Since then the company has gone from strength to strength and Rick has made eight more series for the BBC.
Their latest venture Rick Stein’s Fish & Chips, Seafood Bar and deli also opened on Events Square in Falmouth earlier this year.