Multi-award-winning chef Rick Stein on tour - Guildford date

An Evening with Rick Stein will see the culinary legend dish up his favourite memories from nearly 50 years of gastronomic experience. Delving deep into his lifelong love affair with cooking, the live stage show will see him explore his unwavering devotion to the brilliance of great British produce. On March 9 he will be in Guildford’s G Live.

As a self-taught chef, his story is one of perseverance and passion from humble beginnings to the pinnacle of culinary success with more than 25 cookery books, 30 TV programmes including 12 cookery series, ten restaurants and several hotels: stories he will share on tour.

“I did the same theatre tour last year in the first two weeks of March and it went really well. The material will be slightly different this time. I will have a series of clips of programmes that I've made and anecdotes about making the programmes. A lot of people have done this kind of thing and I'm quite friendly with Nigella Lawson who told me that it was great fun so I just thought I would have a go. Doing book tours and talking to live audiences, I just realised that I could do it and that I wouldn't find it intimidating. It is great. The majority of the audience will have seen many of the TV shows that I've made and when you feel that you're talking to people that know what you do then it's much easier. Part of the problem if you're doing something like stand-up comedy is that you have to get the people on your side but for this I just turn up and be myself and it feels like people are drawn to the things I'm talking about. And there's something about a live audience. It's like it inspires us to do better and in a way it's like running a restaurant which isn't all about how good the food is and how good the service is. A lot of it is about the feeling of bonhomie that you have. It's a combination of all these things.”

Plus of course people are naturally interested in food: “I can find myself getting really boring about it. I get so excited about a plate of mussels! But as a child I was lucky enough to have parents that cooked well and we always had nice food. I was brought up originally on a farm in Oxfordshire and then we moved to Cornwall but I had that background of good food and I know that makes a difference.”

Inevitably things have changed a huge amount in terms of trends and fashions over the 50 years that Rick has been in the business: “And that's the challenge. You've got to try to stay relevant. It is about trying to keep up with the trends and I defer a lot to my sons in that respect. They are much more on trend than I am. My youngest son Charlie is really involved in the business and most of the recommendations that he gets are online.

“But the whole thing has changed a great deal for a simple reason and that's we've just got so much available to us now. It is a quite bewildering choice now. I've just done a series about food stories and there's just so much that we can get. I remember when I was starting doing TV programmes people were saying ‘Yeah well, how long can this go on for, all these TV chefs?’ There are so many and it's great because there is so much choice. And it is also great to get away from the gloomy stuff.”

As Rick, says good food is an antidote to the gloom. He was sitting in a restaurant the other day by himself having a couple of starters: “And people came kept coming up and saying generally how happy they were in the restaurant because of the food they were eating.”