Rick Stein's Long Weekends
 

Is anyone else watching this series?

Some great ideas for European getaways with a culinary bias (Bordeaux, Iceland and Berlin so far) - can't wait to see where he goes next.

Yes. I am watching it. He successfully convinced me that a trip to France would not be horrible.

Any time a Rick Stein show is on, I watch it.

I was almost crying with laughter at the self-drive Trabant tour yesterday.

notice how all the trendy chefs have beards?

Hipster alert!

He's doing Vienna and Bologna in the current series, and a further five cities in a second series to be aired in the autumn. The book of all ten is planned for pre-Christmas.

Interestingly, the hipster irritation has been in the places (Berlin and Iceland) without a real food tradition. Doubtless Bologna will be thoroughly hipster-free, but it'll be interesting to see the balance in Vienna.

Stein's never struck me as a Sachertorte kind of cook, and all the filming was early this year, so he'll probably be light on heurigen. With little else obvious, I'd suspect the beards and silly things with emulsions will work their way back in.

But I'm already planning visits to his Berlin and Bologna places this year. And he's promising some of the Bordeaux recipes for his new Marlborough restaurant.

Despite the neckbeards I thought all the trendy Berlin restaurants looked really interesting and wished I'd known about them before I went. Even the veggie one.

I'd like to see Turin and Copenhagen, and somewhere in Spain - he did an excellent Christmas special in Spain a few years back - so fingers crossed one or more of those figures in the sutumn run.

Btw, I went to an audience with type thing that he did when he launched his autobiography and he was very funny and very self-deprecating.

haven't seen this yet.

I liked his Venice to Istanbul series so I'll probably watch this if I can find it.

It's on iplayer, Ann.

Ann, Friday nights at 9pm on BBC2. The ones that you've missed are on the iplayer as RM67 says.

It is about time a celebrity chef dug beneath the surface and he does seem to be doing so.

Iceland was particualry interesting for us as we have just booked to go next February. There were some excellent tips.

Where else does he visit.
My main issue is purely personal.

I can't stand him.

We have spent all our years living by the sea, loving the sea and sailing. Only once (Rome) in over 150 foreign trips have we ever avoided the sea.

We love sea food.

Rick Stein is academic and intelligent but just dull as dish water and we haven't been particulary impressed by visits to his restaurants. He just just doesn't seem to have the personality to portray a passion food.

We need another Keith Floyd!

I agree with the above impression of his restaurants. We went to restaurant place in Padstow on the seafront and were underwhelmed with the fish and chips offering. (I think it had a more fancy name than that).

Celebrity chefs aren't great IMO when you visit their places,. A case in point is Jamie Oliver who's Manchester branch of Jamie's Italian is poor verging on the awful.

BC, would they allow another Keith Floyd in these PC times? Smoking, drinking and the odd bit of blue language? But overflowing with interest and personality.

"Rick Stein is academic and intelligent but just dull as dish water"

If so: let's hear it for more dull. British cookery TV has been dominated for half a century by the deranged and the lunatic: from Philip Harden, through Fannie Craddock to Gordon Ramsay. Anyone remember Elizabeth David's dreadful interview with Jancis Robinson?

Stein (who's no fool, but just about the last person I'd call 'academic') is precisely the kind of person whose judgements about restaurants I'd intuitively trust, whose recipes work, and whose meals are about hospitality rather than cheffy showing off.

Whether he's any good at running restaurants, or just good at presenting average places to the media as exceptional, I can't judge: he's certainly better connected to TV and newspaper editors than most chefs. But as a creator of effortless TV gastroporn, he's absolutely top of my list.

The real oddity about his brain seems to be languages. He's been like the ultimate parody of an elderly and insular Englishman whenever he's had to mangle French, Italian or Greek. Yet he sounded perfectly comfortable in Icelandic.

The real oddity about his brain seems to be languages. He's been like the ultimate parody of an elderly and insular Englishman whenever he's had to mangle French, Italian or Greek. Yet he sounded perfectly comfortable in Icelandic.>>

did you see the programme where he went in search of his German ancestors? He's no better at german! but he came over as very human, as he did in the latest series I saw him in.

Like many of us, IMO he improves with age.

We finally watched the Berlin episode. He kept using the word "noire" when he should have been using the word "hipster". It amused me greatly that he went to Hofbräuhaus.