Can you guess Rick Stein’s top UK cities for food?
In his new series, Rick Stein travels around the UK sampling the best local food and produce. These are the five cities he’s particularly passionate about… Rick Stein loves trying – and making – regional British food. Which explains why he was so keen to travel the length and breadth of the country tasting and creating popular local dishes for his new BBC Two series Rick Stein’s Food Stories. “I know the UK’s only a small country, but its food culture is big. There's so much history and so many different types of food,” he explains. While he’s known for his love of seafood, when Stein’s travelling around the country, we see him diving headfirst into all types of cuisine “I’m happy to try everything. People's excitement and enthusiasm [for food] really gets you interested in it and makes you look at food the way they are.” So which regions made Stein fall in love with food all over again? 1. London “This won’t come as much as a surprise and it’s obvious that I’d have to go for the biggest city, simply due to the variety of the food, so I’d certainly say London,” explains Stein. The diversity of dishes available in the capital is featured in episode five of Rick Stein’s Food Stories, where he makes everything from beef and shiitake chow mein to Dover sole à la meunière with potatoes. In the same episode he visits the surrounding county of Kent and we see an old favourite return to our screens. “Kent produces 90% of all cherries grown in England,” he says in the episode, predicting what’s to come… “The series looks at the nation’s favourite dishes and so it had to include Black Forest gateau. Back in the ’70s, it was the most popular cake and it’s just one of those dishes that was always going to become popular again. In the show we make a particularly showy-off version of it with cherries all over the place, but apart from anything else it’s a lovely cake. And just so big. You want a seriously over the top cake? Black Forest gateau is the one for you.” 2. Bristol “This is just such an exciting city at the moment,” starts Stein. “It's got a fantastic mixture of cultures in there and it's a university town, which makes a big difference. I think it's a forward-looking city.” In Rick Stein’s Food Stories, we see him visit the city and the community of St. Pauls where he explains how significant the Windrush generation was to the city, bringing about a festival that still runs to this day and includes delicious delicacies such as jerk chicken, which Stein tries and is enamoured with. In this episode we also we see him make salt cod potato cakes with lime and red chillies that are bursting with flavour and continue to highlight the diverse tastes on offer in the city. 3. Manchester “When I was in Manchester, I read a passage from Dickens' Hard Times published in 1854, which focuses on how ‘it was tough in them days…’ and it’s written about Manchester. It was known to be this tough city in the 19th century due to its industrial-like fervour. Now, it’s a post-industrial city with fantastic buildings and a really positive culture, with a really good food scene – the Northern Quarter is full of different trendy bars and restaurants.” It’s not just the city itself he’s enthusiastic about but the nearby towns. He visits Bury Market tasting black pudding and investigating tripe and cow heel at the same time. He’s inspired to make a traditional British dish – albeit one with a slightly fancy twist, liver and bacon with caramelised onions and Italian-style greens and after a visit to the Cheshire countryside finds himself making pot roast brisket with dumplings and colcannon. “I just love brisket,” he explains, before advising: “It needs slow cooking because it’s got a lot of extra tissue in it. That’s why a pot roast of brisket is great, because it's just so succulent when it's cooked. It’s my idea of a supremely comforting British dish.” 4. Leicester “People from India originally settled in Leicester due to there being work available in the garment industry,” explains Stein. While that was in the 1940s Stein explains that “Indian culture is still important to the city and has helped to create a strong food scene. “Now it's a very important food producing city and I just found the atmosphere there really impressive. There are some places in the UK now which are a bit depressed, but Leicester ain't one of them!” In episode three of the new series, he visits the region and as he’s tucking into a thali in the city, he comments, “that’s absolutely wonderful, I think it’s some of the best Indian food I’ve ever tasted,” given Stein’s many food travels around the world – including a series entirely devoted to cooking in India, that’s high-praise indeed. After the trip, he’s inspired to return to Padstow and make his own version of the well-loved cross-over dish chicken tikka masala, complete with chapatis. 5. Belfast “I always like visiting Belfast, and I just think it's a fabulous Victorian city with some great buildings in it. I really do look back at this trip to the city with great affection because we went to a pop-up restaurant in a shipping container in a demolished cinema. There, I had a Filipino Sunday lunch, which blew my mind. “I realised I’ve never eaten Filipino food before and doing so in Belfast meant a lot to me. Because it shows that you can go to parts of Britain now – let alone the world – and have food that you never tasted before, which is contributing to the local culture. “There was about 30 of us sitting at trestle tables, having Sunday lunch together – half the people were from Belfast, the other half were a Filipino family and their friends and it was just such a great, enthusiastic mingling, which meant a lot to me, really.” While he makes a variety of dishes in the episode, it’s a Philippine one – pork adobo with rice, that has left the biggest impression. “It was a revelation to me. Filipino food is so interesting and due to its history, there are Spanish influences too. Adobo has got lots of vinegar in it, which would have been picked up from the Spanish, the dish is fabulous. Watch BBC Two’s Rick Stein’s Food Stories weekly from Thursday 26 September at 7pm, or catch up on iPlayer. Originally published September 2024