User Reviews

I'm a great fan of Rick Stein. I regularly watch his travel/food programs and this series travelling around the Mediterranean is no exception. The show has the usual range of beautiful locations, interesting facts, great food and Stein is engaging and passionate as always.

One thing that irked me quite a bit in this series, was Stein's criticism of British attitudes to Mediterranean food. It's not a new thing for him to do, but it was tiresome how many times he would proclaim that British people wouldn't eat the type of food he was being served. His sweeping generalisations were backed up by a segment interviewing young British holidaymakers in Magaluf. He got the predictable response when they were asked if they had tried local cuisine. I wonder if he actually met any who did? I just felt that was a little mean-spirited in order to prove a point. Certainly, if I had Stein's time, resources and a local guide to arrange visits to these exclusive restaurants across the Mediterranean or hiking up to shacks in the Corsican mountains, then I'd be waxing lyrical about the food too. But mere mortals rarely get the chance to explore this, hence why we watch shows this, to live vicariously through his experiences.

Despite that complaint, the series was excellent and interesting. French, Italian, Spanish, Greek and Turkish cuisines were nicely showcased. As well as seeing the locals make these unique dishes, Stein would make other recipes at his home kitchen and it all looked fantastic. I would have rated it higher, but Rick Stein's food snobbery was overbearing at times, sadly.

Stein is wonderfully down to earth and sincerely in touch with the real people of the Mediterranean and their simple oft-humble food traditions. He investigates mundane but hearty recipes handed down from the mists of a penurious past made piquant by frugality and ingenuity. Every ingredient (olive oil, tomatoes, garlic, pasta, fish, homemade cheese, and bread being fairly ubiquitous throughout the Mediterranean) is hard-won from nearby rocky outcroppings, herds of goats and sheep, wild undergrowth, and the wine-dark sea itself. He waxes elegaeic over every ungodly variety of sea life, as well as over the stoic fishermen who grapple with decreasing catches on heaving seas. The sweat and toil of unpretentious workers is front and center. They shine with simple pride over various sundry culinary configurations featuring local fruits of earth and sea, often garnished with wild foraged greens and lovingly cooked the way their mothers and grandmothers taught them. From cluttered country kitchens to backstreet mom-and-pop eateries, Stein gets intimate with ordinary working class people enjoying ordinary working class food in off-the-beaten-path venues. It's a triumphantly proletariat travelogue sans tourists, expensive restaurants, or sumptuous hotels. It's really quite the Marxist manifesto and the food to which he introduces us is the healthiest on the planet. His painstaking unpacking of each relatively simple and accessible recipe is like a living cookbook. One begins to grasp the overall unity and methodology of Mediterranean cuisine--it's pretty much all one-pot cooking! Stein is also quite erudite and his multi-lingual grasp of cultural and historical minutae is literate and gripping. One almost feels that one has circumvented the Mediterranean at his side. His focus on the true values of farmwork, family ties, and frugal food is infectious--he has inspired me to investigate local wild edible plants in order to start foraging for myself.

We are actually watching the same series on Amazon, which we do during our lunch. He's a nice enough fellow, to begin with.

He likes sausage and potatoes. He loves potatoes. He likes pasta.

He's no better cook than I am, which is pretty decent.

He doesn't seem to go BEYOND sausage and potatoes and pasta. And vegetables.

He reads books about places - to us - instead of telling us about his experiences.

He doesn't talk to anybody who doesn't speak English, even with an interpreter. The man is not outgoing or friendly - not a good trait in a travel show.

He will latch on to some little thing - simple cooking is one - and just go on, and on, and on about it.

The next time he thinks of the same topic he will do it again.

Related to that, he's find some place and just devote a boring 5 minutes to it, even though it has little to do with anything.

If there was ever a show that needed an editor, this is it.

I've about had it - we've watched almost all of 3 shows, we won't go on to #4.