In Rick Stein’s latest culinary adventure he embarks on a series of long weekends in locations his website describes as “a quick hop, skip and a jump from just about anywhere in the UK.” We’ve already joined his gustatory romps in Berlin, Reykjavik, Vienna, Bordeaux and Bologna and, this autumn, Stein takes us to Lisbon, Copenhagen, Cadiz, Thessaloniki and Palermo.



Something has happened with this series, Rick Stein’s Long Weekends. Something quite special. Stein, forever on the edge of his salmon gingham Blue Harbour shirt collar of going full Alan Partridge, has gone full Alan Partridge.

The ingredients have always been there: the crossness at things he can’t quite grasp (hotel door keys, furniture, pens), the self-satisfied chortling, the suit jackets and jeans, the shoulder bags, the grumpiness about us small-minded people back home with our lazy palates, the talking-just-a-little-too-long-ness, the pained exchanges with waiting staff. Now, the dish has been served piping hot. Meet Rick 2.0: the original nomad.

So pleased with himself … Stein bumps into the Tuna Feminina all-girls band in Lisbon. Photograph: BBC/Denhams/Arezoo Farahzad

We can make the case with Stein’s Long Weekend in Copenhagen alone – so far not just the highlight of the series for this fan, but the funniest hour of television broadcast in 2016.

“Hey Rick, where we going this weekend?” A gimcrack Sinatra/Bublé singer croons over a BBC-budget big band studio track. “Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen, salty queen of the sea,” he giggles. The pleasure is ours. But is it his? Within minutes of arriving at his hotel, Stein is moaning about the coffee – “from a machine” – and the weather. Even getting a nice bike to ride – something he’s not done in “ABOUT FIFTY YEARS” – comes with a side order of ranting.

There’s a decent drinking game to be invented in having a shot every time Stein moans about people “back home”, and you’d be well on your way with his soliloquy about Brits’ “ridiculous clothes” (chug – imagine being sat next to him on a plane), “all that lycra” (chug – imagine him at your dinner party) and how things are just so much better in Copenhagen because people “wear what they need to wear to work!” (Chug.)

Cheerier, he cycles along the river, waxing lyrical about what an “extremely cool place” Copenhagen is, how it’s “stuffed with good, agreeable people,” as if they’ve “come from the nice people department of casting!” He grins; he’s pleased with that one. At this point, at several points, you wonder if the production team know what they’re doing.

A-far-too-long shot of Stein wobbling across a bridge on his bike while some jaunty orchestral music plays is too good to be true. Throughout, the camera lingers on him just a tad too long. In those precious extra seconds, his cheeks flush gurnard red; the chortling turns into awkward looking about. You want to reach through the screen, put a hand on his blazer shoulder and say, “Come on, Rick. Let’s go.”

Of course, there is disappointment round the corner. He sits outside the handsome warehouse building that houses noma, chef Rene Redzepi’s palace of New Nordic cuisine and, for many years, crowned the best restaurant in the world. Stein is very much not inside. “If you’re wondering why I’m sat out here,” he squints into the camera, stonewash denim straining at the kneecap, “it’s because SOMEBODY forgot to make me a reservation and I CAN’T GET IN.” He chucks some weeds he’s been picking on the ground in front of him because that is flipping that.

‘No noma for me? That is flipping that’ … Stein with Rasmus Kofoed at his backup restaurant, the three Michelin-starred Geranium. Photograph: BBC/Denhams/Martin Willcocks

Instead of noma, Stein eats at Geranium, chef Rasmus Kofoed’s three Michelin-starred restaurant, which serves imaginative food of a similar ilk. Stein enthusiastically eats the hand-painted, edible razor clam “shells” filled with razor clam tartare, then speaks of reaching “a state of despair” at chefs using tweezers because “I could never do any of it!”

But the stand-out scene in Copenhagen is when Stein meets the actor Sofie Gråbøl. The way he introduces her is so Partridge that Rob and Neil Gibbons must, surely, have had a hand in the script. “It was she who played the part of Sarah Lund in that fantastic series The Killing,” he revs up. “She wore the same jumper for weeks on end!” Crunching into second gear now. “She never wore makeup!” Third gear. “She put her work before ANYTHING!”

The elegant and articulate Gråbøl, answering questions about Denmark she has answered a thousand times before, talks about how all young Danes are taught to be uncompromisingly modest from an early age. Good job, because Stein then refers to her famous character as “Sally Lund.”

‘She wore the same jumper for weeks on end!’ … Stein meets Sofie Gråbøl. Photograph: BBC/Denhams/Martin Willcocks

Later, dining at a fish restaurant, he is absolutely buzzing because he’s getting what he hints is finally a proper plate of food. Presented with a simple dish of cod and some kind of white sauce, he is catatonic. “It suits me perfectly,” the volume goes up, “because I’ve got a LOVELY FILLET OF FISH.” He is actually shouting. It’s magical. He needs this moment of pleasure, too, because later on some tyrant will decide to set off some fireworks. “Someone decided to have a party,” Stein sighs. He wants to go to bed. “How inconvenient.”

The Lisbon episode is a ride, too. Right off the blocks he’s struggling. “How often does this happen to me?” he laments, fussing with a stubborn hotel room key. “Please don’t tell me I have to go downstairs.” Some tasty pastel de natas are on the horizon, though. But it’s in the bakery serving them that you wonder, again, what the production team are up to, when they cut away to a nice-looking woman eating her breakfast as Stein says the words “gooey little tart.”

At a crew lunch, someone asks him what makes a Rick Stein weekend. His interest is piqued; the mood takes a sharp Mid Morning Matters turn. “Alright,” replies Stein. He’s drinking. Running through a list of musts like a nice hotel and good location, he builds to his crescendo, the weightiest of all the Stein commandments: “mooching”. “I like to be able to mooch,” he says. “I just like walking around on my own, okay?” Next, we see him watching a group of women playing guitars in the street. He is so pleased with himself. “That was some good mooching, that.” Later, he compares himself to Lord Byron.

The Lisbon climax, and indeed a piece of observational filming to rival anything in Planet Earth II, is the scene where Stein attempts to navigate the hotel buffet breakfast. “It’s a voyage of discovery,” he says, peering into pots full of little sausages. He gets very cross with some packets of butter. He uses a fork to stir his coffee (“I give up on them,” he says to the teaspoons). He is Partridge impaling his foot on a spike.

Where do we go from here? Stein is in the ancient Andalusian port city of Cadiz tonight. Of course he’ll lose the plot over the freshness of some fish in a taverna on a winding street. Of course he’ll go on about the garlic. But what calamity awaits our dear señor? What will gently blow his gasket? I, for one, am worried about a tussle he had with some almadraba tuna in 1983. Because Rick Stein doesn’t forget.

• Rick Stein’s Long Weekends continues tonight at 9pm on BBC2.