Rick Stein joins pop-up cinema

Rick Stein is guest chef at the first outdoor season from the Pop-Up Picture Company, the film-and-food project co-founded by Tom Kerridge, which pitches camp in the grounds of Cliveden House in Berkshire and Chewton Glen in Hampshire this summer.

Kerridge launched the pop-up with three friends in the lead-up to last Christmas, serving set meals accompanied by a season of classic and contemporary films at the Old Town Hall in Marlow, close to his flagship gastropub the Hand & Flowers.

Stein has assembled a range of seafood-based menus for Rick Stein’s Sunset Cinema, which kicks off appropriately with a showing of the 1989 film Scandal, the story of the 1963 Profumo affair, which was sparked when Christine Keeler met defence minister John Profumo at Cliveden, then the Astor country pile. The matching menu is crisp smoked mackerel with green mango and paw paw salad followed by fish pie with cod, prawns and smoked haddock; Kerridge’s ice cream will be served in the interval.

Film buffs will be interested to note that the Cliveden scenes were actually shot at Wilton House and Longleat in Wiltshire. Wanting to play down the scandalous past, the former owners refused permission to film. These days the house is owned by the National Trust and leased out as a hotel, whose management have no such qualms.

The opening season runs from Wednesday June 21 to July 11 at Cliveden, and at Chewton Glen in the New Forest from July 9 to 23, with more guest chef seasons to follow. Priority booking is available to those who register with the Pop-Up Picture Company before April 23.

Operating from his flagship Seafood Restaurant in Padstow in Cornwall, Rick Stein now has 12 venues, the most recent of which opened in Barnes, southwest London, last month.

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