The south-west is gastro heaven
Rick Stein started it, now you’re spoilt for choice: North Cornwall ticks all the right boxes for foodies, says Julia Buckley
CORNWALL, 2006. Gnarls Barkley is top of the charts, Tony Blair is PM and, to the UK at large, the Cornish food scene consists of just one man: Rick Stein. How things have changed in 11 years. While Stein is still going strong, last month seafood specialist Nathan Outlaw’s eponymous restaurant in Port Isaac was named the best in the UK by the Good Food Guide. It was recognition of what those in North Cornwall have known for a while — that quality dining here is going from strength to strength. But Outlaw — who owns three restaurants around the Camel Estuary — isn’t the only Cornish chef going places this year.
Root to tip
Adam Banks wouldn’t call himself a revolutionary. The new head chef at Fifteen Cornwall — who changes the menu twice a day in order to work with small-scale producers — is modesty incarnate.
“It’s about respect,” he says of his waste-not-wantnot approach to vegetables, which sees him make pesto out of carrot tops, blanch baby leeks with their roots and tops intact, and make sauces from male courgette flowers, which are typically composted.
“If someone is taking care to grow the whole product, it’s our duty to use the whole thing,” he says. “Even our potatoes are hand-sown and harvested. Our suppliers pay incredible attention to detail, and we have to respect that.”
Banks, who started in May, is putting his money where his mouth is. This month he’ll launch a lunch menu based on vegetable off-cuts — the fennel roots and broccoli stems that normally go straight in the bin. He’s already foraging samphire and sea beet from nearby cliffs, and retooling unserved bread into toasted crackers. “I’m just trying to be cleverer with what we’re doing,” he says.
Foraged pizza
Lewis Cole is a forager too. In June he served what he called the “Estuary” pizza: a crème fraîche base topped with Porthilly mussels from Rock, “sea veg” from the Camel Estuary and parmesan, garnished with vetch he picked from the hedgerow.
Cole cut his cheffing teeth in Padstow before launching Wild Bake pizza as a food truck five years ago. He was the second person in the country to retool a horsebox as a kitchen-onwheels. Wild Bake — which pairs Italian-grade flour with local ingredients — has year-round pitches around North Cornwall but every summer they trot off to local campsites, where they’re joined by other food trucks serving everything from Mexican to US-style BBQ.
“Five years ago all you got was fish and chips,” s ays C o l e . “If you camped in Padstow you probably ate out four or five nights a week. Now you don’t need to leave the site.”
Champion baristas
In 2006 Jamie Oliver opened Fifteen, moving the spotlight away from Stein and Padstow — but it was also the year that Hugo Hercod changed the feel of Wadebridge, at the time a sleepy market town on the river Camel. Hercod opened Relish, a coffee bar and deli, at a time when the coffee scene in Cornwall was close to non-existent. “In those days most people didn’t texture milk, latte art was new. Origin (Helston-based roasters) was trying hard to get a scene going but even in London it was fledgling.” Two years later, he was named the UK’s best barista.
This month he converted part of the deli into a coffee roastery, Rising Ground, and is “playing” with blends that will appear on the Relish menu and be sold loose to the public. Last week his roast of a Rwandan single-origin bean made its debut in his cappuccinos.
Relish’s healthy menus — quiches, soups served with locally made bread and cream teas with coffee — even started a lunch scene in Wadebridge. “Someone actually credited me with kick-starting the food scene in Wadebridge, which says it all, because I just serve sandwiches,” he says.
East London style
Most of the North Cornwall food scene is centred around the Camel Estuary but last year hipster-restaurateur royalty made its mark on Bodmin Moor.
Michelin-starred chef April Bloomfield, from New York’s Spotted Pig, partnered with Tom Adams, who runs Spitalfields’ Pitt Cue, to open Coombeshead Farm, a restaurantwith-rooms near Launceston. Bloomfield is based in the US and visits four times a year, while Adams runs it with partner Lottie Mew. They opened as a three-room B&B last year.
But this month, having turned an outbuilding into a restaurant, they opened to everyone. Sunday roasts start at the end of September, including food from Adams’ mangalitza pigs, which are kept in a nearby field — and also provide the meat for Pitt Cue.
The onsite bakery makes sourdough using ancient varieties of grains, and Mew and Adams make soap from pig fat and candles from onsite bees.
They made the move from London, says Adams, because all the produce for his restaurant came from Cornwall, and he wanted to do something closer to the source. “I used to come here on family holidays,” he says. “I loved it but it was a different Cornwall: rockpooling, fudge and ice cream on the beach. Now I’m enjoying being in the rural guts of it.”
Details: Cornwall
(flybe.com) flies from Gatwick to Newquay from £60. fifteencornwall. co.uk; wildbake.co.uk; relishcornwall.co.uk; coombesheadfarm.co.uk