Hidden Hut’s top secrets are revealed...
Chef offers up an insight into the fantastic food created at his beach cafe with a new recipe book
SAMPLING a legendary feast night dish no longer means a schlep to Cornwall because Hidden Hut finally has a cookbook.
It’s hard not to daydream about upping sticks, moving to the beach and opening a cafe – the thing is, Simon Stallard went and did it.
Eight years ago, the chef, who’s worked in kitchens around the world since he was 16, quit his day job and took on the lease of a National Trust ice lolly kiosk on the Roseland Peninsula, Cornwall, with his wife Jem.
The little green shed, perched on a coastal footpath above sandy Porthcurnick Beach, was transformed into The Hidden Hut – a beach cafe and lunch spot with food good enough to match the gorgeous sea-view. It’s gone on to become rather renowned, but now, thanks to its new eponymous cookbook, you don’t have to roam the wilds of Cornwall to stumble across its food.
Stallard, who also owns Tatams in Portscatho (coffee bar by day, wood-fired taverna by night), says the Hut menu is unmoored from mainstream foodie trends, but does “follow the weather”.
“Today it’s raining,” he says, as he looks out at the sea. “There’s a chowder on, a daal; they’re quite warming dishes, but as soon as the sun comes out, the grills go on.”
The Hidden Hut is famed for its feast nights – legend has it, feast night tickets have sold out faster than Beyonce concerts – and the book features dishes from these events as well as classic daytime Hut recipes. On Wednesday nights throughout summer, Stallard and his team get their outdoor grills and beach barbecues going and host dinner for 80-100 people on the cusp of the ocean.
The deal is, you bring your own plates, cutlery and booze, and they provide the food, “come wind, rain or shine”. “They’re a thing of beauty in their simplicity,” says Stallard warmly. “If it’s a sunny evening and you’ve lucked out, then you really have hit the jackpot.”
Part of the feasts’ appeal he reckons is the fact there’s no choice when it comes to what you’re eating. “It sounds really weird but there’s always a big focus on huge menus [in restaurants], you’ve got to have something to please everyone – we’ve done the opposite.”
They’ve traded a menu for a calendar, so there are multiple options, but they’re available on different days. So, tonight it’s windchime mackerel, next week summer sardines, the week after, lobster and chips.
“It’s not like you’re turning up thinking, ‘Half the party don’t eat shellfish and someone’s allergic’. That’s the night you’re booking for; that’s what’s on,” says Stallard firmly. It certainly an approach that cuts out food envy and dithering.
Some of his favourite feast nights are when the grills are loaded with shellfish. “We staple loads of newspaper to the tables and have massive great big shovels of shellfish and claws, hammers and picks. People just pick through it with a beer or a glass of wine, and hang out at the top of a beach – that’s the bit that makes them mega.”
He believes it wouldn’t work if the Hut cooped people up indoors – the charm of it comes from cooking, eating and hanging out together under the Cornish sky. There’s just nothing better, he says, than being outside: “Even if you’re just having a sandwich and a bowl of soup in the rain under an umbrella, there’s something so real about it.
“It actually stops and slows everything down, even just lighting the barbecue in your garden, it just feels really nice. Your mindset, everything, you change when you light the barbecue – it’s all good, it feels right, and it tastes better too.”
He admits he’s something of an “anorak” when it comes to the art of grilling, from selecting the wood the Hut uses (“We basically have a wood library”) to inventing his own grills. He has one made out of a tractor tyre and particularly admires ones crafted from washing machine drums, but it’s his ‘windchime’ grill that sounds like actual magic.
“It’s basically loads of stainless steel cable that runs backwards and forwards, right across these
It’s all good, it feels right, and it tastes better too
huge grill-beds that are on winches, so they can go up and down, then we use big metal clips to clip fish on like you would the washing on the line,” he explains. “The grill needs to be atomically hot and you have to peg 250 fish up in one go,” he says, almost sweating at the thought. “But it looks beautiful.”