The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
William Sitwell visits 2 Fore Street in Mousehole
A picturesque location and three faultless courses left our critic with a smile on his face
2 Fore Street Mousehole Cornwall, TR19 6QU 01736-731164 2forestreet.co.uk
Star rating ★★★★☆
Lunch for two £60 excluding drinks and service
MOUSEHOLE. And no. You don’t pronounce it like that. It’s ‘mowzel’. A little fishing port and village on the Cornish coast a couple of miles south of Penzance. We went down there to live as locals for a few mid-february days, the best time of year to go. The roads to the south-west are not a tailback of caravans; restaurants – many freshly painted – are just reopening; and, because tourists are thin on the ground, after a couple of days everyone greets you merrily as you walk the little streets in the morning.
And those Mousehole streets are narrow, windy and often steep. At every corner there are little alleyways leading to intriguing and pretty front doors. Virtually every house looks different and if they’re not occupied by fishermen, you’ll find artists who have made this place their home, since it offers, or so it seems, fresh air, peace and freedom. The latter because this part of England does feel a little different, more like an island. You feel the warmth of the microclimate but not the official hand of authority. I once joked to someone that the Cornish cheese yarg – a lovely cow’s milk product wrapped in nettle leaves – also lends its name to the Cornish language and currency. They believed me. I almost believed it myself.
A few miles south of Mousehole is an eerie hamlet called Lamorna. The face of a grinning, devious pirate greets you on the sign for its pub, the Lamorna Wink (perhaps that’s yarg for a Glasgow kiss), and I can imagine that pirate speaking yarg and trading bootlegged rum for a few yargs stuffed into his bag.
Mousehole has a timeless quality to
it. You can sit for hours and watch fishing boats coming in and out of the harbour; the lady running the newsagent is the fount of all gossip; and locals gather at The Ship Inn, where I met Shaun the butcher. ‘I’ve made a thing called a Baconberg,’ he told me. ‘It looks a bit like a Battenberg cake, but it’s made with pork and bacon.’
After a bracing swim off the rocks (around 25 seconds of hysterical panting), a late-morning pint at The Ship tastes even better and is a fine aperitif before lunch at 2 Fore Street, just around the corner.
Although this place has been going for at least a decade, it has been refurbished over the winter, so feels brand new. The restaurant is a springlike wash of white and light blue, and the menu an approachable and merry dance of bistro classics.
There are soups, pâtes and parfaits, crispy squid, steaks, burgers, crab and goujons. I saw the words ‘Newlyn crab double-baked Parmesan soufflé’, which is liked being asked if you want some free money. It was a main course but they let me have it as a starter, which
I have to say is the one of the better ideas I’ve had recently. And it was a rather better idea than my wife Emily’s onion soup, a spoonful of which seemed more like warmed-up chutney than soup (too thick, too sweet).
I was smug with my choice. It came in a round dish, an island of soufflé in a
The soufflé was a heavenly mix of fresh local crab enveloped in Parmesan
little sea of cheesy sauce, its ripples charred from the grill, or maybe a flame. The soufflé was a heavenly mix of fresh local crab enveloped in Parmesan. Every mouthful of which was pure joy – charming, not overly rich, textured layers. Original, like eating Mousehole itself.
My main course was moules marinière. And this is how I like them, not bastardised with cream, as some chefs are prone to do, like bribing a child to eat their veg by covering them in cheese. This was pure and simple: white wine, onions (not chopped too fine), garlic and then the mussels. On the side were skinny fries, and having eaten the soft and sweet flesh of the mussels, I finished off the sauce with home-made focaccia.
And then it was rice pudding. The best rice pudding story I know concerned my grandfather, the wonderfully named Sacheverell. He hated rice pudding so much that one day – at a smart lunch party – he was served it but managed to secrete spoonfuls of it into his jacket pocket while his host wasn’t looking.
This rice pudding would have converted even him. It came with a caramelised top – that blowtorch again, perhaps. So this was crème brûlée meets rice pudding. Like a hostile merger, the rice dish steals the identity of the burnt cream, subsumes it and becomes a better version of both, but still calls itself rice pudding.
You can visit 2 Fore Street for lunch or dinner or coffee or cake or sandwiches or cocktails. You don’t have to speak yarg and the staff, like the natives of this island of Mousehole, are very friendly.