Crocadon, Cornwall

Great restaurants often involve a great journey, and the journey to Crocadon, for everyone involved, staff and guests, is greater than most. Dan Cox was head chef at Fera at Claridges when I last sampled his cooking, and although the restaurant eventually turned out to be a bit too cutting-edge for the traditionalists at this grand old dame of London hotels, it sat extremely well with me, an ideal combination of strictly seasonal ingredients treated to an impressive variety of high-end techniques. When I learned he was leaving London to set up a restaurant-farm in Cornwall, I suspected it would be exactly the kind of place I would be interested in. Little did I know that the new venture would take a full five years to open to the public, a lead time more appropriate to the erection of a city skyscraper than a restaurant.

Alongside the metaphorical and temporal journeys, the actual physical journey to Crocadon - this being Cornwall - is also quite demanding. We'd booked the very closest AirBnB to the farm, which although only a few minutes drive away was still too far to walk (in the dark, drunk) so necessitated the booking of a taxi. The full 8 minutes we spent in the cab (four minutes there, four minutes back) cost £50, so if there are any lawyers or orthopedic surgeons out there feeling overworked and underpaid I can thoroughly recommend switching careers to taxi driving in Saltash.

That said, once sat down in the pretty courtyard at Crocadon, all such stresses began to fade. I don't care how jaded you might be about hyperlocality and seasonality and fine dining in general, but there will always be something extremely correct and pleasing about tucking into a fig leaf negroni right next to the fig tree said leaves came from. It's that sense of immediacy and connection with where your food comes from you rarely find in London, and exactly the reason it's worth the trip out of town.

Aperitifs - and a brief tour of the Crocadon gardens - over, we were reseated indoors. At only about 25 covers or so, the Crocadon dining space is pretty small, most of the converted barn taken up by a giant open kitchen in which chefs can be seen studiously tweezering micro herbs into charmingly handmade pottery (often crafted by the head chef himself!) throughout the evening. Lampshades are made from what looks like recycled cardboard, and seats are each covered in sheepskin rugs, another nod to the local environment. Essentially, think Noma-on-Tamar (I'm sure they won't mind me saying) with added Cornish charm.

But what of the food? The first morsel to arrive was a shiso leaf topped with a kind of chutney made with plum and beetroot. And to be clear, it was perfectly pleasant, in the way that a chutney made out of plum and beetroot has every right to be. Whether you consider it a worthwhile addition to a £95 tasting menu rather hinges on how much value you place on hyperlocality and seasonality versus, well, something you'd ordinarily want to eat. It would have gone nicely with a sausage roll.

The next snack had a far more robust flavour profile - mashed potato, buttery and smooth and nicely seasoned, dressed with a bright green celtuce (a kind of lettuce) oil, and topped with probably my favourite thing to do with a potato, matchstick fries. The combination of mash and vegetable oil worked well, and our whole table happily devoured this in record time. I mean, who wouldn't want a bowl of nice buttery mash?

Less successful - from my point of view at least - were these little tartlets of delica squash and lemon verbena, which looked cute enough but unless you are a real fan of squash - which I very much am not - didn't really taste that interesting. And although my personal aversion to squash definitely was a factor, I should also say I didn't detect much enthusiasm for these things from the rest of the table either.

Fortunately, the next couple of courses had far more going for them. Firstly, a padron pepper, delicately charred over coals and served with a wonderfully smooth and balanced lovage sauce. Not only was the padron full of flavour and the charring providing a nice texture, but it had a remarkable level of spice heat - something you're far more likely to find in home-grown than commercial peppers, it turns out.

And then a fantastic cuttlefish consommé, clear and brightly flavoured and with just enough infusion of lemongrass to lend a slightly East Asian feel. I admit, lovely though this was, that I did briefly wonder what a nicely grilled piece of cuttlefish steak would have been like, and which of the guests earlier in the week had been lucky enough to sample the rest of the animal, but this was still a very pleasing interlude of a course.

The next course consisted of turnip cut into thick ribbons like pappardelle pasta, in a rather astringent anise hyssop sauce. There wasn't quite enough of the advertised saddleback pork for my liking, and what there was was cold and rather tasteless, but any disappointment regarding vinegary turnip and cold pork was more than offset by a completely brilliant brioche bun glazed with pork fat, which pulled apart most satisfyingly into soft, moist halves, and some fantastic whipped butter topped with pork scratchings.

Fish course was a fillet of mackerel topped with radish, tomatillo and shiso, and although I very much enjoyed the nice vinegar/herb sauce it came with I'm afraid the mackerel itself was a bit mushy and lifeless. Maybe I've been spoiled with restaurant mackerel recently but I think if you have access to a proper charcoal grill you should be able to get a nice crisp skin on your fish while keeping a plump, firm flesh.

The "main" meat course was divided into two parts. Mutton from the farm's own flock arrived first as a rib piece topped with rosehip and white currant - yet more pretty sharp flavours but at least here the fattiness of the aged meat was able to offset it and produce a very pleasing effect overall. I also appreciated the way the meat slipped off the bone in one piece, which was fun.

Then finally, last of the savoury courses was more of the sheep, this time a neat piece of pink loin alongside a swoop of beetroot (I think) purée, a lovely slice of sausage made with leg meat topped with chilli, and what I assume was a mutton stock sauce studded with capers - again rather sharp but working well with the meat elements.

Desserts came in a number of stages, my favourite turning out to be the first - a kind of super smooth apple sorbet topped with marigold leaves which had a perfect balance of sweet and sour and full of summer flavour.

I also enjoyed the other dessert of steeped blackberries and sweetcorn cake, and the delicate tuiles of berry and corn layered on top, although I should point out I was in the minority on this as the others found it not sweet enough and yearned for something a bit more, well, conventional.

It's probably worth repeating at this point that you either value strict seasonality and hyperlocality above all other aspects of the restaurant experience, in which case Crocadon will be your very nirvana, or you end your dinner wishing they'd let their hair down and use a bit of chocolate or truffle or something just to provide a bit more colour. I understand completely what Crocadon is trying to achieve with their fanatically strict attitudes to super-low food miles and commitment to use only what they can grow themselves at the appropriate time of year, and normally I'd be completely on board with it, but the fact is I did feel like there was something missing from some of the courses - not always anything obvious, but something, perhaps some veal stock to enliven a sauce, or some fancy pastry work to zhuzh up a dessert - that would have made for a more satisfying end result.

Also, and I know I have a soft spot for game and go a bit giddy when I see it on a menu so this might just be a personal thing, but our taxi literally had to slow down to a crawl on the Crocadon driveway because giant flocks of pheasant and partridge were threatening to throw themselves under the wheels of the car. We were slap in the middle of game season, and the food "miles" could have been measured in steps, so why did none of these birds - sustainable, local and tasty - find their way onto the menu?

But I don't want to end on a moan, and it's worth stressing that we did have a lovely time at Crocadon, enjoying interesting natural wines and local ciders and whiskies, and service by everyone concerned was absolutely note-perfect. And although it's my "job" (such as it is) to point out faults where I find them, overall Crocadon are doing far more things right than wrong, and nobody left that beautiful building at the end of the night less than satisfied. At least, until it came time to pay for the taxi.

With a couple of final sets of petits fours - a summer berry meringue thing, and a little tartlet containing a purée of some other kind of citrussy fruit - the bill, with plenty of booze shared between the three of us drinking that evening - came to just under £140 a head, which to me looks like pretty good value considering the amount of effort that had gone into it all. There's no doubt that the Crocadon approach is the cutting edge of sustainable hospitality, and no amount of whining from a jaded Londoner about missing chocolate is about to change that - this is, like it or not, the future of British fine dining. And I suppose the sooner I get used to it the better.

7/10

The Gurnard's Head, Zennor

The Gurnard's Head, sat high above the rugged north Cornwall coast amidst towering abandoned tin mines and dramatic moorland, is nothing if not a welcome sight for weary hikers on the South West Coastal Path, as well anyone taking the somewhat less strenuous approach (I'm not apologising for this) of having a bit of a lie-in and driving up from Penzance just in time for lunch service. However you get there, though, it seems the days of being able to just rock up uninvited and order a steak & chips are long gone - the Gurnard's Head is one of the most popular gastropubs in Cornwall even off season, and with domestic tourism booming, snagging a table is a case of getting extremely lucky, or (our approach) booking many months in advance.

With social distancing, too, there are even fewer precious tables to choose from, and so we felt very privileged indeed to be settling into a cozy corner in this lovely old building while the weather outside, which had all morning threatened to do something awful, finally broke into a dark, sustained downpour. If it hadn't been bucketing down perhaps some of the people trying their luck with a walk-in could have braved a picnic table outside; as it was, I overheard more than one group of rain-soaked hopefuls being gently let down by the front of house. We watched them with some measure of sympathy as they squelched away, before tucking into some warm sodabread and salted butter.

It was very nice sodabread though, and so was this plate of tempura PSB and goat's curd, which had a nice greaseless fry, a good fluffy, citrussy curd and a very clever touch of smoked almonds which added crunch as well as a touch of the embers.

Warm grilled sardines, meticulously filleted so that they could be eaten without the usual subsequent 10 minutes of picking pin bones out of your teeth, came draped over sourdough bread and with a little last gasp of summer, a tomato and basil salad. And it was a very nice salad of course, but the star of the show were the sardines - superbly fresh and with a good firm flesh, with a gentle crisp skin from the grill, and seasoned perfectly. Cornwall really is the place to go for fish, it seems.

After the best part of two days enjoying the best fish in the country, though, a part of me just wanted to be deliberately contrary, so for a main I chose rump steak. And though the steak was nice - pink and tender and with a decent flavour - the star of this plate of food was the sauce, a thick, glossy reduction which clung to the folds of the sprigs of kale and made it all great fun to eat. Also good was a blue cheese mousse, which added a nice hit of salty dairy.

Oh and chips were fantastic - each of them crunchy outside and soft within, with loads of lovely crispy bits at the end to gobble up.

Given we'd taken it a bit easy on the savouries, we felt justified in ordering two desserts - firstly this excellent sticky toffee pudding topped with a huge mound of clotted cream, which obviously went down very well...

...and a chocolate creameaux with coffee and dulce de leche which I had a bit less of an interest in (I tend to avoid coffee) but seemed perfectly nice to me.

The bill came to £23pp, which seems astonishingly cheap on the face of it but bear in mind we'd ordered two starters as mains and weren't drinking, unless you count a glass of local cider brandy that I ordered on a whim before the desserts. They don't automatically add service on either, so you can add on a few quid for that, but even so this not an expensive place, and the extremely attentive staff earned every bit of the tip they didn't ask for. In these large, well-spaced dining rooms every table was taken and quite rightly so - this is a justifiably famous pub.

It's easy to forget, as we gobbled and chatted our way through a happy lunch at the Gurnard's Head, that this is still a deeply uncertain and frankly terrifying time for anyone attempting to make money out of the business of cooking food and selling it to people. Since our return to the real world, the government has introduced at 10pm curfew, a completely bizarre political gesture which won't save many people from getting Covid who wouldn't have got it anyway, but will definitely further cripple the finances of pubs, bars and restaurants who have just seen another 30% disappear from their bottom lines. So book early, and book often, and enjoy yourself, and let's all just try and get through the next few months without going completely mad, because that seems to be just about the only strategy that stands a chance of working at the moment. And you can do worse, if you're in the area, than with a meal at this windswept spot on the Cornish coast, somewhere expertly placed to help you forget about the rest of the world, at least just for a while.

8/10

The Tolcarne Inn, Newlyn

In an ideal world, you'd quite rightly expect the seafood served in a fishing village to be more notable than, say, that served further inland, or in a major capital city. Most fish and seafood (by no means all, but most) is at its best when as fresh as possible, and the closer you are to the source, the more rewarding your fish dinner is likely to be.

You'd hope, then, that a gastropub installed right in the busy fishing port of Newlyn in Cornwall, alongside fishmongers, fish warehouses and the Newlyn Fish Market itself, would have a significant head start over its more landlocked rivals. The Tolcarne Inn, a charming 18th century building sat right on the harbour, constructs its menus around the finest fish they can get their hands on that day, and this being Newlyn, that's some of the best fish in the country, if not in fact the world. Trout, sardines, gurnard, ray, hake, plaice, halibut and of course fresh oysters from Porthilly turn the business of choosing what to eat into a slightly distressing game of "what would I least hate to not try", it really is a menu out of a fish-lover's dreams.

Quite how blindingly good the seafood was that we were served at the Tolcarne though, came as a surprise even if you had pretty high expectations already, which we certainly did. Right off the bat, with the arrival of the Porthilly oysters, it was clear something very special indeed was going on. Lean and clean, expertly opened with not a trace of shell grit, and with the bodies of the oysters lying plump and proud in their shells, these were literally faultless, pretty much the best oysters I've had in a very long time.

From here on, every bit of seafood served by the Tolcarne was some kind of exaggeratedly perfect version of itself, as if all our lives we'd never really had the real deal and our eyes had finally been opened. Gurnard came as a thick slab of blinding white meat, topped with a dark, crisp skin, on a bed of puy lentils and scattered with fried Jerusalem artichokes. It was, it goes without saying, the best gurnard I've ever had the pleasure of eating, and therefore completely worth the price of entry even if - and this is a criticism that can be levelled at some other of the dishes at Tolcarne Inn - it could have done with an ingredient or two less accompanying it. With fish this good, you really don't need any distractions.

No such criticism could be levelled at the chalk stream trout tartare, which was unfussily presented alongside some samphire and pickles and absolutely sung with autumnnal joy. The pickled kohlrabi was particularly good.

Now I have nothing against crispy leeks, or cavolo nero, or summer truffle purée, and certainly not chicken wing, I just wonder if the best way of showcasing a world-class fillet of halibut is to hide it at the bottom of a bowl and pile all of the above on top. Individually, it was all very well done (apart from the purée whch was a bit grainy, but not troublingly so) - and needless to say the halibut was absolutely perfect - I just don't think this dish needed quite so much going on. There's a lot to be said for the Hawksmoor approach of serving fish like they serve steak - cooked well but presented starkly alone on a plate, and with accompaniments such as chips served separately. I suppose what I'm saying is I'd quite like the Tolcarne Inn halibut with chips.

Plaice, then, yet again the finest example any of us had ever tried, the flesh lifting off the bone in meaty, satisfying chunks and having a fantastic rich flavour, which didn't really need more than one (if any) of the accompanying potatoes, beetroot and half a pound of hazelnuts. That plaice, though, blimey.

Finally hake, another completely faultless example of its kind, which because it was place on top of its accompanying squash, beans, confit tomato and anchovy rather than underneath, came across as far less fussy. Also the preserved lemon dressing was genuinely lovely and not superfluous at all, and really brought out the best in the fish.

The bill, with a bottle of wine, came to £41pp, which is certainly towards the lower end of what you'd expect to pay for a whole plaice, a chunk of halibut, fresh oysters and the like anywhere in the country never mind London. And I've never had seafood as good as this in London, at any price. And if I sound like I'm picking up on a few faults above, then please bear in mind that this is all in the context of literally the best series of fresh fish and seafood I can remember eating in a long time.

Above all else, the Tolcarne Inn is blessed with world class ingredients and a kitchen that can cook them perfectly, and for this reason I can do nothing but recommend the place. My own desire to streamline the presentation and accompaniments a bit is nothing more than personal preference - there's every chance other happy customers would appreciate the effort gone into all the dishes and would regard a simple presentation as a bit of a swizz. Either way, who cares what I think anyway - we had a great time, service was lovely, and I now have a new benchmark to measure any future fish restaurant against. Not bad for an evening's work.

8/10

Coombeshead Farm, Cornwall

There's no way I'm going to make it through to the end of this post without being elaborately, embarrassingly gushing about my stay at Coombeshead Farm, so I may as well just get it over with straight away. This idyllic spot deep in the east Cornish countryside makes for as close to an ideal weekend away as it’s possible to imagine; an exquisite combination of luxurious country retreat and cutting-edge modern British restaurant, the fruits of artisanal animal husbandry and organic horticulture presented by a kitchen team at the absolute top of their game. It’s a wonderful place, and you should go as soon as you possibly can.

With that out of the way, let’s look at some of the details. Every inch of the Coombeshead Farm experience is magnificently polished or notable in some way, from the grand comfort of the downstairs living rooms with their well-stocked honesty bars and cookbook libraries, to the bedrooms themselves, softened with thick carpets, absent of ugly 21st century technology (though supplied with WiFi, thank God) and with views of the rolling emerald green countryside from every low-beamed window.

It may be a working farm, and though it feels brutal to point it out, a successful business, but where it counts it has all the securities of a five-star hotel, only a five-star hotel where staff fade in and out of focus enough to make you feel you have the place to yourself, and where you don’t need to lock your bedroom door.

Even the practical, working farm side of things are beautiful, though. The symbols of the place are of course the mangalitza pigs; these magnificent beasts with their thick covering of wire-wool hair trot happily around their enclosure (for at least as long as their services aren’t, er, “required” anyway) and is the image you wake up to in the west-facing bedrooms.

Other rooms look out over the sheep paddock and what has become a much-Instagrammed symbol of the farm - a grand row of tall trees at the top of a grass meadow, framed by hedgerows and resembling an impressionist painting.

So yes, the place is knockout stunning beautiful, but never mind about that now, we have pigs to eat. Alongside drinks in the farmhouse living rooms, the first snacks appear, beginning with a selection of house charcuterie including duck I think as well as the all-important cured mangalitza shoulder blade and sausage. All incredible quality, as you might expect.

With the charcuterie, nasturtium bud capers, punchy and addictive, and wild garlic “sauerkraut” so vibrant and intensely flavoured they were, for the few seconds before I tried the next thing to arrive, my favourite new thing in the world.

These crackers were made from waste breadcrumbs, soaked, spread out like porridge and then fried with honey, whey and thyme. They cracked delicately in the mouth, releasing a sweet, oaty flavour.

Leaves of lettuce that had been growing in the kitchen garden greenhouses moments earlier were spread with “walnut miso”, which complimented the hot, almost bitter lettuce stems for an interesting asian-tinged effect.

Snacks done, and rehoused in the test kitchen/bakery/dining room, our tables were soon laid with bowls of pickles, plates of tastefully dressed garden vegetables, and home-baked sourdough with homemade butter. This just above is a plate of grilled white beetroot with cultured cream and parsnip, a heavenly blend of dairy and earthy veg which satisfied on every level.

And this is kohlrabi (which we’d spotted in the kitchen garden earlier, elongated purple limbs holding themselves above the soil like weird alien invaders) dressed in walnut paste and various interesting dry spices.

Onions came in a stock made out of bread sauce (there’s a certain waste-free philosophy at Coombeshead, though just like the extraordinary Where The Light Gets In in Stockport, nothing is repetitive - ingredients are just teased into ever more interesting new directions), and buttermilk.

Chard and mint had an unbelievable depth of flavour for what is essentially some shredded salad. And look at the colour of it - so vivid they almost glowed in the dark. Cries of “oh my God have you tried the chard” went up every few minutes during the evening.

Once Tom Adams and his team had us sufficiently bowled over by the fruits of their kitchen garden, it was time to move onto the protein. Translucent-thin slices of cured belly came draped over what my menu here tells me was ramson (wild garlic by another name) and gherkins although I’m convinced there was lovage somewhere in the mix too because, well, I hate lovage and can sniff it out at a thousand paces. For that reason, this one didn’t bowl me over but a friend on the same table said it was her favourite thing overall, so I’d go with her if I were you.

Finally, it was time for the Main Event. A thick, medium-rare steak of mangalitza pork, with a flavour profile every bit as complex and rewarding as the finest slab of Jamón ibérico secreta, next to a lively puck of mangalitza sausage and a blob of sharp blueberry chutney. All at once it made perfect sense to hinge an entire restaurant-farm and foodie weekend around a single product - this was world class stuff, nothing like any pork I’d had before. Beautiful.

Dessert was various locally foraged summer berries, blitzed into a kind of chunky sorbet and laced with sorrel. Maybe. Look, we’d had quite a bit to drink by this point (wines are advised by Zeren Wilson, so were obviously a) rare and unusual and b) brilliant, particularly a sparkling Crémant de Limoux) and my notes have started including quite a bit of odd punctuation. We enjoyed it, is all that matters.

After dinner, we wobbled back to the farmhouse and got stuck into the honesty bar. At the risk of sounding like I’ve lost all touch with reality, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier than when sat in the cosy library at Coombeshead knocking back an Auchentoshan Three Wood, revisiting every course of the dinner that we’d just eaten with similarly intoxicated (in all senses of the word) pals. But that’s what Coombeshead does to you - it is an escape from reality so comprehensive and so powerful that you enter a kind of altered state of consciousness where you convince yourself you can stay here in this beautiful place forever, tending to pigs and weeding the artichoke beds in return for food and board. I can make it work, you say. Just give me that chance.

Breakfast the next day consisted of cheese and broccoli tartlets (straight out of the oven), lardy cakes (ditto), pots of kefir, homemade granola, various freshly squeezed grape juices, and - what else - glorious slabs of glazed mangalitza belly bacon. The thought of heading back onto the M4 and revisiting the real world became a deeply depressing proposition. We left, eventually - slowly, reluctantly, a final wave to the sheep and the chickens, a final couple of photos of the garden softened with morning dew - vowing to return as soon as circumstances will allow. And if circumstances didn’t allow, we’d go back anyway, dammit.

Coombeshead the restaurant alone is a phenomenon - a rare example of the kind of magic that happens when only the finest ingredients, treated in sympathetic and intelligent ways, are presented in exactly the environment they belong, a perfect harmony of hospitality, invention and flavour. But as you may have noticed from reading this far, Coombeshead Farm is way more than a restaurant. It’s a holistic foodie nirvana, a shining example of how a partnership between the land and the table should work when good people put their heart and souls into making it happen. And it exists right now, in 2017, in Cornwall. So what on earth are you waiting for?

10/10