In Cornwall, you have to get lost—desperate and borderline panicky, ready to give up and go home—to let the food magic find you. You also have to cast aside your notions of what a restaurant should be. Because in this ocean-flanked southwestern tip of England, hiking trails, parking lots, and beachside snack bars often conceal places of no small magic. That is, if you can find them.
After decades of visiting London, I realized that with the exception of a day trip to Stratford-upon-Avon some 25 years ago, I’d never been anywhere else in England. On recent visits I’d noticed that the menus at the capital’s best restaurants almost always listed Cornish suppliers, from the monkfish at the River Café and Clove Club to the lamb at Lyle’s and Fera at Claridge’s to the cheeses at Neal’s Yard Dairy. So I decided to go to the source, booking my ticket to Cornwall, a humble agricultural region-cum-tourist destination.
Not that my first stop revealed the area’s promise. On a high-season August Sunday in the town of Padstow, the streets were so packed with sunburned tourists it was hard to move. June, July, and September are really the months to go; August is insanity, as seemingly half the country’s families point their wagons south toward the otherwise quiet peninsula. With a population of just over 540,000, Cornwall receives close to 5 million visitors a year—mostly British, and half of whom seemed to be in line at Stein’s Fish & Chips. It is one of ten local restaurants opened by Rick Stein, the chef who put the region on the culinary map in the ’80s. And it was so joyless and rote, I could hardly appreciate the picturebook prettiness of the town.
Even with the satnav assist in my car, I was convinced that the continent was gong to end before I found my next stop, the Gurnard’s Head inn. In less than an hour, I’d traveled from the tidy, mirrorgrazing hedgerows and picturesque fishing cottages of Padstow to a no-cell-reception landscape as desolate and breathtaking as the moon, if the moon had the occasional Holstein. I gave up and turned off into a “village” consisting only of a Game of Thrones– esque chapel and a pub. Nope. I stopped a few kilometers farther and stood on the rental car’s hood, hoping to see the marigoldyellow building that I’d seen online with “The Gurnard’s Head” painted on the roof. Not yet. I drove on. Good thing: Minutes later I was waiting at the hotel’s firelit bar for the bartender to hand me the key to my room. As the sun set, I strolled toward the cliffs on a dirt road, picking blackberries among wildflowers and noticing footpath signs for those who’d rather see Cornwall at a 19th-century pace.
Arriving at an inn like the Gurnard’s Head for dinner after a day’s walk would be a very civilized idea indeed. The food there was hearty, fresh, and unselfconsciously worldly, in the way that English food has absorbed parts of Indian, Asian, and Middle Eastern cuisines. There was mushroom and tarragon soup for starters, but also the Turkish eggplant dish imam bayildi served with baba ghanoush and fresh goat’s curd. Grilled plaice (a flatfish in the flounder family), topped with butter-cupping clams and served with a ceramic bowl of minted new potatoes, was just right with a bottle of local Polgoon cider, its Champagne-like fizz finer than that of any American cider I’d tasted. A sign outside the hotel asks farmers to sell them their produce. Who knows whether this was just for show, but it helped cement the feeling that I was eating Cornwall, in Cornwall.
Breakfast was a lovely affair in the inn’s bar—homemade yogurt, grainy bread, salmon smoked a few towns over in Newlyn. As I got back into my car, I noticed an honor stand selling rhubarb set back from the sparsely traveled road. How many of the few passersby ever saw it? This was an endearing mystery
Only 12 hours before, I’d been worried that Cornwall hadn’t been worth the journey—a flight from New York, an overnight in London, and an hour-long flight from the dreadful Gatwick into the metal shed of Newquay airport before strapping into a right-side-drive Volvo with all of the insurance boxes checked. Now, as I made the short drive from the Celtic Sea to the English Channel side, following hedgerow-hemmed roads so pretty—so English—my chest tightened with elation, a feeling catalyzed by the sight of a teacup-shaped sign marking a farmhouse tearoom. Before I knew it, I was stopping to photograph the phone numbers of cottage rentals miles past where I’d been convinced the world was sure to end.
I went off the restaurant grid. Restaurants, in the traditional sense, gave way to snack bars and picnic blankets. I ate a salad topped with pristine handpicked white crab and dipped into a little tub of clotted-cream ice cream at the Rock Pool café, an infinitely Instagrammable waterside spot accessed through a parking lot in a beachy little harbor called Mousehole (pronounced mow-zul), pop. 697. In the just-this-side-of-twee space, women spoke French in the kitchen, bunting fluttered in the breeze, and a flyer outside announced an upcoming taco night.
Next, just to taste, I bought a delicious house-made crab sandwich on brown bread, packaged Automat-style, at Stevenson, a real-deal fishmonger in Newlyn, where I also stopped at the arrestingly cute seafood bar Mackerel Sky. There I dove into grilled mackerel—the fish of choice in Cornwall—minimally plated with orange, chives, and a few dots of ponzu, followed by a half lobster confidently served with a slice of lemon, one pea shoot, and a bib. Each table held yet another manifestation of the briny air, a tub of salt harvested from the nearby sea.
After five days in Cornwall, the appeal of ditching the city for a life here—or at least a couple of weeks—made sense. Like the food itself, it’s slow, beautiful, affordable, and not trying to be the next anything. Here, it’s about being at the source, no matter how lost you get trying to find it.