What to eat here

Where to eat now — the restaurants

The Salamander — locally sourced and keenly priced, and the name people search for when they look up where to eat here. Tucked away and hard to find in the dark, so book ahead, especially in summer. No dogs.

Number 5 — a Good Food Award winner in 2019, fresh fish in the centre of the village, a café by day with gluten-free options. Assistance dogs only.

The Sharksfin — a bar and restaurant with a harbour view. Roovrays — French, and the place for a crème brûlée. The Harbour Tavern — harbour views, seafood, and pizza and burgers for the family.

No prices here on purpose: they move, and the place's own page is the right place for them.

The pubs

The village once had over ten pubs. The Fountain Inn is the oldest — a fifteenth-century inn later bought by Walter Hicks, who went on to found the St Austell Brewery that now owns around two hundred pubs; it keeps real ales and gets busy of an evening, and has welcomed dogs since 2020.

The Ship is the other old one — the harbour's first rulebook was written in it in 1774. Around the bay you will also find the Rising Sun over Portmellon, and the Barley Sheaf and the Llawnroc in Gorran Haven.

Pilchard on pilchard, served with pilchard

Pilchard is a sardine, the larger ones, and Cornwall once had biblical numbers of them just offshore. We ate a great many, understandably. At one point the village doctors noted so many complaints of stomach ache that they traced it back to a diet over-dependent on oily fish.

Canned fish has always been more popular on the continent than here, and pilchard was mostly an export. Now that the choice exists and the shoals have largely gone — though numbers have picked up lately — you do not see much of it eaten.

The pasty

A crescent-shaped pie with a handle. Small squares of potato, swede and beef, though back in the day you would be lucky to get beef; they were filled with leftovers and whatever came to hand.

The crust was made to be held by dirty mining hands and thrown away after — supposedly to the pixies. If you find mincemeat or gravy inside yours, it is not one.

Clotted cream

Very rich, nearer butter in texture but with the taste of dense fresh cream. It was hugely popular in the 1800s and had been about far longer; it may have come to the South West with tin traders from the area of modern Syria. It keeps far better than other cream, which is likely why it caught on before fridges.

Jam first, cream on top. In Devon they have a more perverse method, widely rejected further west.

Cornish Yarg

Developed in the 1980s from a recipe of 1615, and wrapped by hand in an edible layer of mouldy stinging nettles. The nettles are mildly acidic, which changes how the rind forms and gives the cheese its character.

Yarg is Gray backwards, after the people who developed it. It is an old cheese brought back for modern times rather than an unbroken tradition — which does not make it any less good.

Hevva cake

A Cornish grandmother's classic, also called heavy cake because it is. Raisins, closer to a flapjack than a cake, and scored in a criss-cross to stand for the fishing nets. It was traditionally made by the watchmen of the fishing boats — and if you had been out all day, it is exactly the cake you would want.

Stargazy pie

Eggs, potato and pilchard, with the fish heads poking through the pastry to prove the fish are in there. You will not find it; nobody alive is Cornish enough to eat it.

One origin story says it keeps the devil out of Cornwall, on the logic that if the Cornish will put anything in a pie they might well put the Devil in one. The other is Tom Bawcock of Mousehole, who went out in a storm on 23 December and caught enough to feed the whole village; seven kinds of fish went into the pie, and Mousehole still parades one every 23 December by lantern light.

Cornish fairings

Snacks sold at Victorian fairs, and the Cornish were particularly good at them: a softer, more buttery ginger biscuit. Like Yarg, the history is shallower than you would think — they were only really popularised in the late 1800s. A hundred and fifty years of the same business making them still earns the biscuit its place.

Saffron buns

Saffron and raisins, and very good. It is more common to buy a whole saffron loaf, slice it and butter it like bread; the buns are lighter. The yellow, these days, is dye — saffron is far too dear to use in the quantity that colour would need.

Kelly's ice cream, which started here

Kelly's was founded in the 1890s in Mevagissey by an Italian who changed his name to make it easier for the Cornish to say. Joseph Staffieri sold fish and chips in winter and ice cream he made himself in summer; his son-in-law Lazero built the ice cream side and launched the first mobile unit with a pony and cart, selling the penny lick — a shot-sized reusable glass filled for a penny.

At one point he had several ice cream shops in Mevagissey alone, in a village that never had the population for it. Made by an Italian with the most Cornish ingredient there is, clotted cream. The fleet is forty vans now.

Where the fish actually goes

The great majority of fish landed in Cornwall is exported to Europe and Asia — you can buy live Cornish spider crab in a Shanghai market. Most of the county's best produce leaves it. There are still pockets of it here if you know where to look.