Porthminster Kitchen sits above Warren’s Bakery on St Ives Harbour, like a paradigm of the British class system in food. This happens everywhere, but it is particularly pronounced in St Ives, which is unlucky enough to be a site of pilgrimage for Virginia Woolf addicts – her childhood holiday home sits above the town, her lighthouse is on the bay – and other feckless Londoners. But the balance is long lost. Since the Tate Gallery arrived in 1993, Cornish natives, who used to live alongside artists – Barbara Hepworth, Patrick Heron – have left the old town (‘downalong’). It is now a wonky Disneyland of holiday cottages with stupid names (‘Sea song’ and, more accurately, ‘Adrift’) and nautical-themed decor, which presumably exists to please the ghosts of long-dead fishermen. Or maybe people just lack imagination. It’s possible.
Fishermen often don’t eat fish, so why should we?
It’s also possible to navigate the wharf now that the holidays are over. In high summer it feels like the O2 at the end of a Roger Waters gig, if the punters were attacked by trios of intelligent seagulls – a pleasing fantasy, at least for me. Clever girls! St Ives seagulls must be appeased with cream and sugar, like feathered gods. I am wise now, and I don’t mind eating ice cream while cowering next to a bin with my back to the wall. (No respectable seagull will knock herself out on granite, even for a rum and raisin with flake.) The visitors might.
At the end of the summer, St Ives empties like a bath, and there are fewer supercars parked in loading bays. I wonder why they don’t just drive to Monaco. Those that remain stay at the Carbis Bay Hotel, most recently overwhelmed by the G7 and Boris Johnson in swimming trunks, and eat at the Porthminster Kitchen. Its signage offers ‘Cocktails – Coffees – Views’, which pleases me. I imagine I can eat the view.
Porthminster Kitchen is not nautical-themed: it is less wacky and more soothing, like a Tufnell Park dining room. It has dark wooden floors; pale walls; a lonely fireplace; spindly metal chairs, possibly to discourage lingering in August. If this is curiously understated, I assure you the alternative is worse. I almost bought a house in Penzance that had the anchor of the wrecked flagship HMS Association nailed to an exterior wall. That is not nautical-themed decor: that is a haunted object. Cornwall can be very eerie: go to Zennor church to read the mermaid myth. (It isn’t really a church.) It usually chooses not to be.
In this spirit, the menu is European-style brasserie food: nothing too frightening or monomaniacally fishy. It offers oysters and scallops; smoked chicken Caesar salad; hot-fried cauliflower (is there another kind?); sea bream; mushrooms and poached egg on toast; herb gnocchi. The prices are high, but not insulting.
We fall to open beef sandwiches – fishermen often don’t eat fish, so why should we? – a dish of asparagus; a plate of burrata. The cheese is wildly dressed and lovely: it falls apart. The asparagus is bitter and vivid. The beef, though, is disappointing, particularly since local farms are famous for cows of ancient lineage: a sort of Hapsburg or Plantagenet type of cow. They are not expressive – they only have one countenance between them – but they are noble. I feel ashamed. I should have had the fish.
Even so, this restaurant is neither good nor bad, possibly by design. Tourists don’t think deeply about anything: that is not their nature. It has the kind of preening vapidity you find in places that are hollowed out: like cashmere neutrals, it does nothing to bewitch and nothing to offend. It is not the savage Cornwall I am seeking – but St Ives is a market, and this sells.
Porthminster Kitchen, Wharf Road, St Ives TR26 1LG; tel: 01736 799874.
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