Curiously understated: Porthminster Kitchen reviewed

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.

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.