Mannings Hotel, Lemon Street, Truro, Cornwall TR1 2QB (01872 247 900). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £70
It seems that, from time to time, I am guilty of unwarranted snobbery, as against the warranted kind, which is completely OK and makes the world a better place. It happened recently in Liverpool where Maray’s “curated” menu of sharing plates turned out not to be a throbbing hipster nightmare, but the route to a lovely dinner.
Now it has happened again, this time in Truro. Here, in the restaurant of Mannings, a neat and tidy family-run hotel, panic and fear over the menu turned to confusion turned to surprise turned to pleasure. But let’s step back a moment. I was due in Cornwall to record an edition of The Kitchen Cabinet, the finest culinary panel show currently broadcasting on BBC Radio 4, and so investigated somewhere to review. Two places looked promising, but were not open that night. Others had uncomfortably written menus that promised low-level violence against unsuspecting ingredients. A negative review of a restaurant in Truro did not strike me as a good use of anybody’s time. Apart, I suppose, from that belonging to the people of Truro and I doubted they would appreciate it.
I abandoned the idea of reviewing. We would simply have dinner at Mannings, where we were staying. Cue eye-rolling over the menu. It is very long. It is extraordinarily restless, like it’s been written by a well-funded backpacker recalling all their dinners. It visits Italy, Japan, Mexico, Vietnam and the Americas. There are seafood platters and sandwiches, burgers and grills. In one corner it invites you to build your own crab tacos. In another it threatens you with imam bayildi. There is an emphasis on Thailand. I shake my head sagely. I have seen such things before and know that no good can come of them. No one kitchen can manage all of this. There’s only one explanation: food service. All of this stuff must come out of heat-sealed, blast-chilled, plastic trays unloaded from logo-splattered, refrigerated trucks.
Still, what can you do? We need to be fed. So I order the massaman curry. My go-to Thai place in Brixton, Kaosarn, makes a thrilling massaman: a deep, dark, luscious braise, ballasted by potatoes and peanuts and smothered by a thick, coconut-rich sweet-savoury sauce. It is a killer hangover cure. I resign myself to eating a mere echo of that.
You have already guessed the next bit. In a deep white bowl is a tangle of long-braised lamb. The bits of meat peeking above the sauce are lightly crisped. Those below play tag with the huge, spiced gravy. The potatoes are cooked, as they should be, to the point where they are starting to dissolve away into the sauce. Ribbons of fresh red chilli add a little extra fire. This is a curry with depths you could lose yourself in. The bowl sits on a plate with, alongside it, a perfect heap of steamed jasmine rice, and a few prawn crackers. I taste a couple of spoonfuls and stare at the plate.
Across the table another friend, with his own form for culinary snobbery, stares down in to his bowl. He says, quietly: “You should try the tom kha soup. It’s… good.” And it is: a big sweet-sour savoury broth, with the bellow and shout of fish sauce in its very depths. It bobs with fat prawns and ribbons of soothing rice noodles. Another plate of “sashimi-grade” tuna is just that. A finely cut square has been crusted with sesame seeds, then seared leaving it velvet-plush red at the heart. It is dressed with a sticky soy-lime glaze of the sort you could happily lick off your fingers, or those of a friend. It sits on wok-fried greens. Alongside that is a very serviceable Thai-style tuna salad, with a coconut and peanut sauce.
From another part of the world comes a cast iron skillet, piled high with pieces of seared rump steak, sliced onions and new potatoes that have started to caramelise on contact with the superheated metal work. The whole is bound together by a Stilton-based sauce. The name, “Mannings steak and stilton sizzling platter” has a touch of the Harvester about it. The dish it describes rather accurately, is sustaining: it’s a monument of home cooking from that part of the American Midwest where portion sizes are designed to terrify life insurers. Further down the table is a plate of greaseless fish tempura. There’s a well-roasted chicken breast and some very fine salt-and-pepper squid. All mains are priced in the low to mid-teens.
This is assured, convincing cooking. It’s not going to leave you breathless, but it is hugely satisfying and more than fits the handsome room, with its mix of blonde wood floorboards and buffed-up old stone walls. I conclude there is only one thing to do. I go into the kitchen to talk to the chef. Once there it seems an outrageous question, but I ask it anyway. “Did you cook all this stuff from scratch, or did it come from food service?” The man looks at me, baffled, then picks up a bag of prawn crackers. “Well, these came from food service,” he says, turning them over and examining the deep frying instructions. “Otherwise, no, it’s all made here.”
Later, I speak to Scott Young, the executive chef of Mannings, who grew up in Cornwall, but who spent years in Australia. “I fell in love with Pacific Rim cookery while there,” he tells me, simply. The recipes are his, as it seems are the cooks, who were trained up by him. Not everything is perfect. Chips, with the uniformity of those stored in a bag, wilt quickly. A dessert of a banana and tamarind spring roll is bland. But they do a good sticky toffee pudding, a smooth chocolate parfait and a very passable crème brûlée.
What’s more, the next morning, there’s a cracking bacon sandwich made with both dry-cured back bacon and fragile leaves of pancetta fried until completely crisped, on thick-cut white bread with sauce. I can’t help myself. I just love a kitchen that attends to the details of a bacon sandwich.
I’m not going to lose my suspicion of overly long, overly broad menus. And I can’t pass judgment on the huge stretches of this one that I didn’t try, but the omens are good. Certainly it has to be said: my impulsive snobbery was unfounded. Any number of towns across this country would just kill to have a place like Mannings.
Jay’s news bites
■ Not far from Truro, at Porthcurnick beach, is one of Cornwall’s great food pleasures, The Hidden Hut. By day it’s a beach café, with a killer line in cakes. But from March onwards chef Simon Stallard stages bring-your-own-crockery ‘Feast Nights’. Tickets for June, including mezze on 3 June, a paella picnic on 9 June and lobster and chips on 25 June, go on sale on 1 June via seetickets.com. They sell out in minutes (hiddenhut.co.uk).
■ Ondine seafood restaurant in Edinburgh is working with The Bay Fish and Chips in Stonehaven to stage a charity lunch in aid of the Fishermen’s Mission, which supports fishing communities across Scotland. The lunch, on 22 May, costs £60 including wines (ondinerestaurant.co.uk).
■ I didn’t mention the original announcement of Bunyadi, a pop-up restaurant where clothing will be optional, at a yet-to-be-disclosed London location, because I didn’t think it would catch on. Oh how wrong I was. The current waiting list for tickets is more than 33,000 (thebunyadi.com).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
