Restaurant: NathanOutlaw,
Marina villa Hotel, Fowey, Cornwall (01726 833 315).
Meal for two, including wine and service, £125
The knuckle-dragging saddos of the Cornish National Liberation Army who recently spat bile at Rick Stein and Jamie Oliver for opening successful restaurants on their patch must, I'm sure, also hate Nathan Outlaw. The Kent-born chef has had the cheek to move to Cornwall and forge a career there, providing employment for local people, encouraging producers of the finest local produce and helping to develop the county's reputation for great food. Shameful behaviour. This horde of English cooks with their copper pans and filthy, demented plans to prepare local turbot to the best of its advantage can only mean death to the fine indigenous culinary traditions of the ehm... the er... the pasty!
Then again, if it hadn't been for Outlaw I wouldn't have come to Cornwall, so perhaps they have a point. Any political movement designed to keep me out must surely be a good idea. My companion Henrietta Lovell would, I think, have come to Cornwall anyway. Henrietta answered my call on our food blog for a companion for this meal. She runs the Rare Tea Company, and as Tregothnan, the UK's first tea plantation, is not far from where Outlaw now cooks, she was the perfect candidate. Of course we could have been put off by the threat of a CNLA attack over the amuse bouche, but we are made of sterner stuff. In any case, we're talking serious dinner here. It would take a lot more than that to put us off.
Nathan Outlaw is a young chef with fantastic sideburns who has made a big name for himself very quickly. He won his first Michelin star at the Black Pig in Rock, near Padstow, while barely out of puberty, before a stint at nearby St Ervan Manor. Now he is cooking at the rather lovely Marina Villa Hotel in Fowey. The low-ceilinged dining room sits right on the Fowey estuary, and as the waters ripple beyond the bay windows and the boats rise and fall, it is easy to imagine the room itself is afloat. While I have always argued that you should never eat in a restaurant on a boat - the 'experience' will always be regarded as more important than the food - a restaurant that pretends to be on a boat is a different matter entirely. At least you can get off.
Not that we wanted to. Outlaw's food is smart without being overwrought. Many chefs, plating up pre-dinner tasters, like to lob taste grenades. Outlaw tickled us with a feather: a miniature salad of dinky asparagus with smoked mayonnaise and a fried quail's egg. The big flavours came with our starters, which we managed to order despite Henrietta's lengthy descriptions of the life cycle of the tea plant. (Did you know there is only one tea plant, and that the various varieties of tea only emerge through the leaf's treatment?) Henrietta's starter was big girl's food: discs of soft, fibrous ox tongue breaded, fried and served with capers and anchovies. This was a perfect example of a cheap ingredient made luxurious. Mine was just a luxurious ingredient - pink pigeon breast, and a tiny confited leg - made more luxurious still by the application of a savoury chocolate sauce.
Before our main course Henrietta told me at some length about the way tea masters fondle the leaves. I was agog. She stopped talking when she started on her plate of sliced rose veal, with a disc of deeply flavoured braised baby cow alongside a light cauliflower puree. Mine was a tranche of pearly turbot and brown shrimps with a foamy and light sauce punched up with English mustard. After a short lecture on silver tip tea - the keenly priced Alsace Gewurztraminer was starting to make itself felt by this point, so my attention may have wandered - we moved on to desserts, the star of which was a soft-roasted pear which had been filled with a light amaretto mousse. It was a unique method for the delivery of the ever-winning almond and pear combination. We also liked the freshly baked cherry sponge, still hot on the plate, with a brisk, bright cherry sorbet. At the end, Henrietta asked if the kitchen would make up some of her whole-leaf Oolong, and very fine it was indeed.
Nathan Outlaw is not cheap, though the pricing looks sharper because it is entirely a la carte: £10 or so for starters, £20 plus for mains. But the cooking is confident and the setting beautiful. They also add 50p to the bill per person, which goes to support the local Fowey playgroup.
On the train home I sat opposite a woman who, having ascertained what I was doing in Cornwall, told me that she too had eaten at Nathan Outlaw. The old trout then whined throughout the three-hour journey to Bristol about the 50p levy, which she thought disgraceful. The CNLA might like to recruit her. Championship bores like her may well be exactly what they need to keep people away - though she will find a fearsome opponent in the attractive cooking of Nathan Outlaw.
To get Henrietta's take on the meal with Jay, visit our food blog.
