The Hidden Hut

Porthcurnick Beach, Portscatho, Truro, Cornwall

The Hidden Hut lives up to its name, a small gem of a restaurant nestled along a National Trust footpath, near Portscatho and St Mawes on the Roseland Peninsula in southern Cornwall. A few benches outside offer views down to Porthcurnick beach and across the water.

Run by the husband-and-wife team Simon Stallard and Jemma Glass, who is a third-generation Portscatho local, it’s a cafe during the day, serving freshly baked Cornish pasties, soups, cakes (made by Jemma’s mum, Maggie) and lunchtime specials, ranging from tagine to seafood chowder.

In the evening, it’s transformed, with feast nights turning the hut into a culinary destination that attracts diners from far afield (Stallard published the first Hidden Hut cookbook earlier this year, too).

“The feast nights are very outdoorsy and there’s not much polish – hopefully, the food is the champion,” says Stallard of the events that began with an impromptu barbecue intended to use up some fish. A casually placed chalkboard by the road and word of mouth led to bigger things, though each feast still focuses on just one dish, whether that’s freshly landed local mackerel, or the grilled bone-in sirloin steak from their own cattle. (There are always vegetarian options and some evenings, such as the south Indian vegetable thali event, inspired by Stallard’s travels, are meat-free.)

Prices for the feast nights, which run from March to October, vary from £13 for the seafood paella to £25 for the most popular evening: lobster and chips.

Stallard’s not being modest about the Hut’s informality, with 60 to 100 diners bringing their own cutlery, crockery and drinks. Seating is on communal benches or the camping chairs some bring tucked under their arms.

Feasts go ahead in all weathers. Although a nice summer’s evening can boast dramatic sunsets and the chance to spot dolphins in the bay, it is the colder nights, when diners huddle up together, hot water bottles in their laps, tucking into a plate of hot food, that Stallard thinks are the most memorable.

In 2017, more than 22,000 people applied for just 600 covers over their summer season. How has the ever-growing popularity changed this remote hut with its open-air feasts?

“The hut is still the same size,” jokes Stallard. “Our focus hasn’t changed. It’s always been on the food.” AS
The Hidden Hut is out now (HarperCollins, £20); hiddenhut.co.uk

Roth Bar & Grill

Hauser & Wirth, Bruton, Somerset

It’s a world-class art gallery with a thousand-acre farm. It’s a famous garden and a serious restaurant, with its own Henry Moore lobster on the wall. The cooking at the Roth Bar & Grill at Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, is run out of converted cowsheds by Steve and Jules Horrell, with a bar by Björn and Oddur Roth, son and grandson of artist Dieter Roth: all scavenged woods and stuff, just like granddad’s work.

More lists: there is a Himalayan salt room for ageing meat from animals born and bred on the farm. There are free-range mangalitsa pigs; Angus, Hereford and wagyu-cross cows; sheep gambol through fields before being turned into suckling-lamb chops or merguez sausages served North-African style, with harissa and beans. They even have a vineyard.

It is so bucolic you could almost hate it, were it not (almost) integrated into the community. There is a village summer party, a pumpkin festival, a field has been given over to local allotments.

Art is, of course, central. The galleries currently house an Alexander Calder retrospective, with a massive mobile and free-standing metalworks punctuating the outside space. There is the re-homed Serpentine Pavilion by Smiljan Radić, plonked at the end of the garden like a 1950s UFO (the design, btw, is by superstar plantsman Piet Oudolf, currently planning the outside space at the new Noma in Copenhagen).

But, truthfully, the Horrells don’t need any of this to make the Roth Bar & Grill work. Yes, happily, much of the produce comes from local farmers, gardens and gamekeepers, but it is the cooking you will come back for. Full of bold flavours and ideas, I would drive a long way for the food, with or without the arty accoutrements, though I like the setting, the room and much of the artworks on the walls. “Steve’s cooking is all about the theatre and my part is the table setting and styling,” says Jules.

My current obsession is their Francis Mallmann-inspired metal cage and fire pit – they do “fire feasts” on Thursdays – with heavy iron kit, reminiscent of the Inquisition. “There is no better way to cook than lighting the fire for an asado just as dawn strikes,” says Steve. “All you can hear is bird song and the crackling of flames. Once we have the fire going and the lamb is on, we sit fireside and grill home-cured bacon and eggs from the farm. We never let the weather stop us – we have cooked for parties in rain and snow.”

So, I will return for a Thursday evening (I have an eye on the fish stew fire feast on 9 August). Or maybe make an extravagant detour for lunch, if passing within 50 miles. AJ
rothbarandgrill.co.uk

River Exe Cafe

The Point Bar, Exmouth Marina visitors pontoon, Devon

River Exe Cafe is like very few other restaurants. Built on the reclaimed hulls of two defunct canal barges, it sits in the middle of the wide tidal estuary between Exmouth and Starcross. Customers must take the water taxi from Exmouth Marina. “You need to come with a sense of adventure,” says co-owner David Foa. “The cafe does move a bit when boats go past.”

Foa and his business partner, Paul Craven, opened the cafe in 2011. Foa wanted a clubhouse for his wakeboard and water-ski school, while Craven wanted to open a cafe. Now, it has six people in the kitchen and up to eight front of house.

Seafood is, unsurprisingly, a priority here. Foa says the big seafood platters are a bestseller – with crab, prawns, white-fish ceviche, scallops and clams at £60 – but you can also go for whole Brixham crab, or mussels served six ways. “We buy off the local fish supplier in Exmouth,” says Foa. “He goes to Brixham market every morning, so it’s straight to plate.”

Fish delivery isn’t the only thing that has to be negotiated daily. Everything that comes to the cafe – “every bottle top, every tissue” – has to go back. “Our poo boat, called Winnie the Pooh, does a run every day.” With no pipes or power lines, water has to be shipped over and electricity is from a generator.

To complicate matters further, the seasonality of the cafe (it closes from the end of September until April) makes “finding the right people, and holding on to them, very difficult,” says Foa. So what makes it all worthwhile? He laughs. “Just getting to the end of the season feels like an achievement.” He relents a little. “Having happy customers in is nice, too. We seem to be doing OK.” KF
riverexecafe.com

The Marram Grass

White Lodge, Newborough, Anglesey, North Wales

There are restaurants on boats, swung from cranes, in car parks and deconsecrated churches, so we shouldn’t really have a problem with a great restaurant on a caravan site in North Wales, should we? Marram Grass is exactly that, a comfortably sized former shed that brothers Ellis and Liam Barrie have taken over on their parents’ holiday park in Anglesey.

When they began in 2011, chef Ellis was knocking out fry-ups, while Liam, who trained as a surveyor, was front of house, wrangling the holiday-makers.

I know. In a world where every new launch seems to come from two chaps who quit their City jobs to ride their “dining concept” to financial triumph, a couple of blokes knocking out bacon baps to caravanning families sounds fantastic, doesn’t it?

But here’s the thing. They got it right. Very right. They decided early on that they’d stick with local suppliers and continue to accommodate local customers and, when I made the trek to review them, I found they were turning out incredibly high-quality dishes (Marram made the Good Food Guide in 2015).

I remember spankingly fresh mussels from the Menai Strait, spectacular local plaice in caper butter, and a mad “deconstructed cream tea” for dessert. It was disorientating. Such quality and skill, yet with a cheery informality and, Christ, such huge portions.

They’ve kept it up, too, working on the menu, winning awards, finding new suppliers and developing old ones, and announcing a very “non-caravan-site” guesthouse. What success can’t alter, though, is the integrity of the food, the endearing room and the lovely crew.

As Ellis explains: “The Marram Grass ties so much into the location because it has evolved as a business alongside us, tucked away on Anglesey. Farmers that we talked to as customers became suppliers. The kids of our customers were the people asking for work experience and jobs – the beginnings of a team.”

Michelin may never visit a shed but you certainly should. Marram Grass is one of a kind: a big-hearted combination of a spectacular local caff with splashes of fine-dining refinement and enough witty MasterChef touches to please the crowds it now attracts from all over the country.

“Nine years into running the Marram Grass,” says Liam, “it’s only now that we know what the [restaurant] wants itself to be. She is a beautiful shed, and yet it is the restaurant’s beautiful surroundings that give it its charm. How many chefs can walk out of their kitchens and see the menu, literally, in front of their eyes?” TH
themarramgrass.com

Riley’s Fish Shack

King Edwards Bay, Tynemouth, Tyne & Wear

Not a day goes by when Adam Riley doesn’t wonder what he’s doing, serving seafood from a converted shipping container on a Tyneside beach. But then the winds drop, the crowds come and it all makes sense. “The advantage of a business like this is you get to do what you want,” Riley says. “We’re not part of a high street, so we can be flamboyant and different.”

Riley’s Fish Shack, garlanded with fairy lights, smoke spiralling from its chimney, is certainly that. Riley trained as a chef on the Isle of Man, but went into theatre when he moved to Tynemouth. The shack started life as a mobile barbecue for the Tynemouth food festival in 2012, built out of bicycle parts he had left over from a street art project in Derby. As to the choice of the beach, a serious stagger down the steep path from the road above: “I always wanted to open somewhere that was quiet, so you could create your own atmosphere, and this has long been my favourite beach. It has a calm, tranquil feel.”

The barbecue cart was replaced by the container with its wood-fired oven. Soon there were queues, aided by ecstatic reviews, not least from this newspaper. “I like to exceed expectations. People think they’re coming for a bit of mackerel and then they get a lot more.” Indeed they do: there’s wood-fired lobsters and empanadas stuffed full of long-stewed beef and oysters, all of it served in wooden boxes. You perch on rickety stools at a rough wooden bar, looking out to the North Sea, and all is good.

It’s not always easy, not least because Riley insists on staying open all year round. “During the beast from the east, the winds kept blowing bits off,” he says. “But we only lost three days to the snow.” He’s regularly asked to open more shacks, but he’s not convinced. “I’m responsible for sourcing all the fish as ethically as possible and, if we had another shack, we’d need another me.” He may open a wet fish shop with a cafe. “I think the chefs would like the chance to use real plates.” But he’s not planning an empire. He has his shack on the beach with a view of the sea, and that’s all he’s ever really wanted. JR
rileysfishshack.com