.: MENU's UK Adventure 15. Chasing Rick Stein to Padstow; a visit to Port Isaac

Friday, November 15, 2019

MENU's UK Adventure 15. Chasing Rick Stein to Padstow; a visit to Port Isaac

Even though he had visited Cornwall several times, John had never visited Padstow, so Lynne wanted to show it to him

She has spent many happy days there, walking along the cliffs and then finding a good pub to have a good beer with mates....

and a pasty from the Rock Bakery on the other side of the estuary. The tide was out

Padstow is a very popular town and is well known for having several Rick Stein restaurants
We love his cooking programmes and his recipes have become standards in our home

Bold young kelp gulls are everywhere

Parking is along the front on the extreme right

So we walked into town trying to find the Rick Stein Fish and Chips restaurant

A long view of Rock, across the bay

We wandered around for ages, up hills and down many streets being misled (again) by our satnav

Eventually, we found Stein's Patisserie, selling all sorts of tempting things;

we asked them how to find the restaurant we wanted

They were very helpful, but we were not pleased by the answer

Just our luck. It was back along the quayside, near where we had parked the car!

Still, it meant we had seen quite a lot of Padstow

It’s in a huge old wooden warehouse building that has been modernised

The Seafood Bar & Fishmongers looked good, but we had set our sights on fish and chips

If only our local fish suppliers looked as fresh and good as this

Found it, further down in the same building

Lots of beers, wines and cider for sale as well as soft drinks and water

Prices above the 'bar'. We ordered one hake and one cod in batter with chips

And two local India Pale Ales, which came in the bottle! No glasses or cups

They apparently have gone green, so if you hate drinking beer out of a bottle, as we do, take your own glasses

John did manage to nick one last plastic cup from the counter (which, of course, being green ourselves, we recycled later)

The fish is all cooked in beef dripping; our SA doctor and “fishatarians” might have a fit at that, but it was very good batter

We could see seats to the right of the kitchen, but we were not permitted to sit there

"No", we were told, "that is separate, you have to eat round the back of the building in the open air"

We had obviously missed the fact that the take away and the sit down sections are separate,

even though they share a kitchen

It would have cost us £1 extra each to sit down in comfort

And rules is rules..., even though we’d offered to pay the extra pound

Thank heavens it wasn’t raining. Around the back of the building,

there are some picnic tables and we managed to find seats, eventually

We halved the fish, so each of us had a taste of each fish;

it was superbly fresh and pearly, just as it should be and had great flavour

The crisp batter is a little greasy and we got nice and messy, eating with our fingers

The chips could be crisper; we did ask for them to be crisp,

but they were not, and being packed beneath the steaming fish softens them more

The tide was coming in fast,

filling up the harbour. We decided to head up the coast to Port Isaac
(aka Portwenn, where Doc Martin and the movie Fisherman’s Friends have been filmed)