Do you remember where you were this time last year? I do. I was by the sea, on a restaurant terrace, overlooking a sunset. “So was I,” you’re probably thinking — and so you probably were. What were you drinking? (Me? A negroni). Smoking? (Camels/hot). Were there sailing boats gliding past and beaming against the orange sky and salt blowing in your face from the waves crashing onto the rocks? Same.
The point is I was not in Faro or San Sebastian or Biarritz. I was in St Mawes, a fishing village in Cornwall, four hours door-to-door from London and a world away from the sweats of Ibiza. The day before, I’d been for a breathtaking walk on Porthcurnick Beach and stopped at a café on the cliff for a lobster bisque. The café’s quite famous, apparently, and owned by a bloke called Simon Stallard, who is quite famous too. According to his website he is “passionate about sustainable dining that connects people to their environment”, which is to say that people travel far and wide to eat his soups and buy his cookbook. Besides the café — called the Hidden Hut — he owns a gastropub, the Standard Inn, where I stopped by another evening. Best meal of my life.
