Review: The Tolcarne Inn, Newlyn

They have it pretty good for seafood in Cornwall. Especially if they’re a seafood restaurant in Newlyn, perhaps the most important fishing harbour in the whole of SW England. We wandered into a fishmonger to buy some fish for supper last night and everything was a third of the price it would be back up country. Not exaggerating. If I lived in Cornwall, I would overdose on fish. Apparently it’s a little trickier as a small restaurant – you can’t go through enough fish to actually buy directly from the market, so you still need to find a fishmonger to keep you in haddock. Even so, it’s going to be at least a day fresher than anything that lands on a London table.

The Tolcarne Inn is very much a no-frills dining room. It’s not really a pub any more, though it has the decor, and it still has rooms upstairs, a menu based on what’s good from the boats chalked up on a board, and a short but useful wine list.

To start we both have monkfish with battered sweetbread, pea mousse and a minty salsa verde. It would be hard for this to not be delicious, and it isn’t. Hang on. I mean it isn’t not delicious, of course. So it is delicious. Got a bit tangled up there, sorry. I proceed…

To mains. My silver mullet is naturally silky and perfectly cooked, with charred spring onions coiled on top along with some bright cubes of beetroot and some plump and vivid orange mussels that have added flavour to the butter. It’s set on a thick dollop of pease pudding, which I confess I’ve had seldom so couldn’t tell you if this was a great specimen. It certainly had a sturdier texture than mash potato and a gently beany flavour. This is a lovely plate of fish.

So is Maureen’s blonde ray. Shaved fennel and onion salad is good, along with a sea vegetable that I didn’t recognise and forgot to ask about. We had a bottle of wine quite quickly, you see. The ray was great. The pasta with a sauce of saffrony brown crab that accompanied was f.a.b. and could have stood up as a dish on it’s own. Ate very well with the sturdy white ray meat.

We even squashed in desserts. Lemon verbena posset with raspberries, super-summery and lip-smackingly sharp. Blackcurrant, orange and cardamom pavlova gave up all the flavours it promised in spite of the obvious strength of the blackcurrant. Nice little meringue.

You’ll be up around £40 for 3 courses. So not really pub dining, the price sets it one notch above all but the priciest London dining pubs. But it is veeeeeery good value for the care and attention put into serving up magical local fish beautifully. Good puds, nice atmosphere, decent wine list. Ought to be a candidate for the Top 50 Gastropubs list, really.