It’s hard to imagine a location more requiring of a friendly welcome, a cosy room and some good cooking. Luckily the Gurnard’s Head scores high on all three. I get the impression that most people choose to dine and stay the night. Very sensible too, as it stands in glorious isolation on the rugged coast of Penwith, the very last bit of Cornwall before you fall into the Atlantic. And why attempt a
As far as accommodation goes, the rooms here are going to divide opinion. I loved it; gorgeous Welsh blankets on the comfy bed, old unfussy sticks of furniture, a book shelf of random tomes and a window out onto the rough Cornish moorland. The in-room hot drinks include freshly ground coffee and tea that was actually grown in Cornwall. On the other hand, the shower was a piddly electric unit that dispensed scalding hot then freezing cold water in (mercifully predictable) twenty second bursts, the mechanism on the window blind was broken, there was no wardrobe to hang up clothes, no full-length mirror and no desk or table to sit at. So if you are the kind of person irritated by quirks and only happy with “all mod cons” then I suggest you check into the St Ives Holiday Inn. You’ve been warned!
Downstairs there’s a friendly bar, with friendly bar staff, and a boldly painted rustic dining room that makes the most of the massive
My starter was a plate of rich, sticky pieces of braised calf’s tongue. Delicious, but knocked into touch by Maureen’s dish of oyster rissoles sitting in a bowl of grass green vichyssoise of alexanders. If you’re not a forager that might look a bit greek. I ‘splain. Alexanders are a wild plant vaguely like parsley, one of the first things to start growing on clifftops and almost forgotten as a food. I’m guessing they provided the strong green colour and flavour that complimented the warm, crunchy, salty rissole so well. I just love being given something
And so to main course, where I chose guineafowl and Maureen picked cod. She won again, this being probably the most perfectly cooked piece of cod I’ve encountered, no doubt benefiting from having been landed less than ten miles away. It was accompanied by fat, chewy pickled cockles and a balancing mixture of veg. My guineafowl was a superb supper dish, the bird carefully cooked to keep some pink and matched beautifully with creamy mousseline potatoes and enormous fat chunks of braised leek. I don’t mind saying, I am never going to cook leeks any other way ever again.
My dessert was a log of banana-y parfait with a dark chocolate sorbet and crystallised peanuts. The sorbet was great, the first example to convince me that the words “chocolate” and “sorbet” should ever be used so closely together on a menu. The parfait wasn’t my thing; parfait logs always look industrial, with little indentations from
Good stuff. We trundled back upstairs very well fed and watered, marvelling that such a neat gem of a dining room should be able to survive in such an out of the way place. Especially as their rate for Dinner, Bed & Breakfast is so damnably reasonable; their mid-week winter special D&B&B was £125 per couple, which feels like either the room or the meal were almost thrown in as a freebie. A stay at The Gurnard’s Head is a huge and welcome breath of fresh air.
We enjoyed ourselves so much that we stayed (and ate) another night. Scallops, crab, more great fish and kippers for breakfast!
* – in fact the tiny town of St Just is further west, only a mile or two from Land’s End, but you’ll allow me some poetic license
