Restaurant Review for The Boat House, Fowey

The Boat House

Fowey, 27^th August 2011

Fowey is the sort of provincial museum that would make A A Gill vomit all over the windy cobbled lanes.  Me, on the other hand, I love a bit of quaint, bunting-clad Englishness.  On our recent trip we ambled along said lanes, wandered through a myriad of shops selling local art work and T-shirts for children costing £65, rented a boat and drank coffee in any number of the smart coffee houses catering for Londoners and their Boden-wearing offspring.  It really is very picturesque and I, for one, can only thank the Londoners.  All the houses look pristine, with their Farrow and Ball-painted front doors and understated slate signs.

            Anyway, you get the picture?  So, after a day of cheerfully dreaming of owning a second home or a boat (I was for the property, my husband wanted the boat), the family needed feeding.  My husband would have happily strayed away from the harbour and the Esplanade in favour of some small, un-showy, ‘local’ establishment of which he could convince himself he had precipitated some kind of discovery.  I, however, tended towards location, location, location and atmosphere.  So, where else to try and get a table but The Boat House on the harbour, with its outdoor tables full of laughing, white-wine swigging Londoners threatening to overspill beyond the outdoor heaters with their ostentatious jets of fire on display.  Gosh, those heaters were needed.  Wearing two jumpers and a jacket I decided that I still could not contemplate spending the evening outside.  So, I went to enquire as to whether we could book a table for the evening.  I was told that they did not take bookings but so long as we turned up before 6pm we should be able to get a table, afterwards we would probably have a 15 minute wait but no longer than that.  This is quite a popular arrangement these days; I imagine Jamie Oliver is to blame.  Well, popular with places that can rely on the fact that they are popular.  To me, this seemed to say, ‘hey, we are a laid-back, informal sort of a place; no need to book here’.  So I thought that we would be safe to bring our rowdy rabble inside, but more of this later.

            We duly returned at about five-thirty and were seated by the window, so that we could see the boats and the water but also in front of a sort of inset gas fire that was designed to look a bit like a pizza oven.  Warmth and a view; perfect!  I ordered a very reasonably priced bottle of French Grenache from the not-very extensive wine list.  It was beautifully chilled and very drinkable.  To start, we ordered a selection of nibbles.  The Calamari was a bit of a disappointment.  For £7 you might expect more than 5 rings of squid.  Squid which was chewier than it should have been.  The dough balls were hard like balls of pastry and did nothing to absorb the garlic oil that ran off them.  The Mozzarella and Tomato salad contained beautifully ripe tomatoes; a simple thing but so many restaurants serve tasteless, mushy tomatoes that look like they’ve been sitting around in cellophane for too long.  The mozzarella, however, had come straight out of a packet and cut in perfectly cylindrical rounds.  It was too firm to be considered fresh but perhaps that is expecting too much.  The basil pesto was applied in a stingy fashion.  I see why they do not give this simple dish its Italian name on the menu because then there would be some sort of precept for it to live up to.

            Despite our specifying that the children’s meals should come at the same time as our main courses, the children’s meals arrived on the table shortly after the starters were put down.  And herein lies the problem with a no-booking policy.  The families queued up at the door of The Boat House, each being told that a table would be available within 15 minutes and so they stood, looking forlornly in at the flames of the pizza oven thingy, zipping up their brightly patterned rain coats and telling their children, ‘not long to wait now.’  Everyone inside feels a slight sense of unease and the waiting staff are obviously briefed to get tables cleared and ready for the next party as quickly as possible.

            But back to the children’s food.  They all ordered the children’s Margarita pizzas.  The children’s menu was reasonably priced and the pizzas were exceptionally good.  They came in the shape of fish (a nice touch) and they filled the dinner plates.  For the purposes of research for this blog I sampled a fair bit of this pizza and can confirm that it was light and cheesy and exactly as pizza should be.  As the children were finishing off, my husband’s and my main courses arrived.

            He had ordered the Carbonara.  The sauce looked stodgy rather than silky but he seemed quite happy with it.  I did not try the Carbonara because I was too pre-occupied with my own food.  I ordered the Muscles Provencale and what the calamari lacked in content, the muscles certainly made up for.  I had a mountain to climb and I was game for the challenge.  The Provencale sauce was exceedingly tasty; it had been cooked long enough for the acidity to have left the tomatoes and for it to have thickened to a beautiful soup.  It was rich and smoky and the addition of preserved artichoke gave it a lovely saltiness.  This was probably increased by the addition of chorizo but, being a pescatarian of limited conviction I picked these bits out and tossed them onto my husband’s Carbonara which he confirmed was a welcome addition.  Readers, I ate them all.  I could hardly move afterwards for all the shellfish swimming around in my stomach.  All conversation had ceased for about thirty minutes whilst I undertook the task in hand.  As I came to, I realised that the disadvantage of a Provencale sauce as opposed to the typical Mariniere is that you get very mucky in the process of consumption.  My fingers made me look a bit like someone who’d committed murder but it was worth it.

            So there we are, stuffed and happy but the waiting staff were upon us instantly.  On the whole they were a gaggle of girls home for the holidays from their posh schools where they had evidently been honing the art of looking very bored at all times.  I know that they were not bonafide locals because they did not have the accent of pirates but then, very few of the inhabitants of Fowey are bonafide locals.  Anyway, did we want pudding?  Well, not really but we had some time to kill before our taxi, the only taxi in Cornwall on all accounts, arrived to collect us.  So, after perusing the usual selection of pre-prepared, gateaux-type sweets, one daughter ordered the cheese cake and the other ordered a scoop of vanilla ice-cream with a chocolate chip cookie.  My son, by this point, had fallen asleep.  I think this happened at some point during my ascent of the Moules Mountain but it’s hard to say.  The pudding arrived before we’d blinked.  The cookie turned out to be half a cookie; quite literally a modest sized cookie cut in half.  There is never any need to cut a cookie in half!  If I wasn’t so full of shell fish I may have said something.  The cheesecake, however, was of generous proportions.  It was served with a scoop of Cornish, clotted cream.  Cheese cake and cream?  It happens a lot and I could probably spread clotted cream on almost anything but really, it’s not a match made in culinary heaven, is it?  But still, my daughter was happy enough and proceeded with caution as her fish-shaped pizza was still in transit.  At one point she left to go to the loo and before you could say Daphne Du Maurier the efficient and officious matron of a waitress who clearly ran the show, had cleared away the plate.  Out of perversity, I demanded that the unfinished pudding be returned which of course was too late and so a half a piece of cheese cake was cut and placed in front of my daughter on her return from the lavatory.  Therefore, she sat down to a bigger portion than she had left behind which she found rather daunting and couldn’t finish.  I stepped in and polished off the last of it which was very good; there was just enough sourness of the cream cheese evident beneath all the sugar and cream.

            My husband ordered a sneaky g & t at the end just so that we could indulge in a little power-crazed snigger at all the people queuing up for our table for a bit longer.  It was a delightful evening and none of the imperfections was significant enough for us to withhold a tip.

Macbeth, RSC 2011

Macbeth

Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon, 25^th August 2011

Today I took my ten year-old daughter to see her first performance of Macbeth.  She did not know the play and so I was eager to see her enjoyment (or otherwise) of the bloody plot as it enfolded.  It is hard to remember a time when I did not know the story of Macbeth and so I can only imagine the excitement and horror that must be elicited for an uninformed viewer.   We had excellent seats in the stalls where the actors felt close enough to touch.  Being a matinee, the audience seemed unusually alert.

As the performance begins, artificial light pours through the shattered windows of a ruined church.  This lighting effect was very satisfying as the impression of natural light was so convincing.  The setting of the purged church grounded the play nicely in its Jacobite origins.  After a hastily consumed, strong coffee shortly before the show I was somewhat jittery as the performance began.  Much talk has been given over to the three witches being played by children and so I was eager to see whether or not this reworking of the text was successfully spooky.  And lo, the sight of the three children hanging someway above the stage, corpse-like, as if swaying on the gallows was truly disturbing and I felt my caffeine-induced edginess increasing to something like nausea at this vision.  They are lowered to the stage and each unhooks the other from their ropes/nooses.  The children do this with a ghoulish look of knowing on their faces which has a Jamesian Turn of the Screw malice about it.  However, all this is shattered when the children utter their first lines.  Suddenly they are just children, with children’s sweetly high-pitched voices and their menace is reduced to nothing.  Even the echo that is added to their lines did nothing to dispel their quaintness.  The three excellent cellists, perched high up in front of the shattered windows were the only witchy reminder of ‘double, double toil and trouble.’

And enter Macbeth.  Unfortunately, Jonathan Slinger has an underwhelming stage presence and is a goosy looking man.  I found it hard to believe in his glory initially.  He is eclipsed by the physically huge and powerful presence of Banquo (Steve Toussaint) and I found myself imagining the two men exchanging their roles to greater effect.  It seems crucial to me that we, the audience, travel on a journey with Macbeth.  Pride comes before a fall, of course, and we must believe in Macbeth’s glory; we must feel his pride or we cannot fully abhor what he becomes.  But Jonathan Slinger has the voice projection and delivery of an old pro and Michael Boyd has made him into Macbeth, by hook or by crook, because he is an artless performer.  Indeed, his soliloquy of ‘To-morrow, and to-morrow’, delivered from the top of a ladder stretching into nowhere, is probably the best that I have heard.  This is where his talents lie.  Unfortunately, when he has to share the stage with his Lady Macbeth (Aislin McGuckin) he is once more eclipsed, this time by her cold and consummate performance.  Of course she dominates her husband but it is not necessary for her to appear so much the dominatrix both physically and mentally.  In the first scenes of them together Slinger is like a soppy dog to her Elizabeth I.  It was hard to imagine any chemistry between them and this was a shame as sexual greed goes hand-in-hand with the hunger for power.  My daughter said that she did not like Lady Macbeth, which, I suppose, is as it should be.

There were some nice touches elsewhere in the play.  Before the interval, the banquet scene takes place.  During which, the ghost of Banquo attacks Macbeth and brutally stabs him, leaving him covered in blood.  My daughter and I then went off to find the lavatories. This was no mean feat as the signs seem to send one round in an eternal loop.  However, we were soon alerted to the large queue for the Ladies stretching out almost to the Bancroft Gardens.  There was just time for us to grab some drinks and return to our seats for the second half.  For a play that deals with false meaning and equivocation the previous, liberal imagining of the text is replayed after the interval but without the figure of Banquo present.  We, therefore, get to see the madness of Macbeth as the other characters do.  As he doubles up to take the imagined blows from Banquo’s dagger, the audience laughs and for a moment the play has descended into farce and pantomime.  A welcome addition as far as my daughter was concerned.

Because ‘blood will have blood’ and perhaps because the ‘witches’ take up so much less time than the play dictates, other gory scenes are exaggerated to startling effect.  After Duncan’s murder, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth appear in white night dresses.  The blood is startling on Macbeth’s hands and clothing and we cannot help but anticipate his contaminating the white of Lady Macbeth’s garment.  Indeed, these characters wear white often in the play after they have committed their crimes, to aid the metaphor of disguise; the ones in white are not the virtuous ones.  The murder of Macduff’s children is played out on stage and there is not just one son but two sons and a daughter.  They are the same children who play the witches which gives the play a sort of cyclical and fatalistic intuition.  One has his throat slit, one has his neck broken which again brought to my mind The Turn of the Screw (but perhaps that was just me) and the daughter is sinisterly led off stage by one of the murderers whilst lady Macduff dies onstage as well. 

Jamie Beamish plays a crazed amalgamation of the porter and Seyton to great effect.  As he gives his speech about attending to the gates of hell the character lets off some bangers designed to appear like dynamite.  This caused us all to jump out of our skins; a few of the older members of the audience had strokes.  This allusion enhanced the image of the burning inferno but after the small explosions the theatre filled with the smoky smell of fireworks.  This in turn brought to mind the gunpowder plot which was apt and gave me a little smile at such trickery.

The play ends with the bloodied, victorious figure of Malcom standing amongst his followers.  Just as the RSC sends you in a circle to find their lavatories so too did the play end in a cyclical fashion.  Malcolm stands, as he did in the opening scene of the play, bloodied and surrounded by his supporters.  Only now he is King of Scotland rather than the King’s son.  Order is restored.  This seemed to be very satisfying to the audience whose applause were enthusiastic.  My daughter and I agreed that we had been heartily entertained.  I do not think that the children as witches delivered all that it should but I would not wish to criticise these innovative efforts.  I will just look forward to my next viewing of Macbeth complete with warty, cackling harridans.