The Boat House
Fowey, 27th 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.
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