Favourite Places, Outlaw’s Fish Kitchen

Port Isaac, Cornwall

Leica M3, Summicron 35mm F2 FP4 (400)

At Outlaws Fish Kitchen (Port Isaac, September ‘26)

Port Isaac is the sort of place that makes you understand why the English, given a choice between a sensible harbour and a picturesque one, will always choose the one where you have to descend a hill so steep that your knees file a formal complaint halfway down. I arrived on one of those rare Cornish days when the sun shines with such unaccustomed vigour that the locals regard it with mild suspicion, as if it might be trying to sell them something. The village was heaving with people who had come to stand outside the house from Doc Martin and photograph it with a reverence normally reserved for the Turin Shroud, and I edged past them, feeling rather superior, toward Outlaw's Fish Kitchen, a tiny whitewashed cottage so ancient and so low-ceilinged that I spent the first ten minutes moving about in the permanent half-crouch of a man searching for a dropped contact lens. I cracked my head on a beam only once, which I consider a personal best.

And then the food came, and I forgave Cornwall everything, including the hill. The idea is small plates of whatever the boats brought in that morning, and each one arrived looking so neat and so modest that I assumed I would need a sandwich afterward, which was the first of several things I got wrong. There was fish so fresh I half expected it to glance up and ask what I was looking at, and a sauce that made me go quiet in the way that people go quiet in cathedrals. Through the tiny window the harbour sparkled, gulls wheeled about looking for tourists to mug, and I sat there in the warm light, plate by plate, experiencing that rare and perfect feeling that absolutely nothing needed to be improved. Then I remembered I had to walk back up the hill, and the feeling passed.