Favourite Places, Temple Restaurant

Bude, Cornwall

Leica M3, Summicron 35mm F2 FP4 (400)

At Temple (Bude, September ‘26)

I first came to Bude in the way that I generally come to places in Cornwall, which is to say by accident, on a road that appeared to have been designed by someone with a grudge against motorists and a private supply of free range hedges.

 Bude itself is one of those  agreeable British seaside towns that has somehow contrived to remain entirely itself — a canal that goes almost nowhere, a beach of heroic proportions, and a great many people in wetsuits walking around in that slightly punch drunk way of the recently immersed.

 It was into all this that I stumbled, damp and faintly resentful, in search of dinner, and found Temple on Granville Terrace, a few hundred yards up from Summerleaze in a building that gives no outward indication of harbouring anything more ambitious than a pot of tea. This, I have learned, is the standard British approach to excellence. You must never advertise it. Ideally you should conceal it behind a door that sticks.

 Inside, it is bright and unfussy and staffed by people who seem genuinely pleased that you have come, which after twenty miles of hedgerow is worth a star all by itself.

 The menu changes constantly and leans heavily on the astonishing fact — a fact the English mention roughly once a century, in passing — that Cornwall is surrounded by some of the finest fishing water in Europe and farmed by people who know exactly what they are doing. You are encouraged to order several small plates and share them, an arrangement I distrusted on principle, having once lost a scallop to a friend in circumstances that are still disputed, but which turns out to be exactly right here:

 ……nearly everything arrives tasting emphatically of itself, nothing has been fiddled with to justify the price, and the coffee is properly good, which in a seaside town is roughly as likely as finding a working umbrella. I left an hour and a half later in a state of mild euphoria, and stood for some time on the cliff above Summerleaze thinking about how thoroughly undeserving I was of any of it. Highly recommended, though it’s perhaps best if  you don’t all go at once………