I hope you love our autumn collection as much as we do - We did

 

Chris McClurg seen serving some of his exquisite food in the photo above, says in the Autumn Collection Menu at Paul Ainsworth at No6: 

We absolutely love what the autumn larder in Cornwall has to offer. our wild mushrooms and stunning day boat fish are at their very best and the sight of the first pumpkins always creates such a buzz in the kitchen. I hope you love our autumn collection as much as we do?

Well the answer turns out that we really do love this amazing autumn collection of delicious and delightful food.

Our table with the kitchen beyond

We last eat at No6 (before Paul Ainsworth was famous enough to put his name in the restaurant title) 14 years ago and really loved what the chef, who with friends had been opened the restaurant a few months earlier, was doing with his food. It was wonderful to return and see how prosperous the place now looks, extended and refurbished, and running like a well oiled [note to co-pilot: oiled as in unctious!] machine.   

Our first taster was called: a taste of Porthilly. It was a delicious beef tartare, Porthilly oyster [Co-pilot's note: I've said it before and I'll say it again, they are snot in a shell, but tasty ones], caviar with a seafood dashi all served in a oyster shell. The first tingling session of flavours as we began to eat this morsel of deliciousness was enough to let us know we were in for a real treat at this meal. The texture of the soft beef and the slightly firm oyster washing in the multiple flavours of sharp and sweet in the dashi are really hard to describe - Yummy is the best word.

For what was technically our first course Drew had Crapaudine beetroot, pomme anna and platinum oscietra caviar (n25). This rich earthy sweet heritage beetroot was served on top of amazing potatoes cooked in layers with garlic and salty notes and with number 25 caviar (fish eggs) on top. Drew, who made us stop going to a lovely restaurant in Spain due to their excessive use of fish eggs is more tolerant of them when used tastfully and with a flavour purpose as they were here. The whole was topped by microherbs and microflowers.

I have the Scallop (raw and warm), dehesa de solana and pumpkin brodo. The top photo shows the main part of the dish, a lovely large juicy scallop just gently charred on one side giving its full flavour and served in a zingy and earthy pumpkin broth. The scallop was so well cooked you could taste the sea in it, the broth was so delicious that I wondered if it would be rude to ask for a bigger bowl of it and a chunk of sourdough and I could sit comfortable with its autumnal warmth for the rest of the day.

The second form of scallop, served on a side dish was a crunchy tartlet case with the raw scallop cut finel within and served ceviche, with tiny cubes of vegetable giving a crunch to balance the soft scallop and a range of tasty micro herbs and flowers which weren't just there for decoration, but because each flavour added to the whole. 

The next in-between course treat was called simply Today's Scone. This was a 5 year old Davidson cheese scone made with buttermilk from the restaurant's own butter production. It was warm, soft and crumbly. Savoury scones would be all the rage if they all tasted as spectacular as this.

The scone was served with a round of the Butter made upstairs in the development kitchen from cream bought direct from farm. The butter knife was great for spreading, but wouldn't do much good if you fancied stabbing someone. 😉

As you may have noticed above, the scone was served on a small map of Cornwall indicating where so many of the amazing ingredients for the menu were sourced.

For the next course (second or fourth depending on how you are counting)

Drew chose Kelp cured Cod with seaweed quavers and a camel valley wine velouté. The cod cooked in kelp was soft and just cooked, there were more fish eggs which were soft and crunchy. The velouté crafted from the local wine from the Camel Valley Vineyard, just a few miles up the river formed a delicious rich undertone which was soft and tasty and worked well with both the fish and the crunchy quavers which were lightly sprinkled in tasty seaweed powder. The plate itself, and the food on it, looked like works of art.

I had chosen Birds’ liver (le landes), carrot ketchup and smoked eel. This dish not only wins the prize as the most photogenic of the day or indeed week, but also was the most tasty. The duck's liver was rich and juicy, pan-fried very lightly, but enough to make it firm and topped with tiny squares of eel [Co-pilot's note: It was eely, eely good], artichoke, mushroom and croutons. When I saw tiny squares I mean that they were micro. I don't know how many hours it would take someone to craft such tiny pieces in such regular formations. Either they have imported some cooking imps from Discworld or they have a very patient and careful chef who does this form early morning onwards! The carrot ketchup served on the side was another revelation. It was smooth and carrot sweet which was delightful. I don't mean it was sweet like sugar is, rather it had the natural sweetness of carrot brought out to perfection. It was a lovely complement to the gamey tang of the liver.

The menu says the next course (third or fifth) is served in part 1 and part 2, and indeed they are served at different times. Drew's choice was Eye of the Rib, which was tallow aged beef, aged for 55 days served with both a bordelaise and bearnaise sauce and tiny sauteed potatoes. The food looked so amazing that we had started to eat before we remembered to take a photo, hence there is evidence of a piece of beef missing on Drew's plate. Drew's beef was perfectly cooked, both sauces were tangy and moreish, the potatoes were cooked to perfection (I skipped the garlic clove).

The hand sanitiser is only in the photo of the potatoes and bearnaise sauce as it wasn't possible to edit it out without removing the sauce (we don't have photoshop!). But it reminds me that it was very sweet smelling sanitiser and we made good use of it on arrival and pre-departure. 

My 'main' was a piece of turbot (again we were a bit late with the photo, so you will see signs of eating haven taken place). The turbot was day boat caught in Cornish waters served on a bed of kombu steamed leeks The turbot was cooked to perfection and flaked wonderfully on the fork. The strong flavour of turbot always reminds me of Padstow as it was here that I first tasted it 14 years ago. The leeks were an amazing flavour, Kombu is something I'd only come across in 2020 when doing a FutureLearn course during lockdown which compared the effectiveness of the Mediterranean and Okinawan diets. In particular the focus on the health giving properties of seaweed and other algies like kombu in Okinawan cuisine. Being from Swansea, where we have the best laver in the world, I didn't need to be converted to the delight of seaweed, but its flavour through the crunchy, onioney, leeks was a revelation. A combination I would not have thought of, but will try again. It complemented the rich fish well.

You'll remember that I mentioned that the 'mains' came in two parts. While we continued to consume our part one, part two arrived. In this case our waiter was none other than the Head Chef, Chris. It was really nice to see the chef, who spent most of his time at the pass checking food before it left the kitchen, come to interact with the guests in the restaurant. It was clear there was a rota as he brought different dishes to different diners throughout our time in the restaurant. Mains part 2 was our slot. 

The second half of Drew's beef treat was a buckwheat pancake served with sesame seed flavoured beef with pickled mushrooms, shallots and microherbs, it was perfect, all the flavour had been concentrated down, so they were really, really strong, but when eaten with the pancake they were blended down and integrated with each other - a tasty bit of dinner. 

My second half, which chef took care to describe with as much enthusiasm as I had in eating it was a tarlet let made with ground crab shell being used like flour, small shrimps, sea herbs and crab claw meat picked and served with tiny drops of sharp lemon mayonnaise. Here I am again almost crying with the excitement of delicious tastes dancing on my tongue. Amazing.

The next, in-between course treat (yes this would be seventh if we were counting the 'treats' as well as the mains), was called  Yesterday’s Scone. An odd name one might think, except, as Chef Chris again explained, this was yesterday's scone turned into a crumb and mixed with homemade buttermilk (from the butter making process as mentioned earlier) whipped with a little Cornish clotted cream (because we have too as we are in Cornwall according to Chef!!) with raisins and a light caramel sauce. How can something so simple taste so fantastic - I guess this is the miracle we pay for when we come to nice restaurants, simple ingredients magiced into astounding delights. 

Drew's dessert was Chocolate (Tulakalum 75% Grand Cru) formed into a ‘vol au vent’ with different layers of tastyness and a cep caramel ice cream on the side.

I ordered what was called Cheese – Stichelton and ‘apple pie’. Being a lover of the Welbeck estate Stichelton I took a chance that the rich cheese with stilton like flavours would be enough to overpower whatever sweetness was in the rest of the dessert. It wasn't. The tart case, filled with sweet apple butter and topped by an amazingly constructed soft caramelized apple was way to sweet for me. So I eat the cheese and Drew 'helped out' with the sweet elements. 

We had an espresso each to finish our meal, but we weren't over yet. The little boxes, served with the coffee, were 

Three little tasty filled chocolate bombs, well I say three but Drew had all six. The wrapper had the lovely message:

and the pastry chef had added her own message inside

A friendly and touching end to the meal. As the final picture shows, Drew was very content with the whole experience and so was I.