TRAVELANDLEISUREASIA.COM / MAY 2017 111
culinary talent. Nathan Outlaw, who originally
came to cook in one of Stein’s restaurants, now
has five of his own—two in Port Isaac, one in
Rock and two outside of Cornwall—and they
have four Michelin stars among them. He never
expected inspiration from the place or its
people. When I asked what rejuvenates him, he
thought for a moment. “Callum, one of my
fishermen, who does all the crabs and lobsters,”
he said. “From the restaurant, I can watch him
get his pots, day in and day out, rough
weather—whatever. That’s an inspiration.”
The more recent cohort of non-native
entrepreneurs includes Tarquin Leadbetter,
proprietor of the five-year-old Southwestern
Distillery. Reared in neighboring Devon, he
spent several years in London before settling
here. “I wa nted to quit my desk job, go sur fi ng
in the morning and make gin in the afternoon,”
he said.
Leadbetter now lives that dream on
Constantine Bay Beach, a crescent of golden
sand. Though Tarquin’s Gin and Tarquin’s
Pastis have quickly accumulated prizes since
their 2012 debut, nothing else happens fast at
the distillery. Everything is made in small
batches, mostly in a still named Tamara, after
the river Tamar, which neatly divides Devon
and Cornwall. Tamara is made of hand-
hammered copper, a nod to Cornwall’s history;
in the early 19th century, the county was by far
the world’s leading producer of the metal. For
his gin, Leadbetter grows violets in his garden.
For his pastis, he forages for wild gorse flowers,
which lend the liqueur an unexpected hint of
coconut. Both are made with naturally sweet
Cornish water. “We’re the first bit of land that
the rain clouds hit after the Atlantic,” he
explained. “It’s the freshest water to fall on
England, having traveled for thousands of
miles across the ocean.”
Leadbetter admits his water talk may be
overwrought, but it does speak to Cornish
patience. “You know how the Spanish always
say ‘mañana’—tomorrow? Here, it’s ‘dreckly,’ ”
which can mean “soon” or “eventually, but
I can’t tell you when.”
Such patience can be misinterpreted. People
elsewhere in Britain often condescend to the
Cornish. “They think down here everyone
walks around with a bit of straw in our
mouths,” said Saul Astrinsky, a native
Cornishman who owns the Wild Harbour Fish
Co. with his wife, Abi. “They think we’re all
thick and should learn from people up the line.”
Astrinsky’s six-year-old company sells
seafood to some of London’s top restaurants. All
of his fish are caught by rod, handline or
inshore trawls and pots, the most sustainablemethods, and he pays his small-boat suppliers
premium prices. “There are lads who pick
winkles off the rocks for us, and we’re now
doing mussels, lobsters, crabs,” he told me.
Astrinsky sees conservation of Cornwall’s
natural balance as a key metric of success:
“We’ve got to be ca ref u l not to r uin t his.”
His landlubbing counterpart might be
master butcher Philip Warren, whose
namesake butchery has been carving up cows
from Bodmin Moor since the 1880s. This is
Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall. Though often
stereotyped as bleak and moody, the moor is a
vibrant ecosystem of granite and peat, hill and
marsh. Over the millennia, moor and cattle
have become symbiotic. The grasses growing in
t he moor’s acidic soi l tend towa rd sour ness,
which is tempered by the slightly salty
rainwater that storms in from the sea. The
cattle that Warren’s suppliers raise are
accustomed to the idiosyncrasies of the soil and
the grasses. “The moor is a living, breathing
organism. It’s our best conserver of water. The
peat is like a sponge, and the best conserver of
carbon dioxide,” Warren said. “The cattle are
looking after the moor, and the moor is looking
after the cattle. If you didn’t have the cattle, in
five years, you couldn’t walk the moor
anymore. It would be overgrown with bracken.”
During the past decade, Warren and his
farmers have found new life by marketing their
meat to London chefs and Rick Stein. Business
has roughly doubled in that time, and he now
has a long waiting list of chefs. Warren lauds
consumers’ shifting preference for grass-fed
beef, which is typically richer in flavor. “We live
in an imperfect world. And we’re really quite
happy about it.”
Really, the entrepreneurship that Astrinsky
and Warren exemplify is just a new version of
an old story: neighbor caring for neighbor. “All
we want,” Warren said, “is for people to keep
making a living.”F
arming, Hellyar told me, “is hand-to-
mouth living” for most Cornish
families. The dairy farms that once
dotted the region are mostly gone,
including his family’s. The costs were too high,
revenues too low. Today, part of the Hellyar
land—set amid coastal countryside designated
by t he gover nment as a n A rea of Outsta nding
Natural Beauty—is a caravan park. Over eight
weeks each summer, the Hellyars reap four
times as much revenue from trailer fees as they
do annually from barley and lamb.
Hellyar, who also owns vineyards in France,
fantasizes about planting some grape vines. He
hasn’t figured out which varieties might workThe entrance
and library at
Coombeshead
Farm.