St Merryn, Fish & Seafood Restaurant Guide

This casual venue – one of five outlets the TV chef and his family run in their adopted home town – is “not your typical café”: “prices are reasonable and the dishes spot-on”. The all-day menu runs from breakfast staples through to a lively mix of bistro and Asian dishes alongside seafood and steak sarnies.

Rich & Katie Toogood’s Cornish offshoot – a tiny spot near the harbour – generates much less feedback than their Highbury Corner original in London, but the ratings for its small plates of local seafood remain high. They also run a seasonal pop-up called Barnaby’s on similar lines, at Trevibban Mill Vineyard a short drive from Padstow.

“Continues to impress after 25 years or more since our first visit” – the Stein family’s harbourside HQ continues to deliver the goods for the very many people who report on it in our annual diners’ poll. Opened in 1975, it is nowadays run primarily by Rick’s ex-wife Jill and her sons, and achieves the hard task of living up to the world fame of TV chef Rick (who nowadays spends a good chunk of his year living down under in Aus’). If you were to quibble, you would say the food is “lovely but not brilliant” or that it’s “not cheap by any means”, but to an impressive extent serious disappointments are completely absent in feedback this year: “you get the excellent seafood that you would expect with a good mix mix of interesting dishes alongside more plainly cooked options that allow you to fully appreciate the quality of the fish”. “Well worth the trip to Cornwall: the freshest seafood served with care and love!”