Hidden Hut Cornwall: ‘It’s impossible not to adore the place’. Photograph: Ben Mostyn/The Guardian

The Hidden Hut, Porthcurnick – Reassuring, raffish and very British – restaurant review

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A seaside shack on the south Cornish coast cooking homestyle food served with love – and a large helping of nostalgia

The Hidden Hut is a Cornish beach shack on a National Trust coastal path on the Roseland Peninsula. It sells cakes and tea and hearty lunches. It sells Cornish steak pasties, clotted cream ice-cream and fragments of bygone, possibly misremembered British summers. An era where, for a lot of us, abroad seemed very far away, and a summer holiday meant one week in a static caravan in Filey and sleeping on a pull-out hammock dangling over a chip pan.

For me, the Hidden Hut reminds me of Dent days out circa 1983, driving in an Austin Maxi to a beachside tea hut in Kirkcudbrightshire with my grandmother and her Jimmy Shand and His Band cassette. A 200-mile round trip in order to eat pork luncheon meat and Stork on Mother’s Pride medium-sliced. It was a time when SPF was only for the precious and sun-stroke a small badge of honour. Everyone will get a different Proustian bombardment from a visit to the Hidden Hut, which is lovely, although it is memories like this that helped win Brexit.

The Hidden Hut’s smoked haddock, crab and bacon chowder. Photograph: Ben Mostyn/The Guardian

This much-loved Cornish dining spot, I must underline, would never stoop to serving luncheon meat sandwiches, melted Wagon Wheels, teeth-staining blue Slush Puppies or any other crap things from bygone high days. No, this is British summer filtered through a Jamie and Jimmy’s Friday Night Big Lads’ Beezer-type lens. The food is recognisable and reassuring, but with dashes of pizazz and minor weirdness for the tourists and trendies.

On the day I stopped by, there was a chipotle beef chilli – all good so far – but with added feta and served with herb-speckled bulgur wheat. This culinary brouhaha flies in Stoke Newington, but in Porthcurnick it is positively raffish, and I love them for it.

The smoked haddock and mussel chowder was served with local samphire and oven-fresh focaccia. It could have done with being warmer, but I was eating it outdoors in a gale. The soup of the day was watercress and gorgonzola, which sounds like something Roald Dahl would have The Twits choose.

Fresh from the Hidden Hut’s in-house oven there was a brioche bread pudding, a salted-caramel flapjack, a gluten-free orange and lemon slice, plus – my choice – a very, very good, moist vegan banana bread. The Hidden Hut’s gluten- and dairy-free stuff is acquired from a specialist kitchen called, wonderfully, The Exploding Bakery, but this is largely a family team who stand smiling at the window of a kiosk and serve things they are pulling more or less straight from their hearts.

It is impossible not to adore the place. There’s a reason the Hidden Hut’s much-talked-about “feast nights” – where locals bring their own plates, cutlery and booze to settle in for a night of dining and joy – sell out in mere minutes. “Dress for the weather! We go ahead whatever the forecast says,” the website warns, which I find joyful. Because what is Britain without people stoicly eating mackerel in sideways drizzle?

Yet on an everyday Hidden Hut lunchtime, one can grab a carton of very lightly fragranced lentil and cauliflower dal, a slab of salted caramel shortbread and a bottle of Luscombe Organic’s Sicilian lemonade and head to the sharing tables overlooking the dreamy, uncluttered cove. Or one can retreat down to the beach, or even gravitate farther up the hill and perch on the grass.

Chickpea coconut dal, pickled red onion, cashews and coriander at the Hidden Hut, Porthcurnick. Photograph: Ben Mostyn/The Guardian

I lunched with many, many sixtysomething couples on touring or walking holidays. They were those types who, after many, many years of partnership, would much rather eat silently, and some were communicating only via their dogs, which seems to me a perfect set-up. “Hercules likes it here!” one woman said on behalf of a rotund golden retriever. “Hercules would like us to stay for another tea!”

I adore this type of day out now, sweating slightly in a foldaway cagoule and Caudalie Soin Solaire SPF 50 while perusing a National Trust brochure. Back in the 1980s, however, I would have been tantrumming at my mother for the car keys so I could go and listen to Dave Lee Travis.

I wish I could have my grandmother back for just one day to take her to the Hidden Hut. We would listen to the Bluebell Polka on the way and, most of all, I’d enjoy her unbridled spite over the concept of gluten-free vegan banana loaf. The past is another country. They eat cakes differently there.

The Hidden Hut Porthcurnick Beach, near Portscatho and St Mawes, Cornwall; no phone. Open lunch only, all week, noon-3pm; no bookings (closes for winter 28 October). About £18 a head for three courses, plus drinks and service.

Food 7/10
Atmosphere 8/10
Service 8/10