Gurnard's Head: restaurant review

A restaurant at one of Britain's furthest compass points without a sense of place? Sounds like it may be lost…
gurnard's head cornwall
"What impact does splendid isolation have on the food offering at this old pub – a low-slung, brooding place which makes a gentle virtue of never having had the decorators in?": Jay Rayner on the Gurnard's Head in Cornwall. Photograph: Jim Wileman for the Observer

Near Zennor, Cornwall (01736 796 928). Meal for two, including wine and service: £90

The Gurnard's Head lies to the west of, well, pretty much everything, including Penzance. There may be other places for dinner beyond it, but not bloody many. After that it's all cliff, then surf followed by the raging sea until you get to the spot where the water tumbles over the backs of the giant turtles that hold up the globe. Look it up on a map. It says: "Here be dragons." I make a point of reviewing based not on how far I've travelled, but whether others living nearby would feel the journey worthwhile. Based on population density, there really aren't that many people nearby. To say the Gurnard's Head is a little out of the way is like saying I'm quite partial to pig. We are armpit deep in understatement.

What impact does that splendid isolation have on the food offering at this old pub – a low-slung, brooding place which makes a gentle virtue of never having had the decorators in? The honest answer is not very much. In the days following my meal there I tried to work out what, if anything, linked the food to its locale. Where, on the menu, was a sense of place? Sure there was some fish, but there's always fish. You can't get away without a little fish, so that people who don't really like food have something to order, even if you can't smell the sea from the front door. Otherwise it was a collection of marquee-name proteins – here some chicken, there some lamb – with a few shiny accessories: pear kimchi, smoked apple, soufflé potatoes… that sort of thing.

Choosing not to be one of those places that feverishly represents its locale may not be a negative per se, as long as the food makes an argument for itself. The cooking at the Gurnard's Head doesn't – not quite. It's not actively bad in any way. There are some strange ideas here and there, but for the most part the technical stuff is all in place. A small fillet of red mullet for £7.25 is crisp-skinned but comes sprinkled with bits of clementine, beetroot and those soufflé potatoes. They are thumbnail-sized and less garnish than just loitering as if waiting for a more appropriate dish to come along. Granted, they are fiendishly difficult to make. Soufflé potatoes were the sort of thing you once found at the old Connaught Hotel under Michel Bourdin when he had a brigade of 70 and could put a team of six on those and those alone. But they do need scale to make them worth the effort. Kimchi – normally fermented pickled cabbage – is here made from pears and is mildly diverting, though no better as an accompaniment to confit pork belly than, say, actual kimchi. The dish is un-sauced and curiously dry.

soused red mullet gurnard
The soused red mullet. Photograph: Jim Wileman for the Observer

It's a recurring theme. There's not enough shellfish sauce to lend interest to a startlingly dull piece of steamed skate, taken off the cartilage so it rolls up to look like a banana. When the thrills in a skate dish lie with a caramelised potato and celeriac terrine, you know something's up. Lamb shoulder is slow braised to a deep stickiness and partnered with a pumpkin purée rather than the lake of jus it needs. Best of the lot is a chicken breast with Savoy cabbage, pancetta and chestnuts.

Vegetarian options sound interesting, but don't get much beyond that. There's a pillow of breadcrumbed goat's cheese with Jerusalem artichokes, smoked apple and hazelnuts; the main is more pumpkin purée with pickled globe artichokes and white beans. They emerge on the plate as big, unfocused piles of salty things.

Desserts make more of an impact: some pressed apple, a good chocolate torte, a tonka-bean parfait which doesn't taste too much of potpourri, as tonka bean can. Later I was told by a local that the Gurnard's Head does smashing Sunday lunches. I can well imagine that, stripped of the apparent need to be self-consciously on trend, they really do.

This pub is sister to the Fellin Fach Griffin near Hay-on-Wye, and one of the reasons I wanted to review its sibling was that the food there leapt far beyond expectations. It presented itself as very much back to basics and was anything but. Here it's the other way round. It feels, at the moment, like an opportunity missed.

Email Jay at Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1