Restaurant Review – The Cove

With the summer drawing to a close and its main attraction raised to the ground, you may wonder whether there’s any point in making the trip to Weston-super-Mare. Here’s a restaurant that might just help to change your mind.

It’s unlikely that you would plan a trip to Weston-super-Mare unless you had a blue rinse and a craving for battered cod and chips – that is until now.

The Cove has had a number of different lives – the Rozel Bandstand, a seasonal seaside café – all representations of a forgotten time before ipods and budget airlines. Recognising that the building occupies an idyllic spot overlooking Knightstone Island, owners Heath Hardy and Gemma Stacey have completely refurbished the space into a contemporary eaterie with the remit to provide great food all year round.

The décor is unfussy and tasteful – wooden floors, white pillars and unclothed tables, allowing the real focus to be drawn to the large French doors and expansive sea view (pictured left), which was as impressive on a bright October day as it would be in mid August.

The menu, as you might expect, leans towards seafood, offering dishes such as stuffed baby squid with chorizo and sun blushed tomatoes (£5.95) and line caught sea bass with Cornish crab tian and lemon and chive beurre blanc (£5.95) for starters.

For those of you who aren’t fish lovers, there’s still a good range of other dishes to choose from, and whilst I don’t fall into this category, I couldn’t resist choosing the guinea fowl terrine with roasted figs and walnuts (£5.95) to begin my meal. The terrine was chunky, rustic and moist, and although I requested accompanying bread through force of habit, the portion would have been sufficiently filling on its own.

Choosing a main course proved to be more difficult. I had seen the slow roasted belly of pork with apple mash , balsamic caramelised red onions and spiced jus (£12.95) sail past me onto the next table, but it’s smell alone gave me a pretty good indication of how delicious it would be, and so I felt compelled to order fish. I rewarded my diligence with a glass of Albarino 2007 Mar de Frades which is fantastic with seafood – it’s refreshing to see wines like this available by the glass.

I opted for the yellow fin tuna loin with a caper and shallot mayonnaise, baby gem and new potatoes (£11.95). Unlike measly supermarket offerings, the tuna resembled a sirloin steak in thickness and size. It was perhaps a little pinker than I would ordinarily cook it, but that’s just personal preference, and I was more than happy eating it given that it was so fresh – upon further enquiry I was informed that it had been delivered from Brixham that very morning. The buttery new potatoes were well seasoned and greedily dunked into the caper and shallot mayonnaise which provided the perfect zing to the fish.

Having grown up in a house where the savoury is King, desserts are often an afterthought for me – something to nibble on with coffee. To say that of my white chocolate and whiskey croissant bread and butter pudding (£5.50) would in no way do justice to its delicate and fluffy texture, to its large juicy currants, or indeed to the lashings of rich crème anglaise that I mopped it up with.

By following the simple formula of serving good food at a good price Heath Hardy and Gemma Stacey have been the first to put Weston on the foodie map, and with the regeneration of the Grand Pier just around the corner it won’t be long before others follow suit. The Cove is the first sign of an evolving coastal town, and a must for anyone who wants to dine beside the seaside in style.

The Cove
Birnbeck Road
Weston-super-Mare,
BS23 2BX

01934 418217
info@the-cove.co.uk
www.the-cove.co.uk

John Torode’s ‘Beef’

At the launch of his latest book John Torode’s Beef, I chewed the fat with past MasterChef presenter and owner of Smith’s of Smithfield.

Was your decision to write about beef in any way prompted by the return to more traditional British cooking?
The whole point of Beef is really trying to celebrate the greatness of Britain. The idea of the book is for people to understand a single great subject – beef seems to be one of those extraordinary ingredients that everybody is scared of. People are now happy to go and ask for a different type of apple but we are much less adventurous when it comes to the different cuts of beef. I wanted to demystify the subject a little bit and make it more exciting.

You have emphasised in the book that good food should be accessible to all – how did you try to achieve this when putting the book together?
Everybody should have the right to eat good food. What I’ve done with the book
is to take it from the really basic to the quite complicated, and from ingredients which are expensive such as fillet for beef Wellington down to cuts like shin which are really cheap and make the best curry.

You mentioned supermarkets sometimes use misleading labels when it comes to meat – would you always advocate using your local butcher instead?
Most of the beef that the UK consumes comes from a supermarket and I don’t have an issue with that. What I would say is that if you have the ability to find yourself a good butcher then do it because they’ll be great to talk about food with and will be able to give you a decent piece of beef. What I want is for the big boys to be transparent about what they’re doing and to say if a piece of meat has actually been matured for 14 days, or whether it’s been dry hung for 14 days because the two processes are completely different.
It took 10 years for the EU ban on British beef to be completely lifted –

do you think that confidence in British beef has been completely restored?
It certainly hasn’t been restored abroad and won’t be for some time. It needs people like us to champion it, to talk about the about the traditional breeds, to celebrate what’s great about British beef and not to think about the past.
The fact is that British beef now is such a well regulated industry that we should all be promoting it with confidence.

Beef has always been a staple of British cooking – will that continue to be the case as meat becomes an increasingly expensive commodity?
I’ve always considered beef to be expensive because I’ve only ever bought really high quality. People will continue to eat beef, but if I’ve got anything to do with it they will eat it in a more varied way. Right now we’re very much in a mince and roast society and I want people to move away from that and to start making dishes like Thai beef salad where you take a really small amount of beef, thinly slice it and mix it with lovely fresh ingredients – it doesn’t need to be expensive that way.

What is the most underrated cut of beef?
The shin. It’s a piece of muscle that’s delicious because it’s worked around the fields. It cooks down nice and slowly and tastes great regardless of the animal’s age.

If you could only eat one beef dish for the rest of your life, what would it be?
That’s not fair! It would have to be piece of sirloin steak because hot, cold, thick or thin you just can’t beat it.