Friday in Dartmouth

Posted on 2011/12/30 10:30:59 (December 2011).

[Friday 23rd December 2011]
The day before Christmas Eve, a bit of a non-descript sort of day, which we mostly spent pottering about in Dartmouth.

I made some potato and leek soup for lunch, which seemed to go down rather well, and was impressed that our holiday let had a blender, which we took advantage of. I usually tend to make chunky hearty sorts of soups, but Vera prefers it to be blended. I guess at 92 that's not unreasonable.

Went for a stroll into town with Vera in the afternoon, but other than that the daytime was pretty uneventful really.

In the evening Robin and Robert had booked for us to go to a brasserie, which we'd been to on a previous visit to Dartmouth, and I'd not really liked the first time either. Anything that alludes to French cuisine is likely to be a disappointing experience for me - they are of course as a nation stalwartly opposed to vegetarianism, and therefore as far as I'm concerned are effectively incapable of cooking. This set an unfortunate precedent of food related difficulties that hung over the whole week. Dartmouth seems to be filled with restaurants which offer a vision of what eating out in Britain was like in the 1980s, in the period of history when regrettably we were looking to France for culinary inspiration, before we discovered pretty much everywhere else in the world had much better cuisines, and that we actually had some pretty good food of our own. I never have to resort to dining in a "brasserie" or "bistro" in London, probably such places exist, but I'm barely aware of them. Sadly though Dartmouth, probably because of its largely upper middle class and upper middle aged demographic, seems to have clung on to these tired culinary relics.

I was amazed to discover there isn't actually a proper Italian restaurant in Dartmouth, there were one or two places which had a couple of "Italian inspired dishes" on the menu, but that was it. Where was the Spanish food? The Lebanese (Phoenician sailors were believed to have traded with the Cornish)...? Perhaps Korean or Japanese were a little too much to ask for in a town this size, but I didn't even find somewhere serving Devon classics like Homity pie. Everywhere I looked it was bloody brasseries and bistros.

Anyway, to make up for my frustration at Darmouth's culinary backwardness after dinner I ventured to the Cherub Inn, very much the town's saving grace. Therein I had a pint of Cherub Bitter, specially brewed for them by Otter, which is very pleasant indeed.

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