Have you ever seen The Menu? Of course you’ve seen The Menu. Everyone who reads restaurant reviews has seen The Menu.
Still, to recap: Nicholas Hoult travels to an exclusive restaurant on an island with Anya Taylor-Joy (you know it’s high end, because they don’t seat solo diners), where a threateningly cuckoo Ralph Fiennes cooks a series of extraordinary dishes, while — spoiler alert — killing his diners in a series of extraordinary ways.
I have always found it a touch annoying. Not because the sociopathic chef is nowhere near sociopathic enough to survive in a real Michelin-starred kitchen — though this is true — but because it stole one of my favourite personal theories: that you can absolutely judge the calibre of a chef and of a restaurant by how well they do the basics.
Angry chef Fiennes spends a lot of time tweezering and emulsifying and fermenting, but true culinary joy only explodes when he makes Taylor-Joy a cheeseburger and fries. In the foundation stones of cooking, you see how much a restaurant really cares about food. There’s a reason every review of the Devonshire talks about its bread, why every review of Tollington’s mentions the chips, and why I once wrote a piece on Bavette in Horsforth that focused entirely on its bread, its chips, and the fact that when you ordered croquettes you got four, rather than the much-trickier-to-share three. Which I then had to bin as I read the same piece later that week in the Financial Times.
Simple can be basic, but elevating simplicity is where true wizardry lives. And so to Argoe.
Argoe is a small restaurant with a small charcoal grill, which sits by the harbour in Newlyn, a small fishing village just south of Penzance. To get to it, most people clamber over the wall at the end of car park. Argoe is what Brat, or Mountain would be, if you ripped them out of London and popped them down by the Atlantic, about as far into Cornwall as it’s possible to get.
And the other thing about Argoe? Argoe may be the best restaurant I’ve ever eaten in.
The menu changes daily, depending on what the Newyln fishmen bring in. But usually what’s served is effectively a citadel of grilled, whole fish, surrounded by little settlements of wonderful things that may be served on smaller plates, but which defy a small-plate categorisation because the portions are so generous, so healthy, so abundant that anywhere else, they’d happily be served up as mains. Food to share, with enough food on the plate to actually share. Madness.
You can see the influence of Mountain’s Tomos Parry in the fire, of course, but also in the starters — there’s a subtle Iberian influence in the salted almonds; and the olives; and the pan con tomate, a mountain of tomato, olive oil and garlic piled on top of small slices of bread, toasted to a char over coals.
Simplicity is the watchword: mussels with a bewitching garlic butter, deep-fried ray wing served with shards of lightly pickled cucumber, octopus so tender, it must have been cooked for a week before being finished off over fire… And then the monkfish. If tuna is the chicken of the sea, then monkfish is the Dexter prime beef; and this monkfish is cooked over fire, rested for twenty minutes, and then served with a sauce of olive oil, lemon and turbot stock that’s so rich, so unctuous, so utterly butterly that I really can’t believe it’s not butter — until I realise that it can’t be, because it’s better than that. Better than butter. Only at Argoe.
This is a magical place, a comforting place, an everything’s-going-to-be-ok kind of place. It’s the sort of place where, should you nip to the pass to chat to the chef, you’ll get invited into the kitchen to have a look at the grill, to see the still-wriggling lobsters. And then you’ll go back again with your kids, when the chef will show them how the sardines make the coals flare up because he (rightly) assumes that they’ll love that. And then when you leave, your little boy will ask you how you know the chef, and you’ll have to explain that you don’t know him, you’ve only just met him, but that you maybe love him a bit, and that that’s ok, because modern masculinity means sometimes loving a man who can do incredible things with monkfish, and sea bass, and scallops.
And oh, the scallops: served on the shell, as 2025 demands, but cooked like I’ve never seen them cooked before, done fiercely — aggressively — over the searing heat of the rosewood charcoal until the base is chewy, and almost candied. Somehow, though, they’re also delicate — soft, and pillowy and giving. Jesus, just go and try them.
Of course, it’s not perfect. They only serve natural wines, and I didn’t drink the natural wines, partly because I was driving, but mostly because natural wines taste like feet. The terrace is beautiful, but sometimes the wind whips up the sea, and sometimes, because this is Cornwall, the wind whips up the mizzle… But I’m nit-picking. And some people really like foot-wine.
I didn’t expect to find food like this in Newlyn. I didn’t expect to watch my kids’ eyes glazing over in fits of garlic-butter euphoria, the like of which I haven’t seen on my son Stan since he first tried John Dory under the watchful eyes of Henry Harris at Bouchon. I didn’t expect to find myself driving away working out just how many trips in a fortnight would be “too many” trips in a fortnight. But here we are.
Argoe is a simple place, defined by simple ingredients, a simple approach, and massive, heart-busting ambition: and I absolutely do expect to hear, down the line, that Angus and his thoughtful, attentive team have picked up a Michelin star. Because yes, the chips are great, and the bread is sublime, and this time, I got there before the FT.
Newlyn, TR18 5HW; argoenewlyn.co.uk
