Abbey Hotel

Recommended as one of the best Dog Hotels in Britain

Wow, this comes as a pleasant surprise. We’ve been recommended as one of the best Dog Hotels in Britain by Sawdays and have been featured in the Travel Section of Saturdays Times.

I was aware that something may be said as we had the excellent and supremely talented Jim Wileman come and take some photos on Tuesday of Fleur ( the elegant black poodle owned by the extremely generous Bassett’s who gave up their afternoon to help out).

All I can say is a massive thank you to everyone involved, the pictures look great and Fleur was a star. I knew those sausages we give to our four legged friends at breakfast would pay off eventually! ; )

Untitled receives Bib Gourmand from Michelin

A PENZANCE restaurateur who celebrated the birth of a baby boy two weeks ago has another reason to be cheerful this week after winning a coveted Michelin award.

Untitled by Robert Wright has gained recognition from inspectors less than eight months after opening on the site of the former Abbey Restaurant just off Chapel Street.

It was one of 28 new restaurants this year across the UK to be given a Bib Gourmand – a special Michelin award recognising value for money.

Robert, aged 40, said he was absolutely stunned at the news, which comes just two weeks after his partner Helen Venning gave birth to their first son, Arthur.

“The award is for excellence and value for money,” he said. “This is exactly what I wanted.

Bustling

“I didn’t want the Michelin star; I didn’t want to be ultra-fine dining with just a few people in the restaurant. I wanted it to be really busy and bustling and people just enjoying food.”

Untitled is one of only four restaurants in Cornwall to have the Bib Gourmand, joining the Black Rock in St Ives, Rick Stein’s Café in Padstow and The View in Millbrook.

The Michelin Guide reads: “The chef credits Alistair Little for instilling in him the philosphy of simplicity and keeping flavour honest. A slight French edge runs through the menu, where the focus is on fish. Alternatively, you can order tapas on the ground floor.”

Robert, who was previously head chef at the Gurnard’s Head at Zennor, said he only found out about the award when he was contacted by a journalist last week, while he was away on paternity leave.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I always understood that it would take a couple of years to get established and get recognised. I’m just looking to give really good-quality, honest food at a reasonable price. This award has confirmed that I’m doing exactly that.”

Featured in the Times’ Cool Weekend Guide

We’ve been recommended in the latest edition of The Times’ Cool Weekend Guide as a ‘luxury town house style hideaway with pretty garden’. Penzance is featured as a balmy Cornish port bustling with gorgeous galleries such as Penlee House. There’s also the beautiful Art Deco Jubilee swimming pool, built in 1935 and the stunning cliffside open-air Minnack Theatre.

Robert next door will be delighted as ‘Untitled’ was also picked out for ‘great tapas and plenty of art to admire on the walls’.

Enjoy ‘anonymous’ fine dining

UNITITLED normally describes a work of art that an artist may feel reluctant to categorise or name for any number of reasons.

For a restaurant and a chef, it is a bold move but then chef Robert Wright at Untitled is a bold man. His motto: “real food for real people.”

Robert’s portfolio at his Penzance restaurant is vast and most notably includes head chef at the massively popular Gurnard’s Head at Zennor, Fifteen London, Cranks, Odette’s Notting Hill, Keith Floyd’s Malsters Inn and many more. The result is an unpretentious professional dining experience, capable of fusing the best of local and the best of continental with flair and appropriately, artistry. Flavours are distinct, clean, confident. The atmospheric cloister-like arches of the Untitled lounge and bold primary colours against a white canvas provide a continental backdrop.

Tapas is served here, and with a plate of chorizo in red wine, octopus or tortilla with goat’s cheese and a chilled glass of white, you could easily imagine yourself in Mediterranean climes. Upstairs, the dining is more formal: a light-filled room with views out to the harbour and the sea beyond, decked out in bold prints and eclectic objects. MM opted for Falmouth Bay scallops with black pudding, broad beans, thyme and cream; myself, the devilled lamb’s kidneys (I can’t resist a bit of offal). Delicious kidneys on crisp toast, just the right amount of devil for my liking and sweet fat scallops atop generous chunks of black pudding made for an inspiring start. For the main show, we had difficulty choosing.

In the end MM went for the Megrim sole with crab butter, new pots and spring greens. I chose the pork braised in milk with red cabbage, carrot, fondant potato and wild garlic. The plate-sized Megrim was succulent and tasty, the crab butter adding a luxurious richness. The pork fell apart at the touch of a fork and the veg combination was spot on. My only complaint would be that portions were big and I hate to leave food, but couldn’t finish the shoulder.

Saying that, I wasn’t about to turn down a dessert. Robert’s partner, Helen, runs the Newlyn cheese shop and clearly has a hand in the British cheese board as a dessert option. A stunning collection of cheeses was being wheeled around as we left and I loitered briefly to hear her speak knowledgeably about each one. Getting back to the sweet stuff however, as a keen forager and wild foodie, the elderflower fritters with Cornish strawberries and vanilla cream were a must for me, and MM selected crème caramel with cinnamon biscuit. The fritters were my first and I won’t forget them. Greasy, crisp, light bunches of scented delight, the delicacy of the flowers reaching through the batter to complement the fruit and cream. Service was professional and low-key with a smile.

There is something a little different about the dining experience at Untitled. An intimacy and a passion for good food in an artistic space yet the menu is brief (hurrah), simple and locally European. Much of the new ‘British revival’ food has become over- complicated and rich, a little too much for my palate at times. I feel that Mr Wright is confidently manoeuvring British food in his own direction. And it works.

Long may he defy the titles of food fashion and continue to forge his own foodie pathway by remaining Untitled. Robert Wright’s portfolio is vast and most notably includes head chef at the massively popular Gurnard’s Head at Zennor, Fifteen London, Cranks, Odette’s Notting Hill, Keith Floyd’s Malsters Inn and many more.

Jean Shrimpton in British Vogue

Jean was featured in this month’s edition of British Vogue talking about her love for Cornwall. It’s in the Beauty supplement and very complimentary about Jean and the hotel. I’d like to personally thank the wonderful Kayla Jacobs who was a pleasure to work with on the project.

Michael Cox on The Night Climbers Of Cambridge by Whipplesnaith

The Night Climbers Of Cambridge is a curio. Upon its first publication in October 1937 it became an instant hit, and a second edition appeared in November of the same year. It was reprinted in 1952, 1953 and most recently in 2007. But perhaps more than any other book in The Abbey’s drawing room library, it is deserving of ‘cult classic’ status.
Night Climbers was published under the pseudonym ‘Whipplesnaith’. For many years it was thought to have been the work of several contributors, but the 2007 Oleander Press edition appears to credit one man as sole author: Noel H. Symington, who wrote Night Climbers in the 1930s.

Symington’s book records the exploits of a group of Cambridge University students whose nocturnal predilection might (depending on your view) strike today’s undergraduates as peculiar. Rather than stay up all night drinking, taking drugs, having casual sex and doing whatever else The Daily Mail would have us believe is standard fare among contemporary students, Cambridge’s night climbers sought to climb the ancient buildings of the town and its venerable university. Their derring-do included scaling such heights as the Fitzwilliam Museum and the King’s College Chapel; most, if not all, of their ascents were recorded with prehistoric photographic paraphernalia carried aloft over battlements, up chimneys and down drain-pipes.

The book’s premise is thus interesting in its own right. To embark upon what is now known as ‘buildering’ or ‘stegophily’ by night is undoubtedly foolhardy; to seek conquests of Cambridge’s dreaming spires the height of British eccentricity. As such, Night Climbers belongs to another era. It captures a sense of innocence in pre-Second World War Britain, one delightfully denuded of the health and safety regulation so prevalent in today’s nanny state society.

Night Climbers is also intriguingly written. Take this, for example: “The chimney is too broad for comfort, and a very short man might find it impossible to reach the opposite wall, with his feet flapping disconsolately in space like an elephant’s uvula.” There are innumerable lovely lines and vignettes, and something quintessentially modernist, too, in Symington’s ambiguous embrace of the ideal that night climbers should leave no trace. Not only does he write a book, complete with photographs, documenting night climbing, the very act itself at times proves too tempting not to evoke by way of a literal memento. Describing the climb up St. John’s, Symington writes: “From the window ledge a climber in a playful mood may leave his gown or surplice on the statue in the middle. This would probably cause considerable surprise to the authorities.”

Ah, the authorities. They are ever-present in Night Climbers, lurking in the shadows, but more fearsome than the police or the dons are the college porters. As Symington puts it: “The dismay felt by a climber descending a drain-pipe outside a college, with a porter inside shouting ‘Police!’ at the top of his voice, is an emotion never to be forgotten.”
The Night Climbers Of Cambridge is a strange book, but an uplifting one. It makes us wonder what universities are for, it makes us lament the way in which the British spirit of adventure has been compromised, and, by virtue of its learned and allusive style, it makes us recall that, once upon a time, knowledge of the Classics was a sine qua non of the educated man.

But guests need not fear. Symington’s book doesn’t make me want to set off on nocturnal climbs of The Abbey Hotel. Not every night, anyway.

The Night Climbers of Cambridge is available from Amazon.

Jean Shrimpton on The Rings Of Saturn by WG Sebald

I can’t remember when I read The Rings Of Saturn, but perhaps this is in keeping with the book. It’s one of the most enigmatic and mysterious works I’ve read. There is no fixed point, no real plot, no sense of purposeful direction or narrative intent, and yet its sense of melancholy stays with me as much as the gloriously haunting opening three sentences:

In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work. And in fact my hope was realized, up to a point; for I have seldom felt so carefree as I did then, walking for hours in the day through the thinly populated countryside, which stretches inland from the coast. I wonder now, however, whether there might be something in the old superstition that certain ailments of the spirit and of the body are particularly likely to beset us under the sign of the Dog Star.

What is Sebald talking about here? It’s impossible to know for sure, as he blends the start of a hike taken towards the end of the sultry dog days of summer, his own sense of existential despair and isolation and the myriad connotations of the Dog Star itself. But soon we learn that a year after the tour, he was admitted to hospital in Norwich “in a state of almost total immobility”. So, too, that Sebald’s carefree self is so often assailed by “traces of destruction”.

At the outset, then, we know that The Rings Of Saturn is not going to be a book for Hello! readers. Its seriousness of intent is obvious at once, and anyone who loves fine writing is in for a treat. I don’t quite understand how Sebald does what he does, but though his sentences meander in the most extraordinarily ethereal and elegiac fashion they are always compelling. Take this, for example: “the atmosphere at Schipol airport was so strangely muted that one might have thought one was already a good way beyond this world. As if they were under sedation or moving through time stretched or expanded, the passengers wandered the halls or, standing still on escalators, were delivered to their various destinations on high or underground.”

Both Sebald and those he observes are thus rendered as somehow passive beings, at the mercy of forces they cannot control, still less understand. Likewise, the black and white photographs which appear throughout The Rings Of Saturn and his other works. They would seem to be illustrative of a given thread or theme, but aren’t, instead appearing in counterpoint, as if they are only a possible interpretation of what Sebald is writing about.

It is all quite beautiful, if also melancholic to the core. Sebald, who was born in Germany in 1944, effortlessly turns his major preoccupations – the horror of the Second World War, the nature of memory, both personal and collective – into great literature. No wonder that Horace Engdahl, former secretary of the Swedish Academy, said in 2007 that Sebald would have been a worthy Nobel Prize winner. Sadly, he was killed in a car crash in Norfolk in 2001.