Book review: Restaurant Nathan Outlaw

It’s the most decorated fish restaurant in the UK with two Michelin stars, four AA rosettes and the top spot in the current Good Food Guide, and now Restaurant Nathan Outlaw has its own self-titled cookery book to showcase its dishes.

The 300-plus page tome - the fifth from Outlaw - begins with no less than 11 forewords, including those from fellow two-Michelin-starred chefs Tom Kerridge, Sat Bains and Paul Cunningham, as well as Rick Stein, Jamie Oliver and Jason Atherton. After a brief synopsis of the life and times of Restaurant Nathan Outlaw - which had two other incarnations before landing in Port Isaac in 2015 - the book moves on to eight chapters broken up into early spring, late spring, so on and so forth, up to and including late winter.

Featuring 80 recipes from the restaurant’s menu, Restaurant Nathan Outlaw naturally includes a number of Outlaw’s signature dishes, such as cured salmon, seaweed salad cream and cucumber relish (he served a variation of the dish at the 2015 AA Hospitality Awards) and, of course, his legendary Porthilly sauce (made from plum tomatoes, shore crab stock, fish stock and unsalted butter), which is used on this occasion to accompany gurnard.

Seafood recipes may dominate the book, but each chapter also includes many of the desserts that have graced Outlaw’s tasting menus over the years, such as rhubarb and orange trifle, raspberry ice-cream sandwich, and arctic roll, raspberry sorbet and sugared almonds.

"When I first saw this book in print after a year of working on it," writes Outlaw in the acknowledgements, "I was stunned at how wonderful it looked. In essence, it’s my restaurant on paper and I’m extremely proud of both." For those that haven’t made the pilgrimage to Doc Martin country, Restaurant Nathan Outlaw the book takes you there.

Restaurant Nathan Outlaw by Nathan Outlaw (Bloomsbury Absolute, £45). Try the recipe for lobster and cuttlefish with red pepper sauce here