Fine Dining at the Seafood Cafe – St. Ives

Seafood Presented with Style at the Seafood Cafe – St. Ives:

Seafood Cafe, St. Ives

It’s always good when a local provides you with recommendations on places to eat, especially in St. Ives, Cornwall where there is a huge number of restaurants and cafes offering all different cuisine types. Mike, our guest house host is a pretty knowledgeable guy and amongst the few places that he suggested we may like to dine at during our short stay, the Seafood Cafe was one of them. The Seafood Cafe according to Mike does seafood with a little ‘flare’.

The Seafood Cafe is a very popular cafe and if you wish to dine at a particular time, especially earlier in the evening, a booking is necessary.

On entering the Cafe, you are shown to your seat and a waitress comes and takes your drink order. You are then invited to the bar area where a glass-enclosed chiller cabinet contains the range of seafood that are available for the day. They do serve meat dishes as well. You choose your fish and the sauce that you would like with your fish. If you can’t decide, a staff member is on hand to give you advice as to what goes best with which fish. Your main meal comes with a side dish and here again you can choose whether you’d like a salad, fries or mash potatoes.

We order a seafood platter for two and Ben, the very helpful bar attendant, suggested that we should have an entree with that so we order the moule marinier.

What We Thought of the Food

The mussels were excellent, like those we had in Torquay. Whilst the size of the mussel shell is not large, the mussel meat within fills the whole shell and is plump and juicy and cooked just right.

The seafood platter for two consists of six prawns and four scallops (chargrilled), two crab cakes and two pieces of nicely cooked monk fish, our chosen fish. There are three pots of sauces, a garlic aoli to go with the prawns, a tomato salsa for the crab cake and the garlic brown butter sauce to go with the monk fish.  So eager were we to try our food that we forgot to take a picture of this dish.

We are quite full after our meal and didn’t have any desert, but those ordered by the people at the next table looked quite delicious.

Whilst called a cafe, and the place looks like a cafe, the food served at the Seafood Cafe is of fine dining standard. If you’re looking for an interesting seafood experience during your St. Ives holiday, the Seafood Cafe at 45-47 Fore Street is one of the places that’s definitely worth trying.

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