Porlock Weir, a coastal hamlet a couple of miles west of Porlock village, has much to recommend it: sweeping views of sea and wooded hills, cute cottages, fishing boats in the tidal harbour. Some love the otherworldliness of its beach, though it’s not the place for a relaxing stroll: its “shingle” is actually large, grey and pinkish stones on which you don’t so much walk as hop precariously from one boulder to the next. And now Porlock Weir has another draw: stylish rooms and Italian-influenced dining at Locanda on the Weir.
Pio Catemario has been a passionate foodie ever since he was a child growing up in Naples and hanging around the family kitchen seeing how favourite meals were prepared. It was the chance to indulge this passion that led him and partner Cindy to take on the run-down Café on the Weir, overlooking the beach and harbour. They updated the beige interior (“It looked like a 1980s nursing home,” says Cindy) and relaunched the property as a restaurant-with-rooms last year.
The bay-windowed Locanda has clearly shaken off the whiff of cream teas and fish and chip lunches. In a bar/lounge with smart sofas and interesting artwork, husband and I sip on smart and interesting aperitivos. Aperol is so over; we now favour the more sophisticated Bèrto – less sweet and a less-luminous orange than the famous brand.
Upstairs are five boutique-y rooms (four with sea views) furnished with antiques and eclectic art – though some could perhaps do with a touch less floral fabric. I enjoy lounging on an old steamer chair, gazing out to sea and nibbling a homemade biscuit, before taking a pre-dinner shower with Aromatherapy Associates products.
Pio nurtured his cooking skills over a 15-year career in the City of London, and now he’s letting them fly. Open to non-residents Thursday to Saturday, the restaurant offers a full à la carte menu, plus top-notch pastas, but Pio’s scope ranges well beyond Italian food: “Anything delicious belongs on my table,” he tells me. What he loves best, though, is doing three- and five-course set dinners for hotel guests.
In the hands of a talented cook such as Pio, this makes a relaxing way to dine. No deciding among too-tempting options, no menu envy – just well-chosen dishes from a kitchen that’s not rushed. First comes home-cured salmon, thick-cut and garnished with piquant bits and pieces that make each mouthful different: horseradish cream, candied lemon peel, black sesame, pickled beetroot and balsamic pearls.
A vegan salad with basil guacamole and cashew cream “cheese” is followed by a rich celeriac soup laced with little explosions of astringency – pepper berries grown by Vietnam’s Cô Tô tribe, we’re told. I scrape away at the bowl and am tempted to run my finger round it. The main is salt cod, but salted for just three days, leaving firm, pearly flesh. We barely have room for a shared almond and chocolate torta caprese, but that’s as pretty and delicate as everything else.
Next morning I’m relieved mine are not the only stocking feet in the dining room. Porlock Weir is either the second or the penultimate stage on the South West Coast Path – depending on your direction – and walkers don’t wear their boots more than necessary. Breakfasts offer healthy-hiking fuel: green juice, say, then Bircher muesli with apples, nuts, berries and apricot compote, and parmesan omelette with a plethora of fresh herbs. Husband’s full English is a picture with its two-tone fried eggs: a golden-yolked local one and a bright orange Burford Brown.
We pull on our boots to hit not the coast path but Exmoor, with Jennie and Malcolm Wild, former vets who, as Wild About Exmoor, run guided walks, stargazing and other activities from their barn in the middle of the moor. As it’s the 150th anniversary of the book, we opt for the Lorna Doone walk, and it’s as exceptional as Pio’s food: secret rocky valleys, rugged uplands and gnarled hoar oaks as otherworldly as the Game of Thrones Dark Hedges. There are more highbrow literary associations, too. Coleridge, despite interruption by a “person from Porlock”, wrote Kubla Khan just up the road. Fellow poets Wordsworth and Southey spent time here, and it’s said these hills inspired “England’s mountains green” in Blake’s Jerusalem.
The next night’s dinner brings marbled Chioggia beetroot with pomegranate and sheep’s cheese – a vision in pink and white – and delicate gnocchi with Somerset blue cheese. The main is butter-soft lamb slow-cooked in a heady range of spices to a recipe invented for Alexander the Great after he conquered Punjab in 326BC.
It may not date back that far, but Porlock Weir feels like it’s in a time warp. The road runs out here, the broadband is slow, and the main entertainment is crabbing from the harbour wall. But things are changing: a new social enterprise, run from a shed on the harbour, is creating jobs and selling more than 6,000 oysters a month; there are plans to build a jetty so that boats from south Wales can put in here; and the Anchor Hotel, just metres from Locanda, is under new management and opened a few of its rooms last month. Cindy says she wishes the owners well, but I reckon they’ll struggle to match Pio’s well-honed, well-travelled table.
• Accommodation was provided by Locanda on the Weir, which has doubles from £120 B&B; mains from £15, three-course set menu from £35pp, five-courses £45pp
Ask a local
Roger Hall, director, Porlock Bay Oysters
• Drink
The Ship Inn in Porlock – known as the Top Ship, to distinguish it from the Bottom Ship, at Porlock Weir, owned by the same people – is the oldest pub on Exmoor, built in 1290. It has a good atmosphere, good food and a range of Exmoor Ales.
• Visit
Dunster, eight miles east of Porlock, is a medieval village with a priory, the octagonal 17th-century Yarn Market building, inns, a packhorse bridge, working water mill and National Trust-owned Dunster Castle.
• Walk
Porlock tourist office has leaflets for circular walks; a good one is an eight-miler heading west along the coast path to Culbone and one of the smallest churches in England, then back inland passing the farm (Ash Farm) where Coleridge was living when he was famously interrupted.
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