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Chinese sea bream: one way of ordering at Prawn on the Lawn is to opt for the fish fresh off the boat that day, cooked simply with your choice of sauce (Prawn on the Lawn)
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he first time I visited Prawn on the Lawn was at the Padstow outpost – a tiny hole-in-the-wall establishment hidden in the back streets of the seaside town. When I walked up to it’s unassuming door, I truly thought I’d found my idea of heaven. In the depths of lockdown, when I was about as far away from the ocean as you can get and truly missing the incandescent beauty of real life and the splendour of a dinner out, it was often my first meal at Prawn on the Lawn that I dreamt of. Perhaps influenced by that slightly giddy holiday feeling and the fact that we were a stone’s throw from the port where the fish we were eating was brought in, it was one of the best meals I could remember in recent history.
A restaurant in east Cornwall is looking to create a season-long pop-up in collaboration with a nearby farm and local suppliers. With Covid-19 lockdown restrictions set to affect the hospitality industry for weeks to come, Katie and Rick Toogood of Prawn on the Lawn in Padstow have teamed up with Trerethern Farm to find a new, creative way to run their restaurant. The move, which is being dubbed Prawn on the Farm, has resulted in the creation of ten new jobs and they say more than 17,000 customers are booked in already for the season. Katie Toogood said: The original Prawn on the Lawn restaurant in Padstow is a tiny space, and we can only seat a reduced capacity of 16 people with social distancing, meaning we would have had to let half of our team go to keep the business financially viable.
A squeeze of lemon on Bentley s lobster
Fish stocks are not the only thing in the waters of the British Isles facing a sustainability crisis. The ban on live shellfish exports to the European Union threatens to devastate the UK fishing industry.
The EU rules specifically apply to live bivalve molluscs such as mussels, oysters, scallops, cockles and clams. The industry is worth around £12m a year, which might be small fry to the UK economy as a whole but is of critical value to the communities who rely on the sea for their livelihoods.
Fish exports overall have been hit hard by Brexit. Delays caused by red tape have forced the price of British fish and seafood to plummet as European buyers refuse to pay top dollar for produce that is not as fresh as they would wish. What’s more, with restaurants closed until at least the middle of April, a significant chunk of domestic sales has disappeared alongside the export market. One bright spot, though, is that the suppliers who wou
Prawn on the Lawn will re-open its Prawn on the Farm summer pop-up following the success of its inaugural run at Trerethern Farm near Padstow last year.
Expected to re-open in mid-April for the duration of the summer, the 52-cover restaurant will be set up in a similar way to last year offering views of Camel Estuary and will support Cornwall s fish and shellfish industry,
“It’s been such a journey creating this Cornish seafood al fresco love-affair. Not only the hard work and demands the project itself asked of us, but doing so during the beginning of the pandemic,” says co-owner Katie Toogood.