Arrive hungry, leave happy
- 6 hours ago
- 3 min read
Words by Hannah Tapping
A heady concoction of flavour and indulgence invokes all the senses.
On an unseasonably warm weekend, Porthleven played host to its annual food festival, a three-day long celebration of food and producers. I arrive early evening and the festival is doing what food festivals do: there’s the smell of woodsmoke and frying in the air, the press of happy bodies enjoying cold drinks in the sunshine on the restaurant’s terraces, while a sound track of live music accompanies the quayside revelry.
Leaving the hubbub of festival goers behind, I step through the door of The Shipyard Market and the noise drops away. In its place, gentle tunes and soft candlelight set the mood, while wafts of garlicky, herbed, roasted and deeply savoury smells invite us to the table. And what a table is waiting… It stretches the length of the market, set for feasting with a scape as eclectic as the menu. This is a Naughty Nonnas’ supper club and Jade Berry is in the kitchen. “I grew up surrounded by strong female influences, and with a Scouse mum it didn’t take long before I was pulled into the kitchen. That naturally turned into being the go-to host for my friends – I was always overfeeding everyone, which is where “Nonna” (and eventually “Naughty Nonna”) came from. They pushed me to host my first pop-up at Basket (my friend’s café in Newquay, now closed), which sold out and it’s grown from there,” says Jade.
I’ve been to my fair share of supper clubs as a journalist, but have never experienced anything quite like this. I love its eccentricity and the fact that it’s not trying hard to be something it’s not. The food is served with confidence, bold and unapologetically generous. The format is communal, as we pass plates hand to hand down these long tables. We sit down as strangers, but I get the feeling that this won’t be the case by the time dessert arrives.
The Friday menu for Porthleven Food Festival 2026 is a love letter to the Italian table, rewritten with a Cornish postscript. It begins as all great Italian meals should with things to pass around that we can tear and, of course, share. Heritage tomatoes arrive tumbled with olives, slivers of orange and fennel and crispy gigante beans make for a salad that tastes simultaneously of summer and the sea. Alongside it, we are served charred leeks, their edges blackened and sweet, draped in clouds of stracciatella and scattered with nduja pangratatto. I’m obsessed with how this spiced, oily breadcrumb provides exactly the textural counterpoint that the soft, yielding leeks demand. Then come the arancini, a dish Jade has become famous for. Fried until the shell is crisp and golden, they give way to a yielding, fragrant interior of wild garlic and parmigiana, the aioli served cool and sharp against the warm and rich interior. These orbs of oozing deliciousness are decadent in a way I wasn’t prepared for. Further down the table, someone reaches for the last one without apology and nobody blames them!
The pasta course arrives in the form of mezzaluna, half-moon parcels, plump and perfectly sealed, filled with ricotta and paired with asparagus, courgettes and peas. Mouthfulls of mezzaluna feel at once restrained and lush, the spring vegetables at the peak of their brief Cornish season, coaxed into something that tastes like the countryside on a warm afternoon.
By the time the main courses reach us, the table has settled into gentle conversation and new-found companions. Wine glasses are refilled by the lovely Elly, and I hear someone two seats down explaining, with great animation, the precise conditions required to grow a decent courgette in west Cornwall. Nobody is looking at their phone.
The roast chicken served with white beans, confit tomatoes, oregano and a white wine is a warm hug in a bowl, each element working perfectly with the next and as for the smoky roasted cauliflower with Aji Verde, almonds, chilli and pickled shallot… Well, Jade is known for not doing things by half and this is no vegetable afterthought. The cauliflower is treated with the respect that charring bestows, creating a nuttiness deepened by the heat, the Peruvian green sauce cutting through with fresh herb brightness and the pickled shallot pulling everything together.
Finally, there’s the tiramisu that arrives as the triumphant finale to what has been an evening of Italian-inspired culinary theatre.
We are reluctant to leave, lingering over the last of the wine expertly curated by Elly Owen, as we remain in the spell that the best meals cast, residing in a world that for a few hours has been contracted to the length of a table.
