‘I don’t need to do anything boring’ … Nathan Outlaw cooking steamed brill with pea, shallot and cider stew. Photograph: Kate Whitaker/The Guardian View image in fullscreen ‘I don’t need to do anything boring’ … Nathan Outlaw cooking steamed brill with pea, shallot and cider stew. Photograph: Kate Whitaker/The Guardian Summer food 2026 Fish Interview ‘Good fish smells of the sea on a hot stone’: Nathan Outlaw on simple seafood cooking Zoe Williams More than two decades after winning his first Michelin star, the Cornwall-based chef explains why unfancy food is best – and shares his recipe for steamed brill with pea, shallot and cider stew
Sun 28 Jun 2026 09.00 CEST Last modified on Sun 28 Jun 2026 11.31 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google I t’s 23 years since Nathan Outlaw opened the Black Pig in Rock, Cornwall, when he was 25 years old. It was a long shot that everyone told him not to take – he already had a great job at the Vineyard in Stockcross, Berkshire; his wife, Rachel, was eight-and-a-half months pregnant; and he’d won a couple of prestigious young chef awards. But he wanted a place of his own; a simple menu, “bistro cooking,” he says. “That’s why I became a chef. I loved cooking, my dad’s a good canteen chef, he worked in a big paper mill in Kent, cooking for workers. I loved the physical aspect, standing up doing something. I loved the way there’s a lot of team work. I didn’t know anything about Michelin stars or being famous.” But he got his first Michelin star anyway, the year after he opened.
My mum always said to me, you can’t be the one that throws your weight around, you’re too big After that, he was a name, and it was fine dining and TV specials for many years – two eponymous restaurants in the St Enodoc hotel in Rock, the Great British Menu and Saturday Kitchen on TV, and he kept a foothold in Mayfair with Outlaw’s at the Capital in the 00s. He’s a calm cook, never big on the fireworks – “My mum always said to me: ‘you can’t be the one that throws your weight around, you’re too big’” – which is the right temperament for the food he pioneered during these tasting menu years.
When he started, people only ever cured salmon, a fish he doesn’t use these days because it’s so hard to find a decent farm (and the conditions on an indecent farm, you don’t even want to know about, but I’ll give you the keywords: overcrowding, bad feed, lice). Outlaw started curing all the catch of the area, more or less (“I’d never cure a scallop because it’s fine raw as it is”), with incredible precision – the cuts have to be immaculately even, so they cure at the same rate; he’d take them out of their brine of salt, sugar and white wine every half an hour to see how they were progressing. “Now, people are using the technique for lots of different things. Probably because I’ve showed them how to do it,” he says, and this is the only time I hear him blow his own trumpet. I suppose it’s easy to be your best self in a gorgeous, chef-tidy kitchen, on a beautiful day in Port Isaac, north Cornwall, with floor-to-ceiling windows looking right on to the sea, but even adjusting for that, the guy is an absolute honey.
View image in fullscreen Complete dish … steamed brill with pea, shallot and cider stew. Photograph: Kate Whitaker/The Guardian With his new book, Nathan Outlaw on Fish (“The title’s quite generic, but it’s much more personal than it sounds”) – and for the restaurant and B&B he now owns in Port Isaac, he’s returning to a bistro sens…