Things to do in New Quay when it's raining.

The rain was relentless - fine, even gentle, but utterly unstoppable. A never ending cascade from a sullen battleship sky devoid of all mirth, all hope and any prospect of ever changing. 

And yet we were not alone as we stood, huddled in sodden waterproofs on the rain slicked stones at the end of the harbour wall. There must have been what? Forty? Maybe fifty of us all staring fixedly out over the churning unkempt waves. Someone pointed out over the water and a score of camera lenses and binoculars swiveled to follow their finger. Sure enough, maybe a hundred yards from the harbour mouth there was a splash that had nothing to do with wind or wave - the briefest glimpse of a fluked tail and a rakish dorsal fin sliding gracefully beneath the brine revealed the splash to be the work of a bottle nosed dolphin, a member of Cardigan Bay's resident community - one of only two permanent communities of bottle nosed dolphins in the UK.* 

Somewhere in this picture there is a dolphin. Trust me.

"There's another one!" We turn, the air vibrating with the clicking of cameras and the delighted gasps of the crowd as the dorsal finned back of another dolphin slides gracefully above the surface for the briefest of moments and then slips silently into the depths once more. They were clearly having a camera-shy day, because the shot above is the best image I managed to capture.

There is just something about dolphins. Perhaps it's the fact that they always seem so cheerful. Perphaps it's just that they seem to like us that makes them so attractive. Who knows? Whatever magic they weave around us it is, I can attest, powerful enough to make a large numbers of people stand in the rain at the end of a harbour wall in a tiny seaside town in South Wales at the southern end of Cardigan Bay.

We were in New Quay. Note the space, it's quite important. As we did our research in preparation for this trip entering "New Quay" into Google elicited the inquiry "Did you mean Newquay?" along with a couple of million hits for the larger but similarly named seaside town in Cornwall.

This New Quay is smaller. Much smaller. But while it's also not as good for surfing (although you can catch the odd wave there) it most certainly is a better place to see dolphins. Indeed, between June and October they can be seen pretty much every day from the harbour wall - which is why the marine biologists who study them carry out their surveys from there. At the landward end of the harbour wall there's even a little office which keeps a record of how many dolphins, porpoises etc have been seen that day, and keeps a selection of telescopes of binoculars by the windows to help you get a close up view - and the views are clearly there to be had.

Take a stroll around the gift shops in the town and you'll see any number of framed photos showing these magnificent mammals leaping from azure waters mere inches from the stone of the harbour wall, their silver grey bodies glistening in the summer sun beneath saphire skies.

If you go and visit New Quay - and you really should - those pictures were not taken on the day we were there. We got nothing more than the odd dorsal fin and splash from a tail. Personally I reckon the beasts had seen the weather and decided they'd be drier beneath the waves...

On a nice day the harbour is lovely...

In the sunshine, as we were to discover later in the week, the place is as pretty as a picture of a really pretty thing. In the pouring rain under clouds as grey as an accountants suit? Not so much. When the dolphins eventually decided that human watching was getting boring and swam away to deeper water, we decided to head off in search of lunch.

In a place this small you wouldn't imagine finding a half way decent eaterie would be difficult. To be fair, there would be no reason for it to be - we just managed to make it so.

New Quay's "tourist quarter" is essentially a horseshoe shaped road which loops from the main road at the top of the hill, down to the sea and then back up the hill again. Starting as we were in the harbour at the bottom of the loop, we headed off along the seafront checking out the various cafes and restaurants that the little town has to offer.

As regular readers will know, we take lunch very seriously so we weren't about to just go for the first place we saw. So we trekked off, along the front and up the hill, dilligently reading menus and peeking through windows to check whether places "looked right". And all the time, the rain kept falling. Our gore-tex jackets clung to us, waterlogged and clammy. Every place we looked at we thought "Hmmmm' looks OK, but what else is there? Is there somewhere even better up the hill?"

Turned out there was a limited time we could stand to squelch through the rain sodden steets before our patience ran out. By the time we were completing the circle and trudging back down the hill towards the harbour again we'd had enough. Looking into  a bar/restaurant with an old fashioned exterior, but with a cool, contemporary interior decor and a simple but appetizing menu we considered our wet feet and calculated how far back we'd have to walk to get to some of the other places we'd liked and thought "Sod it. This'll do."

We were greeted by a very nice chap who turned out to be the co-owner. He sat us down and  talked us through the menu, brought us drinks  and was, essentially, the perfect host. He took our order of a cheese burger (me) and pate and toast (Mrs Snail) and then vanished, presumably to do the cooking, because we didn't see him again.

He was replaced, however, by his wife and co-owner, who as also lovely, chatting cheerfully about where she was from, how the business was new but beginning to take off, how proud she was of her staff, how much she loved New Quay. about our holiday and our plans for the rest of our time in Wales - we could not have asked for a bettr host or for better service. We were impressed. We really, really liked the place.

And yet I haven't given you the name of this wonderful establishment, nor the names of the wonderful proprietors. 

Well, there's a reason for that.

Because then the "food" arrived.

Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

"Bad" doesn't even begin to cover it. 

Mrs Snail's pate was clearly the cheapest of the cheap shop bought offerings. It had an unpleasant waxy yet grainy consistency, as though it were made of crayola. I'll happily take the menu's word that chicken livers were involved in its creation, but it was nothing like any chicken liver pate I've ever eaten before. The toast was definitely toasted bread, but it too was nothing to write home about - just two slices of cheap white "Mother's Pride" style white sliced.

My cheese burger was no better. The bun was fine, what back in Yorkshire I'd have called a "bap" - squishy, moist and airy. Browned on top with  light dusting of flour. So far, so good. The chips were OK - no more than that, but fair enough. They were perfectly inoffensive.**

It was very much all downhill from there.

The meal was accompanied by peas - which has a bit of the ring of the children's menu about it now I think about it, which would have been bad enough. These peas however were not the bright, vibrant green of fresh (or frozen) garden peas. No. These peas wore the grim khaki of the tin.

Now. I quite like tinned peas. 

But I do not expect to be served them when I'm in an establisment that bills itself as a "Restaurant and Bar". For a start, they go cold very quickly and by the time they reached our table they were already approaching tepid. And then there was the beef patty itself. It was not good. At all.

In all fairness it was not the worst beef burger I've ever been served. That distinction belongs to a lunch in a hotel-that-shall-not-be-named*** in Scotland, where I actually saw them take the burger out of a can. This was not that bad. It was however, the next best (or worst, I suppose) thing.

The exterior of the patty looked OK - it was the appropriaqte shade of charred dark brown you'd expect. For a moment, in spite of the khaki peas, I allowed myself to hope. This was a mistake, because I was disappointed.

The interior of the patty was an odd shade of reddish pink - not the pink of the "meduim rare" that is so popular in restaurant burgers these days, but the sort of unnatural "whatever this is it only has a tangential relationship with actual meat" pink you get in the cheapest of processed foods. It certainly didn't taste of beef.  It was unpleasant. We were in an establishment that claimed to be a reastaurant. McDonalds would have been 1000% better. I have no criticism more damning.

And yet, I have not named this eaterie. I have avoided holding it up for riducule and approbation.

Why? 

Because we really liked the place. I really don't want to give the owners and their restaurant a bad review. When we ate there they'd been open a month. They had clearly put a lot of thought into the decor - lots of clean white walls with pebble grey wood panneling and the legend "Life is better when you're laughing" emblazoned on the wall in cursive script. The service was attentive, friendly and personable - I have never felt more welcome anywhere. Every single thing about the place was perfect, if you ignore the fact that the food was terrible. Now I grant you, having terrible food is a bit of a drawback for a retaurant, but I really really want this place to succeed. If this place finds a decent chef who cares about ingredients it will rise to astonishing heights. I hope it does. If it doesn't, I can't imagine it will survive all that long. But if it dies, I won't contrubute to its destruction by writing a bad review.

What can I say? I like to support new enterprise. Also - and rather terrfyingly - this wasn't even the worst meal we ate while we were in South Wales.

Next time, we'll have a look at something better...

*The other is in Moray.

**And when "inoffensive" is the best thing you can say about any aspect of a meal you know there's a problem.

***At least not for now. The hotel in question has changed hands since we ate there. At some point we'll go back and try it again - there may be a report at that point...