Fit for a queen

A neighbourhood bar, kitchen, deli and shop that is far more than the sum of its parts.

I found 45 Queen Street the way you’re supposed to find places like this, by accident, down a narrow back alley off Chapel Street in Penzance, following a vague instruction and hoping for the best. What I wasn’t expecting, tucked behind the stone facades of one of Cornwall’s oldest towns, was a cavernous former warehouse buzzing with the kind of easy, unhurried energy that most places spend years trying to manufacture and never quite get there. The building has previous lives written into its bones. It was a garage once; the old inspection pits are still under the bar, repurposed now for barrel storage, which feels about right. Before you even sit down, the place has already told you something about itself: that nothing is wasted here and everything gets a second go.

I was fed. I was handed a mimosa. I was looked after, frankly, in the manner of someone who has shown up at a very good friend’s house rather than a restaurant. And when I left on a bicycle, bound for Kent, which is a long way to go on the enthusiasm of good food and fresh orange juice, the owners pressed a gift into my hands. A small, handmade, clay egg cup, in the shape of a cowboy. Reader, I cycled to Kent with a cowboy egg cup in my bag. I have no complaints.

This is the thing about 45 Queen Street: it doesn’t entirely make sense until you’re standing in it, and when you do, you’ll find it to be genuinely and unselfconsciously generous. The food is produce-led, seasonal, local wherever possible: organic vegetables, Cornish seafood, home-baked cakes, all the things that get bandied about on menus and here are simply true. There’s a deli corner stacked with things you’ll want to take home. The courtyard, subtropical and slightly improbable, is the kind of place you sit down in for ten minutes and surface from two hours later.

But the real secret, and it’s not much of a secret if you follow the threads, is that 45 Queen Street is also the home of Tinkture, the Penzance-born gin distillery founded by Hannah Lamiroy, the woman behind the whole operation. Tinkture makes what it calls “clean alcohol”: no artificial colours, no sweeteners, no concentrates, nothing extraneous. The flagship is a rose gin, distilled in copper alembic stills using organic David Austin rose petals, and it has won a following significant enough to land it on the shelves at Fortnum & Mason. The cocktails at 45 reflect this precise consideration, made with the same refusal to cut corners that runs through everything else on the menu.

On my short two-hour stay, I also sampled some asparagus gin, which sounds odd, tastes a bit weird, but when combined into a cocktail utterly delicious! The ethos is circular: reuse, refill, reduce. Mixers come in cans and glass and nothing is single-use. It is, as Hannah puts it, simply a given. The cowboy egg cup was made from clay, which is about as circular as you get. I didn’t ask why it was a cowboy. Some things you just accept. 45 Queen Street is unsurprisingly at 45 Queen Street, Penzance, TR18 4BQ. Access is via Chancery Lane off Chapel Street. Open Wednesday to Saturday, 10am until late, it’s worth every wrong turn it takes to find it. Breakfast does finish at 11:30, so don’t dawdle in expecting poached eggs at 12!

LAGOM CHEF
LagomChef
www.lagomchef.com

45 QUEEN STREET
45queenstreet
www.45queenst.com