Quite nice cafes, just a shame about the Cornish pasties (West Cornwall Pasty Co.)

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	West Cornwall Pasty Co.
Date:	21/09/09 (92 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Reasonably-priced snack outlets in the south-west

Disadvantages: The pasties aren't that good to eat

The West Cornwall Pasty Company is a chain of smallish café / restaurants mostly found in south-west England. They specialize in a range of pastry products loosely based around the traditional Cornish pasty. Add to that a variety of hot and cold drinks, and that's about it for what they sell.

The main upside of these shops is that they provide a fairly reasonably-priced and overall agreeable venue in which to have a sit-down snack lunch. At the Cirencester branch last Friday for example, from the sit-in menu we had two pasties, a sausage roll, a portion of 'oven-baked potato wedges' and one fruit drink and it all cost approximately a tenner. You buy exactly the same range of goods if you're taking your meal away, only it's sold at slightly lower prices - about 75p to a quid less for a £3-ish regular sit-in pasty, for example.

Despite the option of eating in-house, the cafes themselves aren't the best places to linger as they are rather garishly decorated (you can get a good idea of what the décor is like by visiting the company's website). The main theme is 'pirates in Cornwall' so accordingly, a lot of the surfaces in the shops are painted black. The rest of the furnishings have an olde-worlde feel: there're wooden pub tables and chairs, and lots of rough-hewn looking shelves with pots and 1930s bric-a-brac etc. on them. Also they have thrown pretty much everything else you can think of that's vaguely Cornish into the mix, so as well as the posters and life-size cut-outs of pirates you find other decorative features such as painted wall-murals of Cornish fisher-folk with their wares on the beach, and worse, perfectly good surf-boards that some fool's drilled holes in so that they can be fixed to the ceiling. It's all extremely theme-pub-ish.

None of this would be anywhere near so objectionable if the pasties themselves passed muster. The traditional Cornish pasty has a steak, potato and vegetable filling; in addition to these the West Cornwall Pasty co. sells a range of other flavours including lamb and mint, salmon, and god help us all, even chicken tikka filled pasties. We tried a lamb and a salmon pasty. The fillings are OK and tasty enough but there isn't nearly enough of the filling provided, considering that up to about a third of what you get in each pasty is made up of dense, dry, not particularly appetising pastry which really nees some kind of help to get you swallowing it down. It's neither puff pastry nor a nice short-crust, but more a sort of golden-brown hybrid of the two that doesn't taste of a great deal. They weren't clearing the tables at the café the day we went, and hence we could see that previous diners had left much of the pastry element of the pasties they'd bought behind on their plates - and who can blame them because the stuff is as tough as old boots. I'm aware of the 'rule' with 'traditional' pasties - ie. they say that you should be able to drop them down the shaft of a working tin-mine and the pastry's so hard the pasty remains intact - but I think in this case it's carrying authenticity much too far. (Incidentally, the potato wedges were dried out too, and weren't worth bothering with.)

In summary you can get a perhaps less self-professedly 'authentic' pasty at Greggs the bakers, which despite being sold from less characterful surroundings, and being comprised almost entirely of puff pastry and mashed potato and nothing else, costs less than half the price and is in my opinion more than twice as good to eat than what's on offer at the West Cornwall Pasty co. The Pasty co. shops are a nice idea in principle, but poorly executed in practice because they're let down by the poor quality of their flagship pasty product, which is a shame.

Summary: Nice chain of snack restaurants, let down by a generally poor product