Flavour and focus
- Jamie Crocker
- 16 hours ago
- 5 min read
Words by Jamie Crocker
Jake Grove’s culinary journey spans continents but finds its still point in Cornwall, as head chef at St Moritz Hotel.
The first kitchen that took him in wasn’t a temple of haute cuisine, but a place of honest cooking and character. The Port William Inn, just south of Tintagel, a pub at the water’s edge, where beer glasses clinked, and the scent of salt and ale filled the air. He didn’t choose it, not exactly – his father came home one night and informed him he had a job to go to the next morning. Seventeen years old, he turned up, stepped into the heat, the steam, the sudden and necessary urgency of service and never left the kitchen again.
For Jake Grove, cooking is not a profession in the way that law or medicine are. It’s something more visceral, something that roots itself in the hands, the senses. He learned early that a kitchen is a place where instinct meets discipline, where a dish is only as good as the last set of hands that touched it.
It was this understanding – this immersion in the necessity of craft – that carried him to the Driftwood Hotel, a name that conjures images of gentleness but belied the unrelenting focus inside. Under the command of Chris Eden, Jake discovered that to cook at a certain level is to accept that there are no easy days. He took from that kitchen the rigour, the reverence for produce, the understanding that ingredients tell a story before a knife is even laid upon them. That, and the work ethic: the knowledge that excellence does not happen by accident but by design, through graft and repetition and a refusal to let standards slip.
The pursuit of technique carried him beyond Cornwall’s shores. New York and Sydney. The structured intensity of Sepia, the breadth of influences, the way a dish could be layered with the accents of different continents without ever losing itself. More than the food, though, it was the people – the shared language of the kitchen, spoken in a hundred accents, sharpened in the heat of service. It taught him how to lead, how to recognise the strengths of his team, how to step back when necessary and let someone else take the reins.
It was no surprise that St Moritz Hotel called him back to these shores. He had grown beyond them once, left to test his skills elsewhere, but things had changed. A new leadership, a renewed vision. Now, as Chef de Cuisine, the challenge is not simply to run a kitchen, but to define its identity.
At The Shorecrest Restaurant, menus do not dictate to ingredients; they form around them. A dish begins not with an idea but with what is at its peak, what is being pulled from the ground, hauled from the water. Vegetables come from Restharrow Farm, just a stone’s throw from the hotel. Asparagus from St Enodoc, bass and mackerel from Bro Diplock’s boat off Rock, whole Cornish lamb from Kittows Butchers in Fowey. The raw materials are the story, and Jake’s job is to listen, to shape, to let the produce speak for itself.
He is not interested in theatrics for their own sake, nor in complexity without purpose. He looks instead for clarity, for restraint, for the moment when a dish is balanced enough that nothing further needs to be done. It is an approach that extends beyond Shorecrest to the Seaside Pool Club, where the emphasis is on laid back dining – the kind of food that sits perfectly within its setting. Here, the cooking does not compete with the view or the sea air; it enhances them. Last year’s Sunset Soundwaves events, with live music and sharing BBQ menus, captured something of the relaxed generosity that Jake wants to encourage – food as experience, as something shared rather than merely consumed.
There is no pretence in his kitchen. No aggressive hierarchy, no misplaced ferocity. “We try not to be overly intense in the kitchen,” he says. “When it’s intense, it’s because we’ve made a mistake and aren’t properly prepared.” He believes in readiness, in control, in the idea that a well-structured menu should not be an act of performance but something rooted, something practical. To this end the diners can see everything from the vantage point of the dining room – there are no barriers, no illusions.
The influences that shaped him remain embedded in his cooking. Rick Stein, the gateway to a love of food when he was young. Jamie Oliver, whose enthusiasm first made the act of cooking seem approachable. And Nathan Outlaw – working under him was a confirmation, a realisation that skill, humility and precision could be embodied in a single chef. “A genuine person and an incredible chef who managed to have an unassuming presence at the Fish Restaurant where I worked under him,” he says. The lesson Jake took from those early inspirations was not one of imitation but of principle: to respect the craft, to understand that the best cooking does not impose itself but enhances what is already there.
Food, for him, is both deeply personal and entirely communal. His partner, Petra, is Slovakian, and last year he recreated a cake her mother once made for him – though the original recipe remained a closely guarded secret, he worked with Cornish ingredients to echo its spirit. In a way, it is emblematic of his approach: an act of interpretation, of respect, of allowing the past to inform the present. There is always an awareness of place in his food. Cornwall is not simply a location but a larder, a climate, a culture. Its land and sea dictate what is possible, but also what makes sense. “When it comes to sustainability, then Cornwall’s a unique place,” he says. “We have a lot of farm land that is not able to grow vegetables, so it makes sense to have small herds of cattle and pigs.” Sustainability, for him, is not a trend but a logical response to the landscape – an understanding of balance, of working with what is naturally available rather than forcing an ideal onto a place that does not support it.
At St Moritz, the cooking is guided by principle rather than excess. “What we do with the food here is always based on value for money,” he says, a statement that underlines his pragmatic approach. This is not about austerity but about fairness – about ensuring that what is offered is worth what is paid, that quality is not a privilege but an expectation.
After years in kitchens around the world, Jake Grove has found himself back where he started, but not in the same place. The boy who walked into the Port William Inn at seventeen has been shaped by fire, by discipline, by experience. And yet the core remains unchanged: the thrill of creation, the satisfaction of feeding others, the belief that a dish, done well, can tell a story all of its own.
