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This family run hotel and free house inn enjoys an uninterrupted view of the Atlantic Ocean, and therefore benefits from magnificent sunsets all through the year. The Restaurant at the Bay View Inn is a delightful spot to eat and drink, situated as it is on the picturesque Cornish coast, beautifully located overlooking the Widemouth Bay beaches.

Proprietors Dave and Cherylyn Keene have won a good number of awards from many different organisations, such as CAMRA, the campaign for real ale; Taste of the West; The Publican, presented to the best in the industry, covering a wide range from country pubs to inner city outlets, and Licensee of the Year, from the professional body for the licensed retail sector. With this amount of industry recognition, they are clearly offering quality service and good food!

Most of their produce is obtained locally from farms in Cornwall and Devon, whilst ensuring that they are environmentally friendly, it also guarantees both freshness and flavour.

Speciality dishes could include fresh Cornish mussels; medallions of beef fillet with crunchy asparagus and light juniper berry jus; a carpaccio salad; slow roasted peppers with pilaff rice and a Napoli sauce; shallow pan fried scallops served on a rocket salad, spring onions and completed with garlic and parsley butter, but doesn't neglect more familiar dishes like hamburgers - made from local Angus beef.

You are faced with a wide choice of where to eat, in the bar or restaurant or even al fresco on the deck overlooking the bay.

Drinkers will appreciate the three real ales, which even include their house beer Bay View Sunset, all drawn with a hand pump, plus their Cornish lager and cider. You might be surprised therefore to learn that The Inn holds regular mini beer festivals throughout the year.

If you are coming along with the young in tow, you will be delighted to learn that the garden contains a small playground to keep the kids amused.

Subtitled The Hotel on the River and nestling alongside the Helford River, the Budock Vean offers a golf course and some pretty sensational scenery in a county where one is spoiled for choice. Start with steamed Cornish scallops in their shells, with ginger spring onions, soy sauce and sesame oil. Make way for a cream of onion and potato soup. Then move on to pan-seared medallions of Cornish beef with slow cooked garlic shallots, wine tomatoes, horseradish and Madeira jus. To complete, a chocolate and chilli baked Alaska, leaving the odd corner or two for some of the local cheese.

You have to hand it to Rick - business-wise he really has it organised. It would be foolish to suppose that his benign dominance in his native Padstow could possibly ignore the nation's favourite dish, and here it is; an upmarket version to be sure, but none the worse for it.

A recent "report" given much air time by the media, offered yet further advice on what we should be eating, demonstrated by a table with various temptations set out, and removed one by one as the presenter blackballed them, to leave an empty table, eventually filled by a bowl of fruit which I am sure is very good for you, but does not have quite the same frisson of pleasure that comes from a nice bit of well battered haddock.

Up to a point one can see what they mean, but c'mon, leave us some pleasures please, and one of them simply has to be good old-fashioned fish and chips. Of course the menu at Rick's is never going to be that simple, so choose from nine different sorts of grilled fish after you have worked your way through a few battered local oysters, or you can have your fish battered as well, cooked in beef dripping. Never mind those gorgeous chips as well.

Side orders include traditional naughties like chip butties, curry sauce (with fish, m'dear?), bread rolls and mushy peas, though the latter I have not yet seen on the list of Not Being Good For You. Perhaps they actually aren't? Wow! Put them on that TV table quick.

Wine starts at under £10

One of the lesser-known attractions of the Cornish coast in terms of quirky hostelries is this little gem tucked away at the end of a road leading off from the grandly named Atlantic Highway, Cornwall's answer to the Pacific Coast Highway from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

The building was formerly the local Slate Quarrymaster's House, now much extended and home to a typically robust local community for whom Cornwall has already long gone independent.

In that spirit the Inn is a free house, with an abundance of Cornish real ales, lager, wines and spirits. The chef calls upon local ingredients in truly loyal style and it will come as no surprise to see an abundance of the local seafood, fresh as the day, Cornish pasties, steaks, chef's specials and homemade puddings.

On Sundays they do a carvery at lunchtime, with roast ribs of beef, fresh chicken and leg of pork. The meat is good enough for the local butcher to have his name on the menu with pride. Should discretion stray beyond the legal limits they have five rooms to let, and a function room. An ideal place for that "away-from-it-all" quiet wedding.

The town of Porthleven may have acquired a trendy outlook in recent times, becoming a favoured surfing spot, but you can't possibly dismiss that it is also a fishing port. Naturally, the fish is fresh and local restaurants such as the Blue Haze make the most of the situation, drumming up some interesting food - Asian cuisine with a global slant.

For starters, there's the fishcake with ginger and herbs and a homemade apple and cider chutney, followed by grilled fillet of sea bass topped with crushed coriander seeds and honey, set on savoury cous cous with spicy tomato butter sauce. Thursday evenings are reserved for curry nights and you could choose beef, fish or chicken versions curries with naan or basmati rice. On Sundays, there's the special menu for lunch, from which you could choose roast topside of Cornish beef with Yorkshire pudding.

The Cormorant, with its stylish restaurant overlooking the magnificent scenery of the River Fowey, is a constant source of delight to those who visit, as well as those who stay awhile. The two AA-rosetted restaurant offers good traditional Cornish food with a modern twist.

The team of chefs headed by Martin Adams take every advantage of the best that Cornwall produces in the way of fish, meat, game and cheeses. A typical set menu could start with a warm salad of quail with scotched quail's egg and white truffle mayonnaise, followed by monkfish wrapped in Parma ham with shrimp butter. Desserts are typically tempting with an assiette of citrus with lemon posset, caramelised pink grapefruit tart, lime jelly and blood orange sorbet.

The extensive wine list earned them the Conde Nast Johansens 2008 Award for 'Best Wine List' in the UK and Ireland in the Small Hotels and Restaurants category. The Cormorant is a place for all seasons and their special breaks programme reflects this.