The restaurant 2 Fore Street lives on Mousehole harbour, near gift shops: the post office and general store have closed, leaving a glut of blankets and ice cream, the remnants of Cornish drama. It’s a truism that Mousehole is hollowed out – tourism changes a place, and no one knows that better than Mousehole. Eating at 2 Fore Street gives the visitor the opportunity to examine what they have done with what they call love.

Mousehole is one of those cursed villages that gather in the south-west: haunted in winter and glutted in summer, to paraphrase ‘The Pirates Next Door’. Darkened cottages have Q codes, not families, and only the postman knows the true number of year-round residents, a question that offends them. There are benefits if you are selfish. Driving through a storm to drink at the Old Ship is a bleak pleasure, because no pub has a blacker granite floor: it is a mirror made of part of a mountain. And beauty – with people, without people – is still beauty, even if the village reminds me most of a closed theme park I once discovered in Bulgaria, and loved.

The remnants are interesting, as remnants always are. Mousehole has its own myth – Tom Bawcock, who sailed into the storm to feed the starving village. When they realised he had gone, they stood on the harbour wall to light him home and used his fish to make Stargazy Pie. (That they had pastry, potatoes and eggs is a plot hole that fascinates me.)

2 Fore Street is as lovely as the village that it lives in: so much so that it appears in the children’s story ‘The Mousehole Mice’ as a café particularly beloved by tourist mice. Would human tourists eat in this café for mice? Of course: people will take fiction if that is what is offered. There is also a short novel, The Mousehole Cat: the testimony of Bawcock’s magician cat, but even Mowzer couldn’t solve the puzzle of the pastry, potatoes, and eggs.

There are vast glass windows for the diner to be seen; pale walls and floors; subtle art; fine, sparse furniture; and absolutely no nautical-themed décor. (Few boats fish out of Mousehole, but I have a friend who keeps a mooring for the parking that comes with it. I yearn for an inflatable swan. Some of them seat eight.) There is a garden too, a rare thing in Mousehole, with succulents, blankets, and ice cream.

The first time I came here I ate a blue-cheese soufflé and a rice pudding with strawberry jam: the kind of jam that induces nostalgia. This is food for greedy children, so glorious I stopped eating out anywhere else. I even briefly abandoned the weird Thai van near the Merry Maidens which, on October nights, appears like an apparition from the mist: a Flying Dutchman restaurant with the same haunted quality as Maxim’s in Paris, if less dependent on silks. There is a mania to creating 30 perfect soufflés a night that I cherish: the chef is Joe Wardell, who trained with Raymond Blanc, and he produces food of the same vivid yet familiar kind. This is home cooking, but idealised. It serves good, well-priced breakfasts – a croissant with jam and butter is £3.25 – and, later, bloodied meats, soups, and fish of all kinds.

This is a skilful, charming restaurant in this singular village: it self-consciously excels, with something like pride, and I suppose that is a memorial of sorts. Mousehole is as necrotic as it is lovely, but here something beats for the living still.