“So were you fully booked today?”

The waiter smiled and raised his eyes: “We’re fully booked every day,” he said.

Rick Stein’s Seafood Restaurant wears its success easily.

And self-confident ease springs from its success.

Fully booked means if you’ve got your wits about you, you can afford to train a good kitchen brigade which you can trust. This in turn gives you the confidence to take as long as necessary to get the dishes right. Consistently good food means subsequent customers and critics encourage more diners and bingo - suddenly all your circles are virtuous not vicious.

You could sense the care, thought and time given to the food at the Seafood Restaurant as soon as the starters appeared. Actually you could sense it beforehand with the homemade walnut and sourdough breads, and the set of the linen and the generous space between the tables.

It was even present on the walls. Almost remarkably in a restaurant, the original art actually added to the decor rather than making you wonder why the venue hadn’t just left all the surfaces bare brick. Or even thrown rotten food at them.

My starter of ragout of brill and scallops with Vouvray and basil was a picture all by itself. It was a beauty. Gorgeous. Look at it here folks. Drool. Not on the keyboard mind as that can be costly.

Given all the red crosses on fields of white hanging off cars in Cornwall pre-World Cup I felt sympathy for St George’s dragon. “Yea,” I bet the worm had said to himself, “that girl they’ve given me’s a right looker, but I can’t wait to get my teeth into her.” It felt similarly naughty to rip into this substantial starter but you just couldn’t help yourself.

Flavours were delicate yet strong, there was contrast yet sympathy too between the scallops and the brill and the gentle white wine stock and the very evident basil. The carrots and other veg were cooked just right, as were the later sides of potato, beans, peas and carrots. Perfect timing was characteristic of the whole experience.

The starter showed how you get the best from fish which can suffer from not being as upfront and bold as blood-soaked meats. You need to set fish off with something else, bring out its subtleties by contrast. I’m drooling again.

The lobster and fennel risotto and stir fried mussels with black beans, garlic, coriander and spring onions were equally clever. The stock in the mussels was spooned up like soup and shared between us: a hymn to the light and uplifting flavours of Thailand.

There was a moment of doubt over one of the mains. The wild Scottish halibut came in buttery sauce of Muscadet, dill, carrots and celery and the balance was off. The fish was swamped in the sauce, so the flavours were crunched.

That was the only problem though. The char-grilled sea bass with tomato, butter and vanilla vinaigrette had the equilibrium the latter dish had lacked, with tomatoes that were so juicy and sweet they seemed to have been crossed with melons. An order of thick cut chips again showed that the Seafood Restaurant understands how the devil lies in the detail. These were stonkingly good chips.

My escalope of wild sea trout was almost as pretty as my starter and totally satisfying. Moist is the word we need here, the fish given lustre and bite through the warm olive oil, with extra presentation points for the strips of skin left on the cut.

The smallest child decided too much fish was a bad thing here and went for the steak cooked as he’d requested, ‘medium rare’. He finished the plate.

Finally the desserts. Getting desserts right is becoming more and more important for the top quality places. They are no longer the bought in, crowd-pleasing after thoughts. We’re regressing to the late 18th century when sugary delicacies became more available and people went mad for them.

We had passion fruit pavlova with creme anglaise, lemon posset with grilled figs and apparently the best baked chocolate mousse and raspberry sorbet in the world – according to the 13-year-old. I again came up trumps with a perfect posset and figs that matched them all the way. The pavlova was a charmer too, but the lad was right; the mousse cake was glorious and its lush sorbet made you think you’d fallen into a vat of raspberries.

We had a bottle of Chateau du Cleray Musacadet 2008 (£27.50), a refined drink to match the talent evident in the brill and scallops dish.

We didn’t finish this, so the staff re-corked it and we took it away. Service was excellent throughout. The food by the way was courtesy of the three-course £35 set menu.

Let’s return to the theme we started with: the comfort zone that a successful restaurant builds around itself. Maybe this is the reason chefs go all celebrity.

At the worst you become a man (it usually is a man) who gets distracted by the fame, thinks it all comes easy and fails - a situation the long-winded Jean-Christophe Novelli described in Manchester a couple of weeks ago.

At best, as Rick Stein shows, you make it part of a plan that allows you to build. You take the TV fame and gain extra audience for your business, then armed with that guaranteed audience of curious people you perfect the restaurant, then expand the business until a place like Padstow becomes Padstein, with four branded outlets from the energetic chef/entrepreneur.

Lucky Padstow I say.

As for Rick Stein, his Seafood Restaurant was superb. There’s nothing fishy about his success in the slightest.

Confidential flew to Newquay Airport from Manchester Airport. Padstow is around twenty minutes from Newquay Airport by hire car.

Rating:	17.5/20
Breakdown:	8.5/10 food 4.5/5 service 4.5/5 ambience
Address:	The Seafood Restaurant Riverside Padstow Cornwall 01841 532700

Venues are rated against the best examples of their kind: fine dining against the best fine dining, cafes against the best cafes. Following on from this the scores represent: 1-5 saw your leg off and eat it, 6-9 get a DVD, 10-11 if you must, 12-13 if you’re passing,14-15 worth a trip,16-17 very good, 17-18 exceptional, 19 pure quality, 20 perfect. More than 20: Gordo gets carried away