Case Study: Watergate Bay Hotel | Treleavens Luxury Cornish Ice Cream

Neil Haydock

Neil Haydock is executive chef at The Watergate Bay Hotel on Cornwall’s iconic Atlantic coast, and has been serving Treleavens ice cream for more than 15 years.

Neil’s partnership with Treleavens started when demand in the hotel’s three restaurants outstripped the amount of ice cream he was able to produce.

Strawberry, chocolate and vanilla are the staple flavours of every hotel order, as they’re the big winners with children, but Treleavens also makes bespoke flavours for the restaurants.

“We don’t make ice cream here but if we were to, we would be looking for the standard that Treleavens provides; they give a restaurant quality,” he said.

“It’s great to have some input and be able to influence what flavours are coming up.

“At the moment we have these fantastic plums from Italy – we could actually make the base and give it to Treleavens and they would churn it for us.

“Most ice creams these days are free flow and frozen in the pipes, but with Treleavens you really feel the quality of the ice cream; it’s that right sort of balance of cream and air.

“Some of the ice creams and sorbets are not the sort of flavours you would see in a shop and serve in a cone. They’re flavours that need something else to go with them, to complement them; they are very much a part of a dish.”