EATING NOTES
Fishy Fishy, East Street, Brighton
Dermot O'Leary opened a Restaurant in Brighton earlier this year. It's called Fishy Fishy. I've been meaning to go for a while, because Brighton is surprisingly ill-provided with good fish restaurants - with any fish restaurants, for that matter. This is a rarity and a must. Loch Fyne, my beloved Loch Fyne, which does so wonderfully in Cambridge, failed miserably here and closed down last year. I never went.
Apparently, the "all round cheery chappie" (that's Dermot) "lives for fish." He has always wanted to open a restaurant, says the website, and as he had two mates in the industry, that's what he did. Cool. Brighton is a good location. It has the happy-go-lucky culture for a Dermot-styled restaurant. This could be successful. This could be more than a celebrity whim.
"We love fish at Fishy Fishy," the website goes on in its blurb, "we love it so much we named it twice." Yes, why did you do that? Fishy always sounds a bit off to me, rotten and bodily. How should good fish smell? Fishy? No, it should smell, aromatically, of the sea. As for bodily - well, I'm sure we all have artistic imaginations. Fishy Fishy really isn't a very good name, annoying and inappropriate twice over.
Still, Fishy Fishy it is, and Fishy Fishy is on East Street, at the bottom of Western Road, so that as you trot round the corner the seafront hives hopefully into view. The derelict Laura Ashley with its mdf boards in the windows does, too, but no matter; there's the seafront and the prospect of a fishy lunch! The Brighton seafront should be lined with fish restaurants. There should be stalls selling jellied eel and oysters, brasseries, bistros, fish and chip shops. There should be Michelin starred places in imitation of Rick Stein, bustling and buzzing. But there aren't, so I don't want to be arch about Fishy Fishy. It's just that its ethos invites arch and I can't help that.
Apart from anything, it's in a lovely, old Grade II listed building. I feel warmly towards it just for that. There's something I find very affirming about old buildings being opened up and eaten and lived and celebrated in.
There's conservatory seating at the front of the restaurant. I'm sure it would be a pleasantly airy, summery place to eat when the weather is right. When I walk in, it's lunchtime. I go through the conservatory glass door, up some steps, but the inner door to the restaurant is locked. I twist the handle, then the other handle. I push the door a little desperately. Nope, it's locked. I can see people eating inside so I wave. Nothing. Embarrassed, I turn away and make my way down the steps. Only now, the door opens and a man says: "Can I help you, sir?"
I'm bad at tables for one anyway. I still find eating alone terribly embarrassing. I'm determined I shouldn't be embarrassed about it but I am. Don't look down on me. I'm not lonely, I just want a good lunch. I'm not paying to be patronised. The drama of the locked door - awkward little events like this I do find very affecting and dramatic; again, I wish I didn't but I do - really doesn't help things.
I get taken upstairs to a little table. The interior is breezy, and, like Derm, it's cheery in here. There are shades of light blue, there are white slats, dark oak and light oak, and splashes of pine. There are mismatching mirrors on the wall and big sash windows which let in wedges of bright seaside light.
There is a very nice waiter serving me who is gratifyingly gangly and stammers telling me the specials. I warm to him and say No, thank you, but I order four oysters and a glass of sparkling wine. The wine is Ridgeview Cavendish and comes from the Ridgeview vineyard in Ditchling, a village five miles away from home and one that so perfectly fits the description sleepy you wouldn't believe it unless you'd been there. It's a fact that all the inhabitants of Ditchling go to church on Sunday mornings. The chalky hills that sweep round the religious little place bless it with the right conditions for the cultivation of Champagne-style grapes. Beatific, you feel. This wine, £5 for a 125ml flute, is very fine. It's quite punchy, but it has complexity with its punch. It makes me think of caremelised pears, vanilla, too, but that's not to say there's not good dry acidity; gooseberries, you'd say, or something like that, with a fragrant, sour hit. Really good.
It should be really good with the oysters, but I'm afraid the oysters themselves are not really very good at all. I'm thinking about the little ones, with their fine sheeny shells, I had in Covent Garden last week, tangy and beguiling, and I'm comparing them to these ones, Channel rock oysters, which are obese, awkward in their thick shells, and, frankly, bland. I'm glad of the tobasco on the table alongside the plate of ice on its stand. They need it. They taste faintly briney, and of the sea, but then you'd be worried if they didn't.
Next, I pass over "Fishy Fishy fish pie" and "Fishy Fishy fish and chips" and settle on "Brightonbaisse". (I'm not saying anything.) The idea of Brightonbaisse is that it's like the Provençal original, but using locally-sourced and in-season fish. This mantra is their constitution. The menu proudly claims that they will not serve lobster at this time of year because it's not the right time for it in the channel. Neither will they import fish like tuna from abroad. We have perfectly good alternatives in Britain.
My Brightonbaisse comes with lots of mussels and a couple of scallops. They're lovely, excellently cooked, and there're no complaints. The white fish is in quite small, flakey chunks so it's rather hard to discern what it is, but it's okay, if a little dry. The sauce has a good, deep flavour; you know there have been shells and bones, onions, garlic and fennel involved in its production. But it lacks an edge of saffron and doesn't quite avoid reminding you of Heinz tomato soup. That's mean of me though; I mop up the juice with pieces of baguette and enjoy it very much. I'd just like a little more finesse, some nicely filleted fish, a couple of turned potatoes.
But maybe that's not in the spirit of the place. It's a happy-go-lucky, cheery brasserie, after all, not the place for finessing sauces and turning potatoes. In an interview the Fishy Fishy website links you to, originally published in Waitrose Food Illustrated, the interviewer talks to Dermot about his cooking. He's not bad, he says. He's experimental. "At the moment, I'm adding smoked paprika to a lot of things... Actually, I've yet to find a recipe for which it's wrong to add it; no doubt it'll happen soon."
I didn't order dessert.
I got the bill: about £25, so that's alright, I suppose. I'd have liked better for my money though, really, a little more quality, a little less groan. But having said that, Fishy Fishy does not overcharge, its prices are fair. The cooking could just be more careful.
This is a bit of an afterthought. I was supposed to be reading Saki because I'm doing my dissertation on it, but at lunch I was reading Saki because I wanted to look nonchalant. You can see the frightful green cover in the photo. I came across this in of one of the Clovis stories. I really did, by the way, I'm not just quoting something I read the other day because I have the urge to. Not that it really matters, but to me it was part of my lunch. Sitting there in Fishy Fishy, I'd rather have been sitting in Saki.
"To think of all the adorable things there are to eat in the world, and then [there are people who] go through life munching sawdust and being proud of it."
"They're like the flagellants of the Middle Ages, who went about mortifying themselves."
"They had some excuse," said Clovis. "They did it to save their immortal souls, didn't they? You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed."
Clovis relapsed for a few golden moments into intimacies with a succession of rapidly disappearing oysters.
"I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion," he resumed presently. "They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster. Do you like my new waistcoat? I'm wearing it for the first time tonight."
No comments:
Post a Comment