Telephone: 020-8994 0086
Address: 6 Turnham Green Terrace, Chiswick, London W4
Rating: 14.5/20
If some seer had told me 25 years ago that the British would turn into a nation of raw fish eaters, I would have goggled at him. Or her ... And, of course, we haven't. The appetite for sushi may continue to grow exponentially, and be the choice of health and fashion obsessives (although if they knew a little more about raw fish, I wonder if they'd be quite so keen), but, on the whole, we still prefer our fish cooked.
Of course, we don't cook it ourselves. Far too challenging. And dangerous. And what about all those nasty bones? No, no, no. We prefer to get someone else to do the difficult part for us. So the proportion of fish on contemporary menus continues to grow, and the chains of fish restaurants pop up all over the place. Livebait and fish! were early runners, the one falling foul of corporate takeover and consequent degradation, the other to corporate greed. More recently, Loch Fyne has been taking oysters and crab cocktails to the regions, and now FishWorks is spreading through the land - or, to be more accurate, to Bristol, Bath Christchurch and Chiswick. It was this last that was shortlisted in the Tio Pepe/Carlton London Restaurant Awards and, in my capacity as a judge, I thought I should make good my ignorance of it.
As far as I am concerned, there isn't a fish restaurant in London to touch Sweetings in Victoria Street. It is rather peculiar of me, I will admit. Sweetings is the antithesis of everything modern restaurateuring stands for. It is antediluvian in style, spirit and fact, but the fish is fab, the chips are almost as good as those at the Fat Duck, the oysters are the finest known to man and the roes on toast make me weep with pleasure.
Sweetings observes the fundamentals of fish cookery - getting the objects of desire in as prime and fresh a condition as possible and doing little beyond cooking and serving them with tender precision.
With these precepts in mind, I called on Tucker to join me at FishWorks in Chiswick. I went with a slight sense of déjà vu because it is just around the corner from Fish Hoek, a South African restaurant in a street parallel to Turnham Green Terrace that I reviewed quite favourably two years ago.
In terms of design, FishWorks is as emblematic of modern restaurants as Sweetings is of those of 60 years ago. It appears to have been dressed by Ikea. That is not a criticism, it is a comment. There are blond floors, blond tables, blond chairs, white walls, clean lines, absence of clutter. It is well-lit, agreeable, energetic and, well, anonymous. It is absolutely in the spirit of metropolitan light lunching and dinky dining. It was certainly going down well with Chiswickians that lunchtime.
I tend to warm to restaurants that put razor clams and whelks on the menu, and I restrained my desire for those rarities in favour of oysters (native and fine de claire), a benchmark test for any aspiring seafood restaurant; deep-fried sprats and salt-baked harbour prawns (although from which harbour, or what significance the harbour has, I cannot tell). Tucker was minded to have crab salad (another benchmark test) and whole salt-baked bream.
Salt baking represents the extreme edge of FishWorks' culinary sophistication. It does not dress up its raw materials in fancy gear or put them through a technical mill. This is a good thing, in my view, although salt baking better suited the larger fish than the smaller crustaceans - the salt had a way of creeping into crevices on the prawns, of which there are plenty, so they tasted more of salt than they did of prawn. The salt on the bream was easily removed with the skin, leaving pearly, salt-free flesh underneath. Salt also has the effect of drawing some of the moisture from the flesh, causing it to tighten and condensing its flavour. The bream went very nicely with a salad of wafer-thin slices of fennel dressed with oil, lemon juice and chilli, an excellent idea that I have since adopted for home use.
The oysters were perfectly decent, if a little on the small side. The sprats were splendid, oozing omega oils, the benefits of which I hoped would offset the effects of the crunchy, fried skin. Sprats are another comparative rarity these days, and can hold their own against the more ubiquitous sardine or exotic anchovy any day. Tucker's crab salad was certainly not in the same class as that at Sweetings. There was more brown meat than white, and more greenery than either, but the flesh was sweet and fresh. Oh yes, and we each had a cleansingly citric lemon tart.
That brought a bill of £64 for food, £34 for liquid refreshment, and grand total of £98. I wouldn't call that expensive. I wouldn't call it cheap, either, but then I don't think fish should be cheap. Our obsession with price has devalued just about every other foodstuff, and produced a series of food scandals. I hope fish will be saved. That said, the sprats and fennel salad would have done very nicely on their own, and cost less than £10 - and that's practically Ikea pricing.
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