The Crab, Wantage Road, Chieveley, Berkshire (01635 247 550). Meal for two, including wine and service, £60-140
I have noted before the curious aesthetics we insist upon from seafood restaurants, but nowhere makes the point more starkly than the Crab, at Chieveley in Berkshire. We never insist that a real steak house should be one with a view of the cattle shed and the abattoir, the meal punctuated by the sound of the fizzing stun gun. Indeed, for me, a steak house is an entirely urban experience, far away from the farm. But we do expect fish restaurants to be down by the sea. I'm sure this is because, foolishly, we assume this guarantees freshness, when in truth much of the fish we eat around Britain's shores has been on a round trip to Billingsgate and back by the time it reaches our plates. Logically, therefore, a British fish restaurant could be anywhere.
Still there is something eccentric about the Crab, a converted country pub with rooms in the rolling hills outside Newbury, where the menu is up to its nipples in fantastic seafood. Outside, there is a little tropical foliage and by the door there are blackboards with the names of fish chalked upon them. There is a display case of fine specimens as you come in, and the low ceilings in the two dining rooms are slung with fishing nets (laced through with horse-racing memorabilia). From my table, in the more informal of the two rooms, I expected to hear the rush and suck of waves but, instead, could see only a field recently harvested to stubble.
No matter. The sea is on the plate. There are non-fish options - duck, mango and coriander salad among the starters, steak among the mains - but why would you want them? All the basics are here, including platters of smoked salmon or oysters, bowls of mussels, fruits de mer and bouillabaisse, but there is more complex stuff, too, served by staff who showed real enthusiasm. The declaration of intent came in the platter that landed on the table as I arrived, holding peeled prawns, a coarse tapenade and some exemplary aioli, lifted by the addition of saffron. I started with a salad of chilli salt squid, and although the slick of sweet chilli sauce at the bottom was too strident for my liking, the inclusion of crystallised ginger showed thoughtfulness.
My main course displayed the benefits of a kitchen that cooks seafood all the time. Lobster, removed from the shell, was broken up and then returned to it mixed with scallops and king prawns, before being grilled with garlic butter, but only lightly. Lobster is a delicate meat and needs only a blush of heat to make it shine. That's what it had been given here. None of this comes cheap, and nor should it. Eating seafood in these days of depleted stocks is a luxury and should sting the wallet like one; but once you've made the financial commitment, you need to know the raw ingredients are going to get the care they deserve. At the Crab they clearly do. (Though there is a good-value lunch menu at a shade under £20 for three courses, and wines start in the mid-teens.) I finished with a light vanilla panna cotta with strawberries, which again proved this to be a kitchen which recognises the virtues of basic skills.
I have only one complaint: the appalling music on the sound system. We all know that Spanish pop music is bad, but this was unnecessarily awful - though even I can tolerate such a banshee wail when the seafood is this good. With or without a view of the sea.
