Riley’s Fish Shack, King Edward’s Bay, Tynemouth. Meal for two including drinks and service: £45. No bookings

Call off the search. Close down the web browser and put away the guide books. I have found the eating experience of the year. It’s the sort of place that people mumble irritatingly about to each other, in a way that makes it sound like some tiresome gastronomic Shangri-La; honey-toned and utterly unobtainable. We roll our eyes at such stories. We assume that the experience is better in the retelling than in the reality, its virtues amplified by the efforts some might have to make to get there. Lunch always tastes better when it comes glazed with struggle.

To be fair some of this may apply to Riley’s Fish Shack. It’s on the beach at King Edward’s Bay, half an hour’s drive from Newcastle. It really is hidden. The sat nav took me to a shopping street in Tynemouth. We parked up and wandered to the front. There, we looked down over the Edwardian railings and the vertiginous shoreline to the shack. We knew it was the place. There was a film-fun-style cartoon of a fish skeleton on the roof, the motif repeated across all the deckchairs out front. A wisp of smoke pirouetted from its Hobbit chimney on the roof. We started our descent.

The shack belongs to Adam Riley, who did some of his training on the Isle of Man, before moving to the north east to work with his father’s theatre company. He shifted sideways into street food, and for two years ran a mobile fish cart on the beach.

The knackered cart is still parked up on the sand in front of the “shack”, in truth two full side-access shipping containers, those sides opened out to form the balcony floor. It’s then been fitted out steampunk-style in a mixture of dark wood and artfully rusted steel. The balcony out front has a narrow counter so you can sit on hardwood stools and look out over the beach, under cover of yellow tarpaulins. Industrial-scale trawlers bob and turn far out on the bay, the result of a shipping bankruptcy a few months back.

Alternatively, if the weather is keeping to type, there’s some basic seating inside, behind sliding glass doors. They need them. This being the north east, Riley’s don’t do anything as feeble as seasonal opening. The shack is open all year round. If you want to fit in, wear a T-shirt in December. Most of the inside space, however, is taken up by a wood-fired oven, squatting like a giant red-backed ladybird, its flame-filled mouth open to the door, plus a long grill.

The menu is short and based around a handful of virtues. They have that oven. They have fish. They have crisp-roasted garlicky potatoes. They have a killer bread recipe, for use as flatbreads and for casings of what they call empanadas, but you can call pasties. They have crunchy salads. Adam has a beard and a woolly cap. All of these things are essential. The food is served in thin wooden boxes, with wooden disposable knives and forks. It is messy. It is so, so good.

Two fat fillets of fresh mackerel, seared on the grill until the skin is blackened and bubbled, come on piles of those dark, crisped potatoes, with both a fennel and a green salad and a freshly made, lightly charred flatbread, still smoking delicately in the box. There is a spiced tomato relish, and a bolshie smear of salsa verde to lend the necessary high acidic notes. Tear off a piece of bread, break up the fish and shove one inside the other. It costs £7.50.

At twice the price there are fillets of plaice, so white and virginal the Vatican would probably write them a glowing letter of recommendation. They are cooked en papillote in the oven, with squared-off boiled potatoes, nutty-brown shrimps, samphire and mussels still in the shell, so that they produces their own limpid broth. It is the pristine quality of fish cookery you always hope to find in one of those fancy, raised pinkie finger London places, but rarely do.

Skewers of squid, big ones with thick tentacles that once put work in, have been shown the grill just long enough to char without allowing them to seize up. Then there are the empanadas, big bready triangles so chunky you could sleep on them if you were short of bedding. One hides a mess of long-stewed beef and oysters, cooked down to a tangle of animal with the sweet, happy funk of the bivalve. The other is spiced salmon, like the best Thai fish cake, breathing hot aromatics over you with each bite. Yours for £4 each, £10 for three.

There is a short wine list priced between £16.50 and £25, and a bit of craft beer. Music, involving double basses, heartache and vocals sung by men with names like Brad or Thorsten, roars across the beach as if calling to the abandoned trawlers out on the North Sea. We sit at the outside counter, scarved and coated against the early autumn bluster, fork away boxes of terrific fish cookery and watch children in wellies running between the deckchairs on the beach, artfully placed around fire pits.

Quickly it strikes us: this is a Boden catalogue photoshoot, brought to life. It is every boho, middle-class food fantasy made real. And you know what: it’s bloody fantastic. The food is a minor miracle given the circumstances, the price achingly reasonable, and the setting utterly perfect. Oh, my dear, sweet darlings, I think I’m in love.

There are some pre-packaged brownies available on the bar, and coffee, but to secure them you will have to join the queue again, and as the afternoon or evening draws on that can become lengthy. My advice is to work off some of those roasties by climbing back up the cliff to the high street. A little way down on a corner, you will find Gareth James Chocolatier. The coffee is good and they supply the brownies sold at Riley’s. The salted caramel version is thick and fudgy.

Better still, get a few of their domed salted caramel chocolates which are as good as any I’ve tried anywhere. The tempered chocolate shell is crisp; the liquid centre is that perfect balance of sweet to salt. And suddenly, like those chocolates, I’m gushing all over again. But that’s the way it is. For a few glorious hours on a Sunday afternoon, Tynemouth is the very pin-prick centre of my culinary universe.

Jay’s news bites

■ The equivalent of Riley’s Fish Shack at Oban is even more basic. The Oban Seafood Hut, on the quay where the CalMac ferries to the islands depart, has only outside tables. The freshest seafood emerges on paper plates: huge scallops and langoustine are served in puddles of garlicky butter. There are crab sandwiches as thick as a Hilary Mantel novel and the most you can spend is £25 on a seafood platter, with lobster.

■ Until the end of next week, Fernando Stovell, chef at Stovell’s in Chobham, Surrey will be drawing on the Mexico of his birth to serve a seven-course Day of the Dead tasting menu, yours for £78 a head. It includes fish grilled over citrus wood and served with guajillo and ancho chilli.

■ For those who fear Brexit means an end to culinary internationalism, some good news: Mamuśka!, the Polish restaurant at London’s Elephant and Castle, is looking to build on Britain’s sizable Polish community with five more branches within the M25, and in Manchester, Liverpool or Bristol.

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1