Fin Boys, 2 Mill Road, Cambridge CB1 2AD (01223 354 045; fin-boys.com). Snacks and starters £7- £18, mains £32-£38, desserts £8, wines from £27
If you choose to sit at the deep-varnished wooden counter of Fin Boys in Cambridge, which is the best place to sit, chef Richard Stokes may well tell you things. He’ll tell you about the Cornish day boats that supply their fish, and the WhatsApp group of skippers who ping him with news of the catch early each morning. He’ll tell you about the giant scallops they sometimes get from Orkney, the size of a Dobermann’s paw. He’ll talk about the sauces he makes from smoking and grinding fish bones, and the Asian shops a few doors down, with their stocks of dried ground scallop and shrimp for his oof and aaah of an XO sauce. He’ll tell you a lot of things.
What you won’t see is the culinary burst of flame or gust of smoke. There’s barely more kit in the open kitchen behind him than there is in mine at home. Their location beneath two floors of flats demands it. There’s a four-ring induction hob, a small induction plancha and, in the corner, a sizeable oven. I point to the door out back. “We’ve got a fridge out there,” Stokes says. So both the décor and the gadgets are stripped back. And yet out of here come fish and seafood dishes which will, by turns, make you grin, nod approvingly and often just simply lean in over your plate to get on with the job at hand.
It’s a curiously briny restaurant to find on a shopping parade in the heart of inland Cambridge. Perhaps they’re just working with what they’ve got. Stokes, who has the floppy fringed air of someone who is comfortable with his nerdiness, was previously the head chef at nearby Parker’s Tavern, when it was at the height of its popularity. The other fin boy is Jay Scrimshaw, who spent time cooking at both Bibendum and Chez Bruce in London. When they opened in 2021, they were more fish shop than restaurant. They pursued the doctrine of lip-to-caudal-fin fish “butchery” espoused by the Australian chef Josh Niland. He argues that fish should be treated like other animals; that the whole carcass should be used. If you want recipes for fish sausages and wellingtons, for a marlin ’nduja and a flathead mortadella, Niland’s your man.
Fin Boys saw themselves as a repository of good ingredients, alongside a few pre-prepped dishes and advice. They built their relationships with those Cornish day boats and their sustainable fishing methods. They sourced bluefin tuna from a farm in Galicia; they made sure the scallops were hand-dived. And some nights each week they would become a restaurant. Three months ago, however, they scrapped the main retail business. The demand just wasn’t there. A lot of home cooks seem terrified of fish. They see fins and scales and eyes, staring back at them, and run away gibbering. Now, Fin Boys is solely a restaurant. There’s an à la carte for most of the week, and an £85 six-course tasting menu on Friday and Saturday evenings. A lot of that comes boosted with Japanese umami-rich flavours: think white soy and togarashi spice, shisho leaf and Kewpie mayo and bonito. Flavour is in the detail.
Today’s lunch menu starts with a list of snacks including prawn toast. “You should have it,” Stokes says. “It’s very good.” He’s not wrong. The base is a thick slab of shokupan or Japanese milk bread, which is basically white sliced that’s been taught some delightful manners. It’s been fried until golden. The wedge of sesame-crusted minced prawn on top has been showered with furikake, that bold seasoning mix of ground seaweed and more sesame. It’s then dribbled with oyster sauce, to remind you that this is very much seafood cookery.
From the list of raw dishes come deep purple lozenges of tuna, seared around their edges, with a crisp salad of shaved mooli, a dollop of cooling labne and a boldly savoury nitsume sauce made by roasting any available fish bones. Pearly slices of seared scallop lie on a bed of samphire under drifts of a bright green parsley and garlic crumb. It feels rather traditional by comparison, but in a good way. As does a heaving shellfish platter for £38. That may sound like a hefty price tag, but it really isn’t. Good seafood should never be cheap. Here’s a beautifully dressed Portland crab, the white meat flecked with finely chopped herbs. Here are shell-on prawns, big fat crevettes and oysters. The Fin Boy flourish comes courtesy of a restrained aioli, and both a hot sauce made with the iodine rush of seaweed and a more Asiatic mix of soy, ginger and garlic. We lean over all of this, tearing at shells, dipping, and dredging. Occasionally we make a pitstop at the finger bowl before returning to shove our hands wrist-deep into the seafood funk.
Next up, two red mullet fillets, the skin crisply fried so it shimmers by turns rosy and golden. Underneath, is a heap of ostentatiously colourful rainbow chard in a mess of their XO sauce; a brew of dried seafood, ground mushrooms, miso and soy. It’s the sort of condiment you want to take home to meet the family, so you can all be friends. Alongside, we have a salad of tomatoes as plump as muffin tops, with roasted peaches and torn basil. It’s hinged delicately between sweet and savoury.
Desserts include a summer pudding, the deep purple of a bishop’s vestments, and a Basque cheesecake. “I suspect you get a lot of Basque cheesecake in London,” Stokes says wearily, as if the capital is overrun with pastry sections so bereft of ideas all they can do now is mix cream cheese, sugar and eggs and bake it. Sometimes it does feel that way. He insists I try his and fair enough: it isn’t the deathly, drying puck that Basque cheesecake can be. It’s creamy and light and soft.
At the end, Stokes passes us a tiny bowl bearing four cherry tomatoes, as if they are petit fours. “Try those,” he says. “Properly delicious.” By this point I’m really not surprised. Fin Boys is that entrancing combination of inventive cookery and seriously good ingredients. It seems at first sight to be a modest venture. The space is monkishly unadorned. But that’s because the food coming out of that minimalist kitchen is allowed to provide all the thrills and excitement and colour. It’s a restaurant driven by both an obsession with fishy detail and a profound instinct to feed. The result is completely compelling.
Jay’s news bites
Dan Lee, who won MasterChef: The Professionals in 2021, is to open a permanent street food outlet at Birmingham’s Hockley Social Club food hall next month, following his recent residency there. The menu at Dai Pai Dong, a Hong Kong term for an open-air food stand, will feature BBQ Szechuan lamb flatbreads, salt and chilli chicken wings and a brownie with milk miso caramel (hockleysocialclub.com).
The London-based five-strong vegan restaurant group Mildreds, which opened its first outpost in 1988, is to launch two new sites next year, after having negotiated a multi-million-pound investment. MiMa, a plant-based bakery serving pastries, open sandwiches, and salads, will debut at the redeveloped Wimbledon Quarter, inside a former fire station and will have 100 seats. The second new venture will be in Victoria (mildreds.co.uk).
The Hardwick, the Abergavenny restaurant of veteran chef Stephen Terry, has closed suddenly. The end was announced in an Instagram post which ended with the words “It’s been emotional. Onwards and Upwards.” Earlier this year a couple who defrauded the restaurant of £150,000 avoided a prison sentence, a judgement Terry described as “an absolute joke”. Terry, who was previously named restaurateur of the year in the Cateys, had been at the Hardwick since 2005.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
