Colmans Seafood Temple, Sea Road, South Shields NE33 2LD (0191 511 1349). Starters £9.50-£15.95, mains £13.95-£46, desserts £4.95-£6.95, wines from £21.95
Calling your restaurant a temple to anything is a bold move, but the Colman family in South Shields has an excuse, and it’s not the menu. The menu is great. It’s all the things you want from a restaurant like this looking out over the foaming waves, plus a few things you didn’t know you needed. The excuse is the building. Colmans Seafood Temple, which opened in 2017, is built out of a colonnaded bandstand first constructed in 1931. It quickly became known as Gandhi’s Temple although, according to local history, no one is quite sure why. There is no evidence of Mahatma Gandhi either worshipping or being worshipped here. There were, and still are, public lavatories in its base. Every seafront needs a set of those. For decades it stood lonely on its grass-lawned island, both a landmark and a refuge from the winds belting off the North Sea and up across Sandhaven beach.
Eventually, the Colman family, which has been serving fish and chips in these parts since they first opened a beach shack in 1905, was given planning permission to build a restaurant out of Gandhi’s Temple. The original structure has been glassed in and now houses a bar serving oysters and cocktails. That’s my kind of church. At the other end, the dining room has a pointed prow as if it’s about to surge out to sea. On this Friday lunchtime we are on the right side of the plateglass, because the waves down there are huge and the skies are darkening. There will be rain by the time the main courses arrive, slapping itself against the windows as if eager to get inside. Better than last week, our waiter says. Then the whole building seemed to shake in the gale-force winds. But here we are in the sleek dining room with its ceiling sculpture of shoaling fish and its shiny surfaces.
Colmans faced an interesting challenge with this business. Over on Ocean Road, where they started trading in 1926, it’s haddock or cod with fat chips, and a senior citizen’s special for £8.99. Yes, there are a few flourishes that lift it away from the standard chippie. They’ll grill your fish if you’d prefer it that way, can do you lemon sole alongside the cod and haddock, and make much of their sustainability practices: the healthy fishing grounds their wild catch comes from, via the small day boats sailing out of the quay in Sunderland. Yet it still presents itself very much as offering catering for the masses.
The Seafood Temple must hold true to that heritage, while examining horizons as big as the ones glowering beyond the windows. So yes, you can have a cup of tea for £2.50 to go with your fish and chips. Today there’s a large party next to us doing just that. Here come plates heaving with the golden deep-fried stuff, which is less lunch than birthright. But there are other fancier routes to tread. The sizeable oysters come from nearby Lindisfarne, as they should, and are offered three ways: they come unadorned and brisk and salty as the waves, but also in their own crisp batter overcoat with a coarse tartare sauce and finally in a dressing of chilli and lime, slung loosely with fronds of coriander.
They had good reason to think the latter would fly with the locals. Riley’s Fish Shack, down on the beach at King Edward’s Bay on the other side of the Tyne, was already doing a roaring trade in fish empanadas and chargrilled skewers. So why shouldn’t Colmans offer, say, XL crispy prawn tacos, two for £12.95? The XL is not hyperbole. These are huge specimens, split, panko-crumbed and deep fried, then dribbled liberally with the umami whack of Japanese mayo and okonomi sauce, a sweeter Japanese take on Worcestershire sauce. A sprinkle of togarashi spice provides a little heat. It’s one for your hands and messy to eat. Share with a friend so you’re messy together. Or be a little more refined and have the soufflé Arnold Bennett, rich with smoked haddock, as the name demands. It’s my second cheese soufflé in my two-week tour of the northeast, and it’s another one to get you through the cold months: butch with tangy cheese and mustard and smoky fish.
For £91.95 they’ll do you a hot seafood platter for two. I mention it, much as I would a local landmark. Just look at that. Instead, we order the whole fish of the day. It’s a sea bass the length of my forearm for £29.95, roasted in a caper butter. They tell us it’s for one, but this slab of crisped salty skin and pearly flesh just sliding from the bone would do for two, alongside their chunky chips. A Malaysian seafood curry has a thick, spiky broth which dares to speak its spicy name, but for £21.95 feels light on content. There are mussels on this menu. A few of those wouldn’t go amiss at the price.
We attend to the essentials, which means ordering the chip-shop curry sauce for £2. The fear is that some ambitious chef, who knows a few things about roasting spices, will have tried to “improve” it. Happily, that’s not the case. A proper chip-shop curry sauce should taste like it’s staining your insides while raising your blood sugar, with its mix of rough spiced heat and sweetshop raucousness, just as this does. It’s the Ultra High Processed Food we can all get behind. A round of applause, too, for their mushy-pea fritters, which are fat discs of thick pea loveliness in a lacy batter overcoat which leaves behind chip-shop scraps on the plate, there to be picked at. The impact of all this is cumulative. They’ve devised a menu that is part bargain-priced Bentley’s or Scott’s, part kiss-me-quick-and-kiss-me-again. You can come here for something light and dainty. Or you can come here for something that will harden your arteries at 20 paces. If you’re planning a walk on the beach afterwards leaning into the wind, do go for the latter.
Dessert is a victory of shopping. My companion is a local chef, who nods at a well-known food service company’s van, parked up outside. There’s nothing especially wrong with the offer of a dark chocolate torte, sticky toffee pudding or ice-creams. Just know they’re not made here. Don’t let that distract from the headline. Colmans Seafood Temple may not exactly be a house of God. But they do pay serious attention to all the details. For this diehard atheist, that’s what matters.
News bites
A village in Cumbria has come together to save its last remaining pub. The Miners Arms has been trading in Nenthead for generations, but closed in 2020 and never reopened. Now the locals have formed the Miners Arms Community Association to raise funds to buy it. To learn more and donate to the campaign or, as their website puts it, ‘buy the Miners a pint’, go here.
Big name chefs Tom Kerridge, Tom Aikens and Monica Galetti have joined more than 230 hospitality companies in signing an open letter created by industry body UKHospitality, calling for business rates to be frozen and government help to be extended. Currently, eligible businesses get a 75% discount on business rates up to £110,000 each for the 2023/24 tax year, a scheme announced during the 2022 autumn statement. It runs out at the end of March. ‘With rising costs and ongoing challenges, time is running out,’ Tom Kerridge said, referring to the tough trading conditions for hospitality, ‘and without further support from government they will shut their doors.’
Sad news from Sheffield where the social enterprise Blend Kitchen has been forced to close due to a funding crisis brought on in part by the long tail of the pandemic. Blend Kitchen was incorporated in 2016 to assist vulnerable adults with disabilities and mental health issues into work by providing training and employment. They managed to secure a permanent location in the city but they say a lack of local trade due to large numbers of people working from home, meant cashflow never materialised.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
