Harbour Hotel, Christchurch, Dorset BH23 3NT (01202 400 950). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £120
In a world of polarised opinions, we often forget that it’s possible to hold two thoughts in your head at the same time. A few weeks ago I wrote adoringly of Riley’s Fish Shack, a steampunk eatery on the beach at Tynemouth where the brilliant, cheap food came in thin wooden boxes, the seats were uncomfortable and a stiff easterly wind off the sea could delay service. I declared undying love.
Well the Jetty, the restaurant of the Harbour Hotel at Christchurch in Dorset, is the other thought. It is a glass box which, I imagine, looks exactly as it did when it was merely an architect’s drawing. It’s all hard glittering surfaces, with floor to ceiling windows and automatic blinds that slip down gently when the sunlight flashes too brilliantly off the quicksilver waters outside. There are comfortable chairs and sturdy bits of crockery, thick-glazed and satisfying to the touch. There are well drilled waiters in uniforms and cooking which, while recognising the modern, is rooted delightfully in classicism. And yes, of course, one lunch at the Jetty will buy you three at Riley’s. The latter is truly special. But that doesn’t make the Jetty less deserving of love. Water outside. Fish on the plate inside. It works.
I’ve reviewed this space once before, in 2009 when it was run by Gary Rhodes who at his best can be terrific, but who here felt like he was phoning it in. He departed the Jetty a few months later to be replaced by Alex Aitken, previously of Le Poussin in nearby Brockenhurst. Over the years Aitken and Le Poussin had garnered a reputation for old school food done right. Butter and cream were involved. Wild mushrooms would come from the surrounding New Forest.
I never made it there, but when he surfaced here in Christchurch I put it on the “to do” list, where it lingered. But sometimes being slow can have its rewards, for right now is exactly when it’s worth taking a look at what Aitken does. In the past year his food has spread across the south of England. There are new Harbour Hotels with new outposts of the Jetty restaurant in Salcombe, Guildford, Brighton, Chichester and now Bristol. This is the mother ship; then again Aitken wasn’t at the stoves the day I ate there. He was off tending to his expanding empire. No matter. He knows how to drill a brigade.
Clearly the locals know this, for on a weekday lunchtime it is full of those who make a moneyed retirement look very pleasant indeed. If there’s a criticism, it’s a surfeit of menus. You could lose an hour doing the paperwork: there’s an à la carte and a “catch of the day” menu, a seasonal local produce menu (which suggests everything else comes from far away and long ago), a tasting menu, even something called a mini gastro.
We get a plate of “Jetty nibbles” to sustain us through these labours: a dollop of thick, smoky taramasalata on a fragment of toast, a still hot crab croquette boisterous with brown meat and dainty curls of smoked salmon with, at their heart, a cylinder of smoked salmon mousse that is all substance and intent. Come Christmas you’ll be offered countless smoked salmon mousse rolls, courtesy of that nice M&S. The ones here are like those, only with ambition and style and grace.
A starter of octopus three ways is a master class in how to take a blunt object and bend it to your will. Cooking with octopus requires commitment verging on stubbornness. Here’s how to do it: to one side is a tentacle, which has been char-grilled to an extraordinary meatiness. On the other side, laid in delicate petals, are rounds through the tentacle so thin that I feel sympathy for the poor cook charged with the job of slicing. This carpaccio comes dressed in peppery olive oil, lemon and parsley. Finally there is more sliced octopus, long braised and sticky, punched through with garlic and chilli.
A Jetty bouillabaisse reads heftily and eats lightly. It is a fish stew-cum-soup, made by a kitchen that is deeply studied in the ways of a classic French fish soup. The broth is not some ground-down mush, all macerated shell and leftovers which steals your appetite for good; it’s a cheery stock full of depth and understanding, with a generous portion of fish and shellfish for £8.50. On the side there is toast and grated gruyère cheese and the kind of garlicky rouille that repeats on you for days. Which is as it should be. One niggle. Those myriad menus have random outbreaks of quotation marks. So the shellfish for this dish apparently comes “from the quay”. That just makes it look like it’s a euphemism, as if it “actually came from a Tupperware box at the back of the fridge”, or “a bloke called Stan who was trying to offload some gear down the pub”. Obviously it didn’t, but you get the idea. Tricky thing, punctuation.
No quote marks near the Jetty mix fish grill. It’s just pieces of bream, John Dory and turbot cooked on the bone so precisely that they are now ready to kiss that bone goodbye. There are roasted tomatoes, sticky with natural sugars, and fronds of roasted fennel pungent with anise. There are clams and fat prawns and in the middle a seaweed mayonnaise to send it all on its way. It is one of the prettiest platefuls I have seen in a long time. Again, for the quality, the price tag of £24.50 does not feel like a mugging. Another main of cod in a soothing white broth is lifted by crab meat dumplings that are all flavour and cloud-like texture. You can have ratatouille both with and without shellfish. Naturally we went for the former. Why wouldn’t you? It does what it says, bringing the earth to the very water’s edge.
We finish with an apple and blackberry crumble soufflé, because it would be rude not to. The top is crusted with a nutty crumble. At the table our waiter slices it open and fills it with a blackcurrant sauce, as if it’s being given a transfusion. The soufflé seems to rise and then sigh as that sauce goes in, and so do we. We dig down and at the bottom find lightly stewed apple. It brings to an end a meal of sunlight and flavour and professionalism, at the place where land meets sea. It doesn’t matter how many fish shacks there are – there’s always space for that.
Jay’s news bites
Pebble Beach at Barton-on-Sea in Hampshire is an old stager of a fish restaurant, with unrivalled sea views. Chef Pierre Chevillard, formerly of Chewton Glen, has all of Alex Aitken’s classical chops, plus a commitment to serving seafood at its best. If you want to get armpit-deep in fruits de mer, while staring at de mer, this is the place (pebblebeach-uk.com).
Christmas present alert: for those who like body art with their cooking, there’s a new book called Knives and Ink (Bloomsbury, £14.99) by Isaac Fitzgerald with drawings by Wendy MacNaughton. It includes illustrations of American chefs’ tattoos, the stories behind the images they chose, and recipes.
And so to the ‘What were they thinking?’ award for new Christmas food products. In third place it’s the three-tier pie cake from Asda. It’s a cake. Made of pie. In second place it’s chocolate-covered tortilla chips from M&S. But the winner from Tesco has to be the crisps flavoured with rum and chocolate. Kill. Me. Now.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
