The Fishmarket, 23A Pier Place, Newhaven, Edinburgh EH6 4LP (0131 552 8262). Starters £7-£11. Mains £7-£36 (the latter for a whole lobster). Desserts £5. Wines from £17
There is, in my head, an alternative geography of Britain. It’s not built around the triumphalism of grand museums or cathedrals, but something much more encouraging: the places that have fed me well. If I imagine myself in York, I’m at a table in Skosh, spooning away at an egg filled with whipped egg whites and cream and toasted cheddar and a mushroom duxelles. In Manchester, I want to be at Albert’s Schloss, with the slow-roasted pork knuckle and the drag queens, probably in that order. In Gateshead, I want to be at Träkol, sucking the black-bean sauce off the sweetest of clams. The mental map is marked out in trails of knives and forks leading to plates piled with good taste.
In Edinburgh, it’s Ondine. There are other places in the city I pine for. I love the Honours and Gardener’s Cottage. But Ondine always wins. I do find the shiny surfaces and the box-shouldered 80s glitz baffling, but then I’m not there for the interiors. I’m there for the pitch-perfect seafood: for the tempura squid with its sprightly Vietnamese dipping sauce; for the heaving hot shellfish platter; for the scallops with garlic butter and bacon jam. Lick the shells clean, wipe your mouth and don’t even think about the bill. The good stuff costs.
For me to not go there during an Edinburgh visit takes something special. The prospect of the Fishmarket, part of a pier-side development at Newhaven, a few minutes’ drive from Edinburgh’s centre, is that something. It opened last spring, a collaboration between Ondine chef Roy Brett and his long-time suppliers Welch Fishmongers. Instead of Ondine’s view down the Royal Mile, there’s the glitter and ripple of the harbour waters at night. Instead of the heel click of the grand restaurant, there’s a classic metal takeaway counter and, beyond that, a simple dining room. There are walls tiled in jade green and white, and bare-wood tables.
The takeaway side looks like a standard chippy. You can have your fish battered, breaded or grilled, but that’s hardly revolutionary. Haddock and chips comes in three sizes, from standard at £7.50 to “whale” at £11.50 (a startling choice of synonym for “extra-large”. They’re serving what? Is that even legal? Oh, I see…) There’s cod, fishcakes and lemon sole. The nearest thing to fancy is battered monkfish with Vietnamese dipping sauce. There is curry sauce and mushy peas.
We head for the dining room, where the menu is more expansive. It’s not quite Ondine in trainers. The pricing this side of the divide is too punchy for that, but then the good stuff still costs. At Ondine, for example, the tempura squid is £14. Here it’s £10. We have the crab claws, a pile of eight, for £11, the shells stripped away, leaving the tips as handles, the meat breaded and deep-fried. There is a bowl of mayo on the side. It’s a satisfying plateful; an engrossing process of mayo-dredge and teeth-drag and the sweetest of white meat.
Three big langoustine – thumping great beasts of a sort that too often get sent away to Spain or France because they have eyes and claws and British people don’t hold with that sort of thing – come grilled in garlic butter. The meat pulls from the shell. There are implements to get at what’s hiding in the claws. It’s a lengthy business, as it should be for £16. A smoked haddock chowder, herb-flecked and spoon-coatingly thick, is notable for the bite in the cubes of potato. This is butch farmhouse cooking, pursued with acute attention to detail.
Alongside fishcakes and mussels comes the fish of the day: a thick wedge of snowfield-white halibut, on nutty purple potatoes with broccoli and a fair dribble of pesto. The plate clears quickly. All of this bears the fat thumbprints of Ondine. It is seafood cookery of the first order, executed by a kitchen which understands that timing is everything. There’s no point in stopping langoustine from being exported or banging a nice shiny halibut on the head if you’re only going to screw them up. They don’t.
Which leaves the fish and chips. This is where it all gets a bit weird. Because the Fishmarket is the love child of Ondine I want to dribble and rave and cheer. But I can’t. The fish is fine, but here fine isn’t good enough. You’d try it and go yeah, that’s a piece of fried fish in batter. But you wouldn’t tip your head on one side, dab at an eye and admit undying love, as you might over, say, a plank of the same at the Magpie Café in Whitby, where it arrives looking like a golden galleon in sail. Given the lineage and the price – the smallest, when not taken away, is £12 – you need to be able to feel you can leap to your feet and applaud.
If the fish is merely OK, the chips really aren’t. They’re a promise, broken. If you’re going to eat chips, you need to feel that the calories are worth it: that the potatoes have been fretted over, and allowed to swim in the bubbling fat for long enough, at least twice. There should be crunch, and the occasional shatter. These are pale and uninteresting. They’re not quite under-fried enough to warrant being returned. They are just disappointment, fashioned from dry matter. Because surely an under-fried chip is the very definition of a sad night out? Mushy peas are OK, but served in the sort of minuscule portions that give posh fish and chips a bad name.
Thank God, then, for the two desserts. There is an extremely squidgy chocolate fudge brownie, which we have with a scoop of mango sorbet. Better still is a lemon posset, with a dollop of lemon curd on top, and on the side, two still-warm madeleines. It’s a lot of dessert for £5. Of course, it doesn’t make up for the chips. Nothing will. But it soothes the heart a little. The white wine list is a dozen long and the red wines number just four, which is as it should be.
The Fishmarket has a lot going for it. They appear to have thought carefully about the proposition. And then weirdly misfired on the most important bit. If it’s possible for a restaurant to be both hugely enjoyable and utterly baffling all at once, then this really is the place.
News bites
During this trip to Scotland I stopped off at the Cheesy Toast Shack, above the beach at St Andrews. This is sandwich as main event: try the Arbroath smoky, with mature cheddar, the New Yorker with pastrami and dill pickle, or the macaroni cheese, a carb-on-carb fest, which will sustain you through many a breaker. They cost between £5 and £7. Find them on Facebook at thecheesytoastshack.
Chef Aiden Byrne, of Restaurant MCR in Manchester, is also to open a grill room in Liverpool inspired by those at grand London hotels such as the Savoy. He has taken over what was the Vincent Café and Cocktail Bar which, until recently, was owned by footballer Steven Gerrard. The Metropolitan Bar and Grill Rooms will open later this year.
The Flitch of Bacon, in Essex, which recently won a Michelin star, has been forced to close temporarily because of chronic electrical issues, causing the power to cut out in the kitchen. Chef Tim Allen told Caterer magazine the closure was ‘heart-breaking’ (flitchofbacon.co.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
