London is a truly great seafood city: here are our favourite seats at the bar for cracking, picking and shucking.
The great metropolitan areas of Europe and North America inevitably pull in some of the best seafood caught around their respective coastlines. This makes them great places to eat fresh seafood, especially given modern standards of transport and refrigeration. London’s famous Billingsgate Fish Market has been operating since the sixteenth century (with its origins as a general market stretching back even further), casting its net as wide as Scotland’s tempestuous seas and Cornwall’s rocky coves. London’s great seafood restaurants source directly from the country’s other fantastic markets and suppliers too, Peterhead’s vast fish market in Aberdeenshire or Brixham in Devon, for example.
So strap on your plastic lobster bib or fine linen napkin and take a break from the urban soundtrack with the soothing seaside clatter of shells and crack of crustaceans. Here’s our pick of the fishy catch, particularly when shellfish is the order of the day.
Sheekey’s, as it is familiarly known, combines something of the gentlemen’s club with the exotic perfume of London’s historic theatreland. But it’s neither as fusty as the former would suggest nor as louche and glitzy as the latter might imply. Instead, it’s a warm, leather-armchair of a place, formal to a certain degree but welcoming, comforting. Serving hungry audiences and actors (the great Shakespeareans rather than impoverished chorus boys, one suspects) for well over a hundred years, the fish-heavy menu offers some lovely British shellfish including oysters from Jersey, Lindisfarne and Ireland, Portland crab and mussels from the Shetland isles. There’s a toe in contemporary waters with the likes of modish soft-shelled crab and the odd miso glaze or yuzu paste but to my palate it’s the likes of Cornish fish stew and the excellent fish pie that win the day.
Only Nyetimber and Rathfinny of the English sparkling brigade make it on to the Champagne-heavy wine list. With the likes of Billecart Salmon and Jacquesson on offer, it's hard to feel too aggrieved. The still selection includes some serious wines. Burgundy-focused (Alain Chavy’s exemplary Puligny-Montrachet is available by the glass – oh, happy day), they also offer the full array of lighter fish-loving whites from the Loire and Galicia, as well as gems from Italy, Alsace and the new world. Reds are inevitably Pinot-dominated, reading like a Who’s Who of its home region and producers around the world. I haven’t tried the house Sea the Stars cocktail (whiskey, banana liqueur, honey & dill water, ginger ale) but I’ve made a slightly trepidatious note to do so. There’s even Sunday afternoon jazz to accompany the banana and dill experiment.
Decked out in smart, utilitarian black and white tiles (the building once played host to a Victorian butcher’s shop), the marble-counter-top ambiance makes for a Dickensian hideaway with a dash of French flair. Chandeliers and glass boules add to the Parisian chic, lighting enlivened by the very Soho addition of the odd disco ball. It’s a charming place with lots of character and great food expertly prepared under the eye of Head Chef Ed Baines.
You can pick up the French inflection in dishes like Bouillabaisse and condiments like rouille and aioli. Even the oyster section of the menu is entitled huîtres, somewhat ironically as most of them are from British and Irish shores: Cooley’s sweet Carlingfords, Gallagher’s west-coast rocks and Cumbraes from Scotland, amongst others. There are Natives to be had too, when in season. It’s all topped off with a nod to Soho’s Italian heritage with vongole, Tuscany’s Boschetto al Tartufo cheese and zucchini fritti. The south-west’s finest brown crabs are rightly honoured, although as Norfolk-raised I always wonder why I don’t see more Cromer crabs on London menus. I must remember to ask next time I am there (R&A or Cromer, that is). The rather fine Plat de fruit de mer has the usual optional lobster, and there’s a smaller, more manageable Assiette for the (in every way) tighter-of-belt. There are daily specials boards as well – on a real black board with chalk ‘n everything – and a bit of good, carefully-chosen cheese.
The wine list is put together with wine guru Joe Wadsack. It’s nicely compact (although rumour has it there’s a Fine Wine tome knocking about too) and takes you to all the right places for fish-friendly wines. The vast majority are available by the glass so there’s no excuse but to try a few options as your meal unfurls. Hungary’s star pupil Furmint, fermented dry, makes a great fish wine for example and the Etna Bianco is a super, minerally foil for shellfish (this one from the quality hand of Planeta).
Occupying a smart glass-fronted affair in Covent Garden’s Henrietta Street, the name refers, one assumes, to the two founders (Matt Lovell and Rob Hampton) and also to the thousands of anonymous fisherfolk, past and present, who have dared tide and tempest to bring these pearls to our table. Oystermen is a great little place that does honour to them both. To the left as you go in is a buzzy zinc-topped oyster bar which is great for couples and especially for solo guzzling (not so for larger groups, unless you are of the craning-and-hollering brigade). There are more trad tables of course and even a few seats in the window for Covent Garden watching. The whole place has a Lyonnaise-brasserie lilt but definitely speaks the London vernacular.
Oysters, raw and cooked, come in an array of temping incarnations. Japan, a country with a great oyster-eating tradition, gets a nod with tempura, wasabi, yuzu, shiso etc. It doesn’t define the menu, however, which is quite content to roam between France, Italy, Scotland with well-handled eclecticism. If you can tear yourself away from the titular shellfish, then the tuna tartare “snack”, served with black garlic mayonnaise is pretty unmissable as is the anchovy toast. From there you might graduate up through something light, pickled or ceviche-ed to a whole pan-fried number. And be very happy about it. Crab will keep beckoning however (hopefully not too enthusiastically). You might as well give in and dedicate a good while to cracking and sucking accompanied only by a bowl of their exemplary mayonnaise and a slight feeling of greasy-chinned hunter-gatherer.
Wine-wise, there’s a cheery Gavi spumante by the glass (Italy makes an enormous amount of sparkling wine, from just about any grape variety that grows locally). From there, you can gaze up to the sparkling stars of the Pol Roger/Louis Roederer firmament. The still white selection ranges nicely across France, Italy and Spain calling in at most of the right ports.
I was reminded of the delights of Wright Brothers recently when I ordered a sushi making kit from their new collection with Yuki's Kitchen. A fun evening was spent trying to master the basics of temaki and uramaki with some decidedly homespun results (a book and online classes are available!). The highlight of the experience was undoubtedly the generous portions of sashimi-grade yellowfin tuna and Ora King salmon that came ice-packed and briny-fresh (and sadly met their end under my less-than-sushi-grade knife skills).
Founded just over 20 years ago, the Wright brothers started out as oyster merchants, developing into wholesale and oyster farming. They now supply some of the country’s top restaurants as well as running the aforementioned home delivery of a range of seafood. In 2005 they launched the first of their three London restaurants, in Borough Market. Watching the theatre at the pass during a quick lunchtime perch and guzzle is always good here or you can sit at one of the high tables that even spill out on to the pavement on good-weather days. The oyster selection is fantastic: Scotland, Ireland and Jersey’s finest as you’d expect but also French royalty such as Fine or Spéciale de Claire. Of particular note is their Oyster Happy Hour (Monday to Thursday, 3–6pm) when oysters are a “pound a pop”.
I recently popped into their little South Kensington place and sat in the window looking out on to the slightly tatty swank of the Old Brompton Rd. A small plate of taramasalata starting things off: not the lurid pink stuff of supermarket infamy but pale ivory and utterly delicious. It was cleverly topped with roasted fennel seed and served simply with pickled cucumber. A selection of their raw and cooked oysters went down brilliantly with a glass of the house Champagne – a blend created with Piper-Heidsieck. It was, unusually for a seafood wine, heavy on the Pinot Noir but its fruit notes worked very well indeed: nicely autolytic and textured but nothing to swamp the seafood. I’ve yet to visit the Battersea Power Station branch, although I’ve booked one of their popular oyster masterclasses there later in the year (classes also available online).
