This excellent restaurant was never all at sea, and now that it’s added a choice of quiveringly fresh fish it’s one of London’s best catches
‘After two years in London I’ve developed great relationships with all my suppliers and fish is no exception. That’s why I’ve created Fish Market, to show off and cook the best UK fish’
Jeru’s Executive Chef Roy Ner likes to come out and chat to diners, the chefs in the long open kitchen behind him don’t need standing over, you can see they are all getting the dishes out like a well-oiled machine.
I’m standing by his display of fresh fish and tonight I can see Monkfish, Seabass, Red Snapper Sea Bream, Gurnard and Lemon Sole and Lobster, all fresh, line caught and sustainable and from boats in Brixham, Peterhead and Fraserburgh. It’s now up to the diner to choose a fish and then how it’s to be cooked – cured, charcoal grilled, steamed or baked.
We ponder on that for a bit and then decide on shared monkfish, charcoal grilled, and go back to the regular menu for our pre-dishes, one of which has to be the potato bread with truffle honey, chickpea miso butter. We ate this two years ago and I’ve been dying to have it again.
Freshly baked in the wood fired oven that’s by the restaurant entrance, it’s even better than I remember. The 72-hour fermented bread is fluffy, moist and chewy, the butter decadent and that truffled honey just makes me a bit weepy. It’s so good.
A ‘mezze’ of roasted aubergine and tahini striped with Piquillo peppers and enlivened by a mint dressing is also excellent. Aubergine, particularly the ones we get here in the UK, can be so deadly dull but roast one, particularly in or over charcoal, and it takes on a whole new character. Solid yet buttery and with a smoky aroma against the very sweet peppers and a sesame loaded tahini.
Jerusalem artichokes get a bad rep in the UK. On allotments they take over like weeds, ask me how I know, they are also an absolute pain to peel and their effects on the digestion are well known, and usually audible, for some hours later. Not everyone knows, by the way, that it’s actually a species of Sunflower.
So full marks to Jeru for making it so tasty, By roasting these hasselback-style (slotted like a toast rack) lots of flavour gets in and each is topped off with a white anchovy. Celeriac, another vegetable rather ignored in the UK, has been roasted and pureed with tahini with spring onions on top and plenty of olive oil. We love the crunch of the artichoke, the umami of the anchovy and celeriac is always good.
Raw tuna, or tuna tartar if you like, with a fennel salsa, whipped avocado and herbs is another excellent dish, fennel is an unusual choice but a very good one and the tuna is a good chilled temperature, just enough to make it refreshing but not so much as to dull the flavour,
Time for the main attraction, which is going to have to be very good to top what we’ve had so far. The monkfish tail arrives with it main bone removed and laid to the side with heritage tomatoes chopped and mixed with smoked sumac between it and the fish.
And what a lovely piece of fish it is. Whoever first ate Monkfish was very brave because the head looks like something Dr Who would run away from, but the tail is delicious. It used to be called ‘poor man’s lobster’ and I remember my mother warning me off buying cheap breaded scampi, ‘they use monkfish dear!’. How times change. The smoky tomato is wonderful.
We have an asparagus side dish with it, quite where they get such fine thin asparagus this time of year is a mystery, but who cares? They’re very good.
By now we’re so pooped we could beach ourselves and wait to be pushed back out to sea, but we manage a dessert selection with rather wonderful ‘crackers’ made from white and black sesame seeds – sesame seeds get a lot of love at Jeru – and then we heave off into the night.
We already loved Jeru, this new Fish Market makes it even more of a place to push the boat out.
11 Berkeley Street,
Mayfair,
London,
W1J 8DS