Viva Brighton Issue #64 June 2018

FOOD
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The Little Fish Market
Scaled-down perfection
On the way to The Little
Fish Market, I find I’m
more apprehensive than
excited. I’ve become fed up
with places where the food
is good but not remotely
sensational, where the
tablecloths, glasses and
other flummery seem more
important than the fare,
where the greeter – usually
haughty and dressed in black
– can’t even say ‘hello’ and
where the bill requires real
imagination to work out how
it had turned out to be quite
so high. Is this going to be
another of those places?
My wife Jean and I walk into the 20-seat Little
Fish Market to be greeted with a smile from Rob,
who looks after all of the service on his own. He’s
relaxed, gentle, calm and delightful. Happily, there
is no flummery in sight. The floor is red-tiled, the
walls are sage-green, and the wood tables are plain.
There is a set menu (£65 per person), that’s it. It’s
four fish courses and a dessert. Everyone is going to
be eating the same food. I love the simplicity of it.
Three amuse-bouches arrive in slow succession.
Each is just lovely to look at and better to eat.
There’s taramasalata in cucumber and basil oil
with a warm blini, cured salmon with avocado in
a sort of choux pastry cracked egg (crisp, crunchy,
moist, slightly acidic and wonderful) and halibut
surrounded by squid batter.
The set menu hasn’t even started to arrive yet and
we are won over. The theme of the evening – in
fact, the theme of the whole restaurant – has been
set already. The chef and owner, Duncan Ray, uses
the very best ingredients
he can find, and does
something quite magical
with them.
Our meal lasts three hours.
Nothing is anything other
than wonderful. We have
scallop on a sweet and
intense rosemary sauce. We
have Duart salmon, oyster,
cucumber, samphire and
caviar, the salmon cooked
to the second. We have
Aligea Halibut (Aligea is a
small island off the Hebrides
where the fish live in a loch)
with seaweed and espilette
(a capsicum cultivated in a
Basque village of 2,000 people) on top of which
is a delicate potato galette that I thought was a
cheese straw but which is cooked in ghee which
gives it the cheese flavour. It takes me but a
moment to eat and is worth the visit on its own.
Then there is wild bass with crisp English
asparagus, mussels and puréed peas. At the first
mouthful Jean’s groans of delight call to mind the
famous When Harry Met Sally diner scene. Finally,
it’s raspberries with yoghurt dressing sandwiched
between two thin wafers, on top of which is a
vanilla ice cream.
Quite simply, the city has something magical
going on in this small space. It restored my faith
in what a restaurant should be, run by a small,
passionate team who love what they are doing
and whose main aim is to give their customers an
experience to remember. We loved it.
Martin Skelton
10 Upper Market Street, Hove, 01273 722213
Photos by Xavier D Buendia Photography
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