New Forest Living Mar - Apr 2020

THE CHEF
that rocks
Famed for his growing group of fabulous fish restaurants,
Rockfish, Mitch Tonks is a chef, author, restaurateur and a
passionate, lifelong advocate for all the morsels that emerge
from the deep blue sea. Sally Thomson caught up with him
to discuss expansion plans, career motivations and why his
heart will always belong to the kitchen...
Sally: I hear you have another book
on the horizon?
Mitch: I do! We’re doing another
Rockfish book. It will be published
October. All very exciting!
Fantastic! How many Rockfish
Restaurants have you got
now?
At the moment there are
seven but there will be
nine by the end of the year.
They will be in Poole, Lyme
Regis, and Sidmouth. Poole
opened in January, Lyme
Regis will open in June
and Sidmouth will open
in October. We then have
two or three sites ready
for 2021 that we are just
negotiating on.
That is incredible,
when you think about
where you’ve come
from.
It’s kind of been an
up and down journey,
because we had
Fishworks, which
grew to thirteen,
but it was a public
company and the
wrong environment
to grow restaurants
in and ultimately
the project failed.
But since 2009
Seahorses has existed down in
Dartmouth, and Rockfish is ten years
old, so we’ve done well to rebuild over
that period.
When we last had a chat you’d
opened Joe’s Bar, how’s that going?
It’s going really well, and since May last
year we actually moved the entrance to
the restaurant through Joe’s Bar, and
that’s been a real success as people
enter the restaurant through Joe’s
Bar, have a drink and start their dining
experience off with something more
special and fun.
So how do you stretch yourself with
everything going on?
Well the business is over three hundred
people, with a really good senior team,
finance, marketing, and then over four
hundred in the summer. So, I obviously
work very closely with my senior team
and I am clear about what I want to
achieve in a period of time and helping
other people to achieve those goals.
Sometimes its challenging but when you
work as a team and you are supporting
each other you can make stuff happen.
That’s it really!
Managing those people, helping them
manage others, then I spend my time in
the restaurants, as well as consistently
looking at the business as a whole and
thinking ‘How can our business provide
better solutions for jobs, how can we
be better than anywhere else to work
"I tend to think of the restaurants like a
community now. Everybody who works for
us belongs to the community. We talk a lot
about family but of course family are hard to
get rid of and communities are made up of
people all contributing"
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