One Fish Street, Chandos Road: 'As if tablecloths were a tedious bourgeois imposition'

Seafood you don't have to shell out for

Saucers! This week The Bristol Sauce became a Substack bestselling publication. We are absolutely thrilled to have this recognition of our work, and all thanks is to you — our readers.

Behind the scenes, I’m working on another investigative piece. It’s meaty, and requires some ‘field work’ if you will, which is going to cost quite a lot of money. All will be revealed in due course (probably early-ish next year). Meanwhile, now would be a really excellent time to upgrade your subscription if you are considering doing so, or buying a gift subscription for someone as a Christmas gift. All funds generated from our little bestselling (!) publication are reinvested into producing high quality, entertaining and informative journalism. If that’s something you care about, your support would be greatly appreciated.

And if you’re already a paying Saucer - thank you, thank you, thank you! Now, over to Phil for a typically witty review of One Fish Street.

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Chandos Road continues to pack them in. The Turkish bakery at number 16 has just metamorphosed into a mezze parlour, Snobby’s new wine bar Barroux is opening as I write (review on the way shortly), and a Cornish fish restaurant, no less, has trucked up the M5 to take over the premises next door.

One Fish Street’s name isn’t as whimsical as it sounds: it’s actually the address of the St Ives original, and anyway if you’re across the road from Snobby’s nothing you can call yourself will sound whimsical.

A fish restaurant is good news — it could have been a pizzeria, or a tattooist — but One Fish Street does face a challenge, which is some serious Bristol competition in the shape of the excellent Noah’s and Spiny Lobster, the latter only ten minutes walk away.

Both Noah’s and Spiny Lobster are notably stylish and attractive places, but One Fish Street is altogether a more subdued affair. It’s a small shop — frankly a touch drab inside — with poor lighting, minimal ornamentation and a tiny bar at the back where two people can sit to eat in close proximity, brown floor and brown furniture.

No tablecloths, which would brighten the place up considerably, but which the website boasts of having dispensed with, as if tablecloths were a tedious bourgeois imposition. What they are of course is a source of sizeable laundry bills, which have to be passed on to the customer, as does the cost of luxurious décor. And One Fish Street seems to have adopted what could be a winning strategy, of keeping things moderately priced.

This doesn’t mean a lack of interesting grub. The menu is divided into snacks (Cornish for tapas), tins (Spanish-style quality canned seafood), oysters, and bigger plates. Snacks cost between £4 for olives to £14 for charcuterie and at one point strayed into exciting territory with a composition of Exmoor caviar and potato terrine at £45, which the chef had obviously thought better of and ditched by my second visit.

The best section is the oysters, a changing selection of half a dozen exotically prepared molluscs: grilled with potted shrimp butter and Spenwood cheese or with crispy chilli oil, raw with sweet and spicy Thai green nahm jim or plain old fashioned French style sauce mignonnette.

Averaging £4 each, or £42 for a mixed dozen — the best option if you can divert sufficient funds; try cutting out breakfast, or better still the kids’ breakfasts, for a few days — they’re certainly worth it. And undoubtedly preferable to being reduced to the sad new financial reality of ordering a single oyster and feeling like Josh White in his Depression era lament One Meat Ball.

Josh White would’ve cried with happiness

As for main courses — or what would be main courses in a parallel culinary reality — on arrival you learn via a short lecture the “concept” of One Fish Street. In short, it’s one of those places where everything you order is served according to the whims of the kitchen, usually together. This is fine if you want a selection of snacks with your drinks, but not fine if you want a nice piece of fish as a main course, all for yourself, and after your starter, or what would have been your starter were the restaurant not operating with a different world view. The solution in such places (as most of us will have figured out by now) is to order only the dishes you want immediately, and wait until you’ve finished them before ordering the sequel.

A bigger plate

Anyway, there’s a short list of bigger plates at One Fish Street. No sign of the open kitchen mentioned in the publicity. If ‘seafood restaurant’ evokes for you the image of a marble slab covered in shaved ice with a compendious selection of glistening bright-eyed beauties waiting to be sizzled on charcoal, think again. Perfectly good fish, a very nice cut of hake (£18), a John Dory with a sprig of cauliflower and some girolles (£24) a big bowl of River Teign mussels (£16) — but not necessarily to everybody’s taste.

The condiments are doubtless very fashionable, things like ponzu, XO sauce, chilli and tamarind. But the sweet and glutinous black bean sauce with the mussels had me fondly reminiscing a delicious bowl of mussels served in a more conventional garlic and leek cream broth I had recently at Spiny Lobster. The powerful XO preparation with the hake — which Hong Kong-ers consider the quintessence of luxury — also unfortunately had me longing for some old-school Hollandaise.

Stepping out of his comfort zone left Phil shell-shocked

Sides are limited: a couple of salads and that crispy potato terrine everybody seems to do these days, served here with kimchi flavoured mayonnaise, wouldn’t you know, unquestionably very tasty at £6, which is only a pound more than a large bag of chips across the road at the (excellent) Chandos Fish Bar.

One Fish Street does a perfectly good job at price — at least 30 per cent lower than Spiny Lobster. If you want a plate of good quality fish, you’ll get one, just maybe not cooked in the classic manner, but this is personal preference. The oysters are well worth the trip.

Myself? I’d blow the extra money on Spiny Lobster. But alas, I’m a feckless bugger, reactionary to boot, and will probably end up bankrupt still eating M&S sandwiches while you sensible readers are tucking into mussels with black bean sauce in One Fish Street.

All words and photos by Philip Sweeney, edited by Meg Foulk

One Fish Street, 17 Chandos Rd, BS6 6PG

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