Scales of Excellence

Chef Mitch Tonks at his Rockfish restaurant, Dartmouth, Devon

"A great fish restaurant is not about the chef," he says on the phone from Devon, England. "It's about the guy who gets the best fish."

He starts rhapsodising about one of his favourites, La Pineta on the Tyrrhenian coast. "The chef there has been a fisherman for 28 years," he says. "He gets the fish and he just steams it, or roasts it in salt. You have to be brave enough to do that. You have to accept you can't make it any better than simple. Restraint is the best ingredient when cooking fish."

If he were a fish, Tonks would be a Dover sole: quick, smart and highly prized. He has four seafood eateries in Devon, all in fishing ports, with another opening next year. To read the reviews is to know they are clearly worth the detour from Australia. Even that potty-mouthed food critic Giles Coren can't find a bad word to say. "The Seahorse (Dartmouth): perfect," he wrote in The Times. "Our dinner there was the best meal - taking in produce, cooking, service, ambience, location and company - that I have had all year." And the awards: your head swims just reading them. Seahorse, Best Seafood Restaurant, Good Food Guide, 2013; Best Restaurant in UK, Observer Food Monthly, 2012; Tatler Restaurateur of the Year, 2006, and so on back to 2000, which is when Tonks snared his first big gong (for Best Seafood Restaurant for Bath) and hasn't stopped running since.

On the phone, he talks at a hundred knots an hour. About the Australian seafood he loves - South Australian rock lobster, soon to star at his Melbourne Food & Wine Festival Masterclass - Eyre Peninsula oysters ("off the Richter scale"), sea urchins, yellowtail kingfish ("I love the oiliness") and King George whiting; about the "horrendous miscommunication" of some prominent seafood sustainability campaigns, here and in Britain - "Everyone wants to think their fish is hand-plucked and hand-dived, it's a Utopia, it's completely unachievable" - and about how it all started for this former London accountant in 1996, at age 27.

"One evening I was driving back home to Bath and I just decided I wasn't going to go to work the next day," he says. "So I went down to Cornwall and bought a shop and started selling fish. But it wasn't a British style of fishmonger; it was a European style like Boqueria in Barcelona." From fish shop to restaurant and then to London: in 2003 Tonks opened London FishWorks, a chain of restaurants and fishmongers he subsequently floated on the stockmarket. But in 2007 he left, heeding the call of the ocean again, to open Seahorse. "I just felt it was time to go. Unfortunately, the company went broke after that."

There's no hint of conceit, but Tonks also doesn't undersell his achievements. "We didn't have great fish and chips in England. Now people are coming from miles around to eat our seafood." In 2010, he opened RockFish in Dartmouth, a family seafood restaurant (Tonks has five children) serving soft-shell crab sangers and potted shrimp alongside fish and chips, and voted in the Top 3 British fish and chip restaurants every year since. A second branch opened in Plymouth last year. In the high season it feeds about 1000 people a day.

The Melbourne Festival guide calls Tonks a "fishmonger, restaurateur and food writer" (he's written a stream of cookbooks), so it comes as a surprise to hear he's also a hands-on chef, cooking at Seahorse two or three days a week. "Well I think if you have your name above the door, you ought to be there," he says. The restaurant makes its own charcoal in line with its owner's belief that the best fish is cooked over an open fire.

He's even launched a Seafood Academy at South Devon College, to help steer students through the morass of misinformation about seafood in Britain.

So what gives him the Neptune touch? "I think I have an innate knowledge of fish," he says, "and I approach cooking from an eating perspective. I learnt how to cook risotto by going to Italy and eating the best risotto - the same with fish. I'm self-taught."

His friend and colleague in Australia, John Susman, who will be hosting his masterclasses, reckons Tonks is the new Rick Stein.

"And he's done it with much less TV exposure," he says. What Stein has done for Cornwall, Tonks is now doing for Devon. Making it a destination. But he's not stopping there. Believing the whole southwest peninsula to be hugely undervalued, his ambition is to put it on the map as Britain's Seafood Coast. All that fish, turbot, brill, seasonal anchovies, sprats, brown crab.

Hmmm. I can see an Oz v UK fish debate brewing for the festival, especially when Tonks says cold-water fish such as turbot and bass will always have a much better quality than fish from warmer waters.

"They're the big fat fish the Europeans are prepared to pay big money for," he says.

Right, Mitch, we're on. And how much do you think the Asians pay for our lobsters?

Mitch Tonks will be giving masterclasses at the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival on March 8 and 9. ticketmaster.com.au or 136 100. He will host a barbecue lunch at Siglo, on March 10. Bookings, 03 9654 6631.

Source:  The Australian - 8 February 2014