Fishers

Fishers
36-37 St. Clements St
Oxford
OX4 1AB



Winner of several seafood awards a few years ago, Fishers claims to be a laid back and unpretentious fish restaurant that serves simple and good food. The nautical theme inside with chip-paper table cloths certainly verify this point of view, but what of the food?



Seated with menus we are given some excellent marinated anchovies. The slightly tangy hot-sauce offsets the anchovy nicely.



We would prefer a fattier fish, but this was a nice bite to tantalise.



The menu is simple - fish, fish and more fish.







We made our choices, and the bread arrived with some excellent butter. Unfortunately, the bread was past its best before, and crumbed horribly everywhere.



Tabasco and chili powder in anticipation of our entrees.



The (very long) wait was rewarded with a platter of delicious, fresh, and plentiful bounties of the sea. Jumbo prawns, langoustine, small shrimp, fresh oysters and smoked salmon. Everything was incredibly fresh, with a brilliant briny taste.

The oysters were plump, but had unfortunately lost some of their brine. The prawns, shrimp and langoustine were simply poached in salted water, and their natural flavours illustrated their marked contrast: the large prawns were firm and meaty, while the smaller counterparts (with roe intact) were briny and tender; the langoustine were much sweeter with a very delicate flesh.



We had a pseudo intellectual discussion on the difference between prawns and shrimp. A thought the small crustaceans to be prawns, because of the additional set of plates near the thorax, and the brooding method of the roe (rather than shrimp, that eject their eggs). Pseudo intellectual because neither of us could remember the facts, so we were going by half-remembered biology lectures. Well, A was; I had nothing to go on except mock-aussie accents and jokes about the barbie.



The last, sad piece of bread - hard to the touch, and definitely left over from a kinder era. The only reason we had polished off the rest of the stale bread was because of the wait for our mains. Tables came and went, whole eco-systems emerged, evolved, developed nuclear warfare, and disappeared, before our mains turned up. Even the manager was getting embarrassed by the length of time it took to plate up, blaming the long wait on the size of my sea bass (doesn't look too big to me), and saying that it took longer than expected to cook. An hour for a whole sea bass? Perhaps, but unlikely.



The offending creature in all its glory.



A's whole lemon sole looked fantastic. It was served with a caper, parsley and smoked salmon sauce. Smoked salmon sauce? Eating it didn't dispel any of the confusion.



Roaaar! I love whole fish. In the end, the fish was adequately cooked (slightly over), and with an overpowering smell of thyme (many sprigs stuffed into the poor creature's belly). A's fish had suffered from the wait in a warmer, becoming tougher and less delicate. Not brilliant, especially for a restaurant that specialises in this stuff.



The chips were flaccid, slightly cold and not at all tasty. More on that later.



The potato on the bottom left is obviously twice the size of the other taters. One of the potatoes still had clods of dirt clinging to it (garden fresh, as they say), while the offending gargantuan was crunchy in the middle from being cooked for the same length of time as the other three.



Because of the lateness of the mains, and also a quick word about the problematic tubers, the manager graciously took our bottle of wine off the bill, and invited us to return another night, to show that usually their chips are of a very high quality. In fact, we hadn't so much complained as mentioned to our waiter upon clearing the table that the spuds were inferior.

The damage: £58.30 for an enormous cold seafood platter followed by two fairly decent mains, sans wine (which would have been approx £14 - a cheap tipple). The wait was too long, and service at times was difficult to flag down, but all in all it was friendly, and competent. If the manager hadn't been so gracious in dealing with our potato problems, we would have meekly left, never to return. With the warm welcome back, we might give them another shot.