When I started at Salt Room we bought fillets. They came boxed and weighed, skinless, boneless and uniform, and they were easy to cook. It took me about a month to start asking why the fish tasted so flat.
A fillet is a fish that has been gutted, scaled and cut a day or two before it reaches you. The flesh has been exposed to the air since then, and the heads, bones and trimmings that make half the flavour of a fish have gone in someone else’s bin. A whole fish on ice is a different thing. You can see the eye, check the gills, smell the belly. You know how it was caught and roughly when.
What whole fish does to a kitchen
The first change is on the board. A whole halibut is a lot of work. Someone has to scale it, gut it, take off the fillets and keep the bones. It takes longer, and it needs a cook who knows what they are doing. We have trained three people to do it well and they are very good at it.
The second change is in the menu. We cannot know on Monday what we will cook on Thursday, because we do not know what the boat will land. Some weeks it is halibut. Some weeks it is gurnard, which almost nobody asks for and which I think is wonderful. The menu has a line in it that says the fish changes with the landings, and that line is true.
The third change is the waste, or the lack of it. The heads and bones go into stock. The collars of the bigger fish are grilled for staff dinner. The skin is dried and fried, and now appears as a crisp garnish on the halibut. A good cook can find a use for nearly everything, and the margins work because we use it all.
The harder bit
None of this is cheap or easy. Whole fish costs more per kilo than fillets, and some of that weight is bones. A fishmonger who sells whole fish will not wait for you to make up your mind. We have learned to phone early and take what we are given.
But the first time a guest tells us that the halibut tastes like the sea, it makes sense. Fish should taste of where it came from. If it does not, we have not done the job.
If you are at Salt Room this autumn, ask what came in that morning. The answer is rarely what you expect.
