It was started in the mid-sixties by William Pinney, a local fisherman and business-owner who also caught the largest shark then recorded off the coast of Suffolk. I don't think it was a person-eating shark. Let's not dwell...
The Oysterage looks like an old-fashioned canteen, with tiled floors, and paper on the tables. There is a short laminated menu, and a wine list, but the experience is made whole by the daily changing blackboard. If you are an oyster-lover, they have their own beds - a little further down the coast. The oysters are sweet and succulent. They also do them on toast or in a glass of tomato juice which is weird but tasty.
If you order the sardines on toast, or the smoked eel on toast - that's what you get. That's EXACTLY what you get. Fresh sardines, or eel, on a bit of toast. No butter, no garnish (a very London idea) just that. Brilliant. My fish pie was a perfect dish of salmon, smoked haddock, summink else and prawns, in a scrumptious sauce under cheesy breadcrumbs. Because it was a main course it came with 9 large new potatoes. No salad, no garnish. Brilliant. Before my fish pie I had dressed crab salad. It was, as you will now be able to guess, a dressed crab, and salad. No mayo, no coleslaw or other fripperies. The salad comes with dressing, and they give you a bit of lemon. What more do you want?
Herself had the best dish on the menu: scalloped prawns. It's comfort food of the highest order, and I let her have the last one, because she is Herself, and she deserves all the good things in the world.
The ladies who run the Oysterage are all from Suffolk and they beam and if you're nice to them they beam summore and make little jokes. If you're not nice to them (and I have witnessed the poor lost souls who manage such dishonourable behaviour in such a noble setting) they still beam, but I hope they spit in your angels on horseback.
When you've eaten your delicious simple food, and made the lovely ladies beam and paid up promptly, you can try to walk to the old harbour, and maybe round the headland a little way. It's sublimely beautiful (to my eye) and even the strange buildings on the Ness only seem to add to the other-wordliness of this place. Orford and the Oysterage are not as well known as their smarter neighbours (Ruth Watson owns the posh pub in Orford, she can keep it) so they remain unspoiled. If you go (and I hope you will) remember - the first rule of Fight Club is, you don't talk about Fight Club.
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What a shame. To celebrate a place by erroneously denigrating another makes a canard of them both. The garnish is not a "very London idea" at all. If it can be indeed termed an idea, it is one leant on by the pseud chef wherever they may trade.
ReplyDeleteI have suffered the sprig of parsley or twist of cucumber in provincial towns and Cumbrian backwaters, where even the mere mention of London ideas brings cries of disgust. Yet all the while one of London's finest restaurants, St John of Smithfield, has a menu offering "Fennel & Berskwell" or "Octopus & Chickpea". And that, as they say, is what you get.
Those looking for the ornate radish accompianment ought to go elsewhere. London or no. Just thought I'd mention.
Or have I missed the point entirely, and you were in fact saying that the absence of garnish was a very London idea?
ReplyDeleteI think I may have said enough.
are you two actually having a row about 'garnish'?
ReplyDeleteI think I'm the only one involved in this garnish garble.
ReplyDelete