The Fenland Gent

Food recommendations for anyone visiting Weymouth.

Whilst this blog is about telly chefs – I’m also going to use it to write anything else about food that takes my fancy. This may include short reviews and recommendations of shops, of brands, of restaurants or anything else food related.

Last weekend I visited friends in Weymouth. I’ve visited Weymouth about half a dozen times over the last year so here are a couple of food recommendations that people may be interested in.

Firstly restaurants. There are a few that I have eaten at that are in The Weymouth area that I would recommend. The first , The Crab House Cafe is in Wyke Regis at the Weymouth end of the road/bridge that connects Weymouth to Portland. It is an extraordinary seafront restaurant – serving fish and shellfish all caught within 40 miles of the restaurant (and with the oysters coming from the oyster beds a few minutes away). It’s real speciality is the crab, No crab I’d eaten before was like this. The one I had was huge, freshly caught and totally delicious. The rest of the menu is constantly changing – depending on what has been caught but from what I saw, and from the very good reviews the place has received in the national press I’m pretty sure everything is as good as the excellent crab that I had.

This part of the coast is rich in seafood restaurants, I would also really recommend The Riverside Restaurant an equally excellent place a few miles down the coast in West Bay (One day I’ll get round to writing a review). Closer still to the Crab House is The Blue Fish (I could not find a website – so the link is to Trip Advisor where the place has got some glowing reviews). The Blue Fish sits at the other end of the bridge/road that connects Weymouth to Portland, and whilst it’s very strong on seafood – it does serve other dishes to the same standard. The staff were friendly and relaxed and at the end of our meal the waitress recommended the Cove House Inn a pub that was almost next door. She was right in her recommendation – the pub was fantastic – with great views and with a really decent folk music session.

(Getting away from food for a bit Weymouth/Portland seemed to have a very healthy folk music scene. As well as the Cove House Inn having a folk session every Thursday – The Sailor’s Return, right in the heart of Weymouth has a folk session on the Wednesday night. If you are interested in that sort of stuff it’s worth checking first before setting out).

My last food recommendation is for Weyfish – a fishmongers on the quay – which came highly recommended by our friends who we stayed with, and which was packed when I went there. Again – I could not find a website but the address is

Weyfish Ltd
The Old Fish Market
Custom House Quay
Weymouth
Dorset
DT4 8BE
Telephone : 01305 761 277

So if you are in the region if you are eating out go to the Blue Fish restaurant and/or The Crab House Cafe, but if you are watching your budget and are eating in buy your fish at Weyfish fishmongers and then have a pint in the Cove House Inn or the Sailor’s Return (especially if there is music on).

If anyone reads this and wants to add their own recommendations for food stuff in Weymouth please do – just use the comment form below.

There is much to recommend Buckler’s hard as a place and The Master Builders as a hotel, but as this blog is suppose to be about food I ‘ll just stick to writing about that

The restaurant at the Master Builder’s Hotel at Buckler’s Hard in the New Forest has three things to recommend it.

Firstly, the location. Buckler’s Hard is a unique place. An 18th century ship building village set in one of the quietest corners of the New Forest. The restaurant has views of the River Beaulieu and it’s yachts and of the woods and forest on the opposite bank.

Secondly the staff who were nigh on faultless. Nothing too much bother; they were polite, helpful and managed to be both efficient and easy going on the same time.

Thirdly, and I suppose most importantly, the food. Much of it locally sourced and the restaurant is particularly strong on fish. Where you eat your food is up to you – there is a bar menu, a full restaurant menu and during the summer they run a bbq where you can buy sausages and burgers and shrimps. I’ve eaten in the restaurant 3 times now with each meal being very good, the highlight being a simple steak, cooked rare, which was close to perfection. The cheese board is pretty good as well, most of it local – though they do have a smoked cheese with paprika which, as far as I see it – is the kind of “stunt” novelty cheese that should be discouraged. (The other cheeses more than made up for it – on my last visit a nice “crunchy” Godminster really made it’s point).

The restaurant is not cheap. 3 courses with wine will set you back about £50 a head but I felt the price was about fair. If you are staying in the hotel then I would also recommend the breakfast -where they offer the fancy (eggs Florentine) and the necessary (a quite brilliant full English).

There is so much more to say about the Master Builders and when I get round to it I ‘ll write a review of what I thought of the hotel (which I liked) and the place (which I really liked). But as far as the restaurant goes I’d say you pay for what you get – and what you get is well worth having.

20 years ago, when I lived in the area, Lee on Solent High Street seemed stuck in the fifties. Maybe the fact that it was not pedestrianised, and that it still had a greengrocers and a butchers made it seem so out of place in the late eighties. Skip forward twenty years and not much has changed, this rather tatty road still has the feeling of somewhere that has been left behind, stuck somehwere in the middle of the last century, and maybe that is why I could not build up too much enthusiasm for a visit to Sapori, the High Street’s Italian restaurant. I was expecting the place to reflect the ambience of the road it sat in, an old style Italian restaurant serving lasagne and bolognaise and garlic bread on checkered red table clothes.

I was wrong; expectations were totally confounded and the meal I had, in this white walled, white table clothed, airy restaturant was an absolute joy.

My starter was an absolute killer of a dish. It was thinly sliced veal, served with roquette leaves and parmesan with a lemon dressing. I asked the owner (I think it was the owner) about it and he talked with enthusiasm about Carpaccio dishes and his enthusiasm belied someone who cared deeply about food. (I’ll write about what he said in another blog entry).

My main course was Tagliate di manzo (Beef sirloin, ‘tagliate’ style with rocket leaves, parmesan, sun dried tomatoes and honey and balsamic dressing, with roasted potatoes). Ordered rare, it was a delightful dish – the combination of rare steak with the fuller flavoured salad leaves works so brilliantly together. So well in fact that I wish that I had asked for it without the balsamic dressing as this may have slightly taken the edge off the combined flavour of the meat and the rocket.

However, despite the fact that my first two courses were nigh on perfect – the way I usually end up judging a restaurant is by its cheese board (if it has one). A lazily assembled cheese board makes me cross because these days very decent cheese is not hard to come by.

Obviously this is a quirk on my part, if I could I would only eat cheese until my dying day, (which, if I followed that diet, would be in about August 2012). But the cheese board at Sapori proved my theory that a decent cheese board means a decent restaurant. They had really made the effort and by putting some thought into it and they have come up with an Italian cheese board that surpassed almost any I have had before in a restaurant.

5 cheeses were served. Dolcelatte, a decent enough Fontina, Pecorino ( a nice change after having Parmesan in both my starter and main) , Talegio and a goat’s cheese the name of which I did not get. The cheeses came with a Sardinian bread, which I think is called Pane Carasau and which comes in wafer thin slices, much like popadums. This bread was a perfect accompaniment to the soft cheeses and the bread and the cheese all went perfectly with the Chianti we had been drinking through the meal.

(I asked the waitress about the cheeses and she called the chef over and he identified the cheeses and told me about the bread. Clearly also a man who really cared about the food that the restaurant served)

Both my girlfriend and I had 3 courses and a bottle of wine and the whole meal came to £61. I felt that £30 a head for a meal of that quality was a bit of a bargain (though I am hopeless at estimating the true financial value of things).

After the meal, under dark swollen skies we walked a mile or along the beach to the Osbourne View, a big barn of a pub which has some fantastic views of the Solent and over a pint we wondered whether the best meals usually come with no expectations. That was certainly the case with Sapori. Really excellent.