Catch, Weymouth: ‘I’m happy to offer the opinion it was bloody gorgeous’ — restaurant review

Raised in a south-coast seaside town, I have an abiding, secret love for wet nights off-season. Sure, you can drive along the Weymouth Croisette, look at the palm trees and remark how very much like the Riviera it looks on a summer evening. Me? I like it when the lights are smeared through the windscreen wipers, and the blood is chilled by the Solent wind’s eldritch shriek.

Down here, once the tourists have gone and the squalls have arrived, it matters not if the government is havering about fresh precautions. The locals are experts at voluntary self-isolation and the streets are deserted anyway.

Catch occupies the top floor of the old fish-market building down on the harbourside. You escape from the rain-scoured cobbles to be led through the empty fishmongers’ fridges and counters, then upstairs into an ecclesiastically vaulted loft. There is a small open kitchen, a few tables and the sort of background “jazz” that’s bioequivalent to Librium.

I took my mum. She lives down there. Like me, she likes her nosh, and is possibly the person from whom I inherited my visceral distrust of faff in food. She cast an appraiser’s eye over the room, nodded an affirmative, then turned her basilisk gaze to the menu.

I feared for Catch at this first hurdle as they employ the now-prevalent restaurant syntax, the becomma-ed list. “Crab, fennel, onion, coriander” doesn’t give your old mum much to go on really, but it actually undersold something far more developed and interesting. Shredded fresh crabmeat, layered over finely shaved fennel, policed into a disc by the ubiquitous Chef’s Ring, the onions lightly pickled, interspersed with edible flowers and dotted with verdant coriander oil.

We admired it for a moment, then the waitress swung in with her little jug. I’ve come to believe the table-side “pour-over” is now the dominant trope in British restaurants, that it’s become an intrinsic part of the experience, like cutlery, functioning bathroom arrangements or a roof. I’m old enough to remember when piled ingredients and subtle broths were rare signifiers of iconoclasm, driving out the bourgeois sauce boat and banishing the reactionary gueridon. Now they are everywhere, a given. This one, however, was filled with a handsome crab consommé, which combined sensitivity with a charmingly rough, dockside heft. A bit Tom of Finland really.

“Lobster Thermidor croquette, lemon and fennel” gives the enquiring reader more information. The croquettes were light, almost custardy. There was a buff chunk of lobster tail, glazed and tensed like a bicep, and a princely bisque pour-over, running heavier to tomato than crustacean but supreme, in context.

“Poached skate, pork belly, pumpkin, seaweed and sage” saw the fish rolled and laid alongside a glistering pork belly ingot, while pumpkin sauce the colour of a life jacket was poured around it. It was a sizeable and well-crafted serving, having the kind of innovation and intricacy that flirts with Michelin, but still sufficiently substantial to nourish a grown-ass adult.

‘Poached skate, pork belly, pumpkin, seaweed and sage’ had the kind of innovation and intricacy that flirts with Michelin, but was still sufficiently substantial to nourish a grown-ass adult

“Roasted hake, chicken wing, mushrooms and truffle, vin jaune” repeated the fish-and-meat combo that, despite what chefs seem to think, really doesn’t shock anyone any more. The chicken wing was stuffed with a forcemeat, mushrooms and truffle brooded in an airy tartlet and the vin jaune pour-over was concentrated enough to stand up to fish, fowl and fungus. It was an excellent combination, rich enough to serve either smaller or with a cardiac crash-cart.

“Hazelnut, lemon and lime” was a vanishingly delicate sponge base topped with creams, foams, gels, candied peels and a handful of crushed nuts and — though it now seems that writing restaurant reviews means merely fleshing out the description you should have got in the damn menu — I’m happy to offer the opinion that it was bloody gorgeous.

At Catch, they’re serving fish landed at their door by local boats, and they’re doing it brilliantly. The food is as creative and sharply executed as you might expect in a larger city or a more fashionable European seaside town. It is served with precision, but with hospitable warmth.

I suggest you adopt the low cunning of us locals and throng to Catch in the miserable evenings of the off-season. Go on a sleet-blasted Tuesday in February, or that Monday in March when we’re all supposed to want to kill ourselves, because, truth be told, Catch is so good that the minute the sun comes out, you haven’t a hope in hell of getting a table.

Follow Tim on Twitter @TimHayward and email him at [email protected]

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