The best thing about being on the coast is the quality of ingredients available. Sure, you can buy frozen fish a thousand miles inland – but it’s never going to have that same delicious, fresh flavor that you get when it’s straight from the sea. There’s nothing like looking out of the window while you savor some bass and seeing the water where it was caught. It means that things can be a bit unpredictable. After all, you don’t know what the catch of the day will be until the fishermen get back to the dock. Working at a restaurant like ours, that relies on fresh fish, we have to be able to think on our feet. If there’s no salmon, how about ocean trout? No mussels – better get clams instead.
And if I’m honest, that’s one of the things I love about the job. Sure, it would be easier working in a restaurant that didn’t put so much value on fresh seafood. I’d be making the exact same dishes every day. There’d be a lot less to think about. But on the other hand…do you really want to cook exactly the same thing, day in, day out? And of course, it’s better for our guests, too. Nothing beats freshness. Not only is the flavor a thousand times better than you get elsewhere, but it also means that our environmentally-conscious diners can relax. They know where our fish came from, and if they have any questions about its provenance, we can answer them completely.
When it comes to meat, freshness and traceability is just as important to us. Early on in our restaurant days, we committed to grinding our own minced meat. We bought a meat grinder in Germany, because there is the best quality there. That may sound like a needlessly tedious job – after all, large quantities of ground meat are available in literally every supermarket in the world, right? But again, there’s a world of difference between our house-ground meat and the vacuum packs that you’re used to. Do you know what goes into most minced meat? If not, then honestly, you probably don’t want to. It’s not normally the choicest cuts, let’s put it that way. But when we grind our own, we know exactly which parts of the animal we’re using – and why. Different dishes call for different types of mince. Coarser or finer, leaner or marbled with fat, we know our dishes will be of better quality, because we’re choosing the perfect mince for the job.
And again, our guests can relax, safe in the knowledge that their meat has been carefully handled in-house. We take full responsibility for the grinding process, so we know we can stand 100% behind the meat that we serve. There’s no middle man who might have questionable hygiene – our customers can trust us.
Fresh fish, fresh meat…is there anything better?
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