Telephone: 01962 872 930
Address: Loch Fyne Restaurant, 18 Jewry Street, Winchester.
Lunch for two, including wine and service, £40 - £70.
We are not meant to like - by which I mean I am not meant to like - restaurant chains. The idea smells richly not of food, but of mammon. Why else clone an idea other than to accumulate on the slim profit margins that mass-catering operations demand? And surely, when the design for each outlet is dragged from the greasy, laminated pages of a concept manual, anything even approaching a breathable atmosphere or eatable food is an impossibility? It is, I think, one of the greatest unintentional design jokes in corporate history that the logo for the risible Happy Eater chain is a man pointing a finger to his mouth as though, like some seasoned bulimic, he is trying to stuff the digit down his throat.
Such conventional wisdom, of course, always deserves to be challenged. The truth is that while there really are many appalling chains - come friendly bombs, and fall on a Harvester - there are now a few that aren't all bad. In fact some of them are - whisper it - rather good. Although it is standard to whinge that the pizzas at Pizza Express are getting smaller (I'm not sure they are; they were always small) the chain still offers a dependable product to middle-class parents who want the chance to feel slightly adult when out with their kids. The growing group of Pasta Cafés, also from Pizza Express (whose stupid idea was it to ignore the obvious marketing boost of the name Pasta Express?) is equally good. And Nando's, the South African chain of piripiri chicken restaurants now spreading across the country, offers consistent quality.
But the real boom area in chains with serious aspirations is in fish and seafood. At the top end of the market Livebait, which won awards when it first opened in London's Waterloo, has been taken over by the uneven Chez Gerard group. They have spread the menu of complex dishes across the capital and into Manchester, with patchy results. Fish!, which first opened in London's Borough, invites punters to choose how they want their choice of cut, cooked and sauced. Personally, I'm not convinced its brand of democracy is a good idea. People can do some awful things to perfectly good pieces of fish in the name of consumer choice. So far there are a dozen nationwide.
As far as I'm concerned, the chain that is making all the running right now is Loch Fyne Restaurants, whose branches number about 10, mostly in the south-east, with another 10 or so to come. I first tried the one in Henley-on-Thames when, early for an appointment, I dropped in for a langoustine and prawn salad. At £5.95 it was an exemplar of its kind: gloriously fresh seafood, a light, not overly sweetened Marie Rose sauce and good, crisp foliage. I also liked the look of the place, which was scrubbed and clean and light, without being austere.
I have long been a fan of Johnny Noble's company Loch Fyne Oysters. For four decades now, it has been farming high-quality oysters and mussels in a sustainable manner, alongside a smokery, all of it hard by the Scottish waters from which the firm takes its name. The restaurants, while not the same company, have a licensing deal with them and source all their fish and seafood through them. The name is a guarantee of top-quality ingredients. Where fish and seafood are concerned, nothing matters more than that.
At random, I decided to try the outpost in Winchester, which sits inside a decidedly skewwiff lump of ancient brick and beam. (Tudor? Elizabethan? What do I know about old buildings?) It's a sympathetic conversion, with lots of stripped wood and pale walls; to one side of the dining room is a massive marble slab and, next to it, a seafood counter, stuffed full of oysters and pinch-clawed lobsters. The menu is long without being fussy and is, I think, good value. Half a dozen oysters for £5.95 really isn't bad. Nor, frankly, is £22.50 for a whole lobster - and that is pretty much the highest price. At lunchtimes there is a two-course menu for £9.95, which looked appealing - crab bisque followed by smoked- fish pie, for example - although, as I was on my own, I decided it was my duty to give the main menu a bit of a shakedown.
I began with queen scallops baked on the shell in garlic butter. Queenies, being so small, are easy to cook to rubber, but these were soft and sweet. The butter was salty without being overwhelmingly garlicky and, when I had used up all the crusty bread, I was left surreptitiously sucking the shells. I chose a cold platter of Loch Fyne products for my main course and it was as good as I'd expected: tender smoked salmon, a chunk of bradan orach (a strongly smoked salmon served as a steak), a piece of bradan rost (salmon roasted in the smoke kiln) and delicate slices of gravalax, all served with a sturdy dill mayonnaise. None of the fish was too chilly. I finished with an outrageously rich lemon posset, thick with zest, and drank a glass of something white and Spanish from a carefully chosen list with lots by the glass.
If I have a criticism, it's that the enthusiastic waitress should have warned me off the side salad I ordered with my main course, because the dish already came with sufficient green stuff. Also she could have put down the bottle of cleaning fluid she was carrying when later she brought me the bill. But at least it showed a commitment to hygiene which, like good food, is not something you always find in chain restaurants. These, though, are small quibbles. Based on a random selection of just two branches, Loch Fyne Restaurants really may be on to something.
· Also at other locations. Call 020 8404 6686 for details, or go to www.loch-fyne.com. Contact Jay Rayner on jay.rayner@observer.co.uk.
