High Street, Mistley, Essex (01206 392 821). Dinner for two, including service, £105
The first time I visited the banks of the River Stour in the very northernmost reaches of Essex, where the land and sea are locked in a constant dance of pull and push, it was to meet an expatriate American supporter of gun ownership who was being charged with esoteric firearms offences. This was nearly 20 years ago and even though I can't recall whether he was convicted, it fixed the area in my mind as a restless place; a wild east which tried to live by a different set of rules.
Two decades later and that same feeling of borderland persists for me here, helped by the fact that early the next morning I am to board a skiff and go out oyster dredging with a man whose family has been in the business for 250 years. In these lowlands, where the tides cut off slabs of the earth twice a day, the sea at their backs dictates not just how people make their living but also the pace at which they do so. It seems only fair, therefore, that the sea should also dictate my dinner, and while every gastropub around here seems to make some impassioned point about local seafood, only the Mistley Thorn has a menu that shows commitment. It is full of things that swim and bottom feed and filter. Likewise the room, while hardly Carry On Sailor, has a relaxed, wood-panelled, water's-edge feel. It's exactly where a hardened, callous-thumbed oyster catcher should be. In the absence of one of those they'll have to make do with me.
Once again I have come to this corner of England to experience the world as seen by an American, though happily this one is armed only with the odd kitchen knife. The restaurant belongs to Californian Sherri Singleton and it's tempting to imagine that it takes an outsider to see most clearly what defines a place. Certainly it makes blinding sense to start with rock oysters from nearbyWest Mersea. They offer oysters Rockefeller, grilled with a breadcrumb and spinach topping, but venerable a recipe as it may be, it still strikes me as a terrible thing to do to an oyster. Instead I order them naked with a ginger and shallot-vinegar dressing, and they are everything good oysters should be: a brisk, cheery slap about the chops. My companion, an Essex native, tells me she has not eaten an oyster for 25 years, does so now and declares that it's not for her. Being a well-dragged-up chap, I do not chase her from the table with pitchforks and burning stakes, though only because I need her here to order a few plates of food.
The cooking at the Mistley Thorn is big and messy, rather than prissy and subtle. The daintiest dish is a starter of very good treacle-cured salmon on a heap of celeriac remoulade in turn on a buckwheat pancake with a mustardy dressing. It sits, a pert island, in the middle of the plate. Remarkably, the fish holds its own against the armed assault. The one non-fish dish of the night is a rugged salad of pigeon breast served pink and tasting gamey, as if it came from a bird that had seen serious wing action, with cubes of roasted beetroot and butternut squash.
A thickened fish stew, while underseasoned, looks like it contains everything that ever swam anywhere near these shores and a few – mussels, queen scallops – that didn't. Crisp fried fillets of brill come in generous portions on a saffron sauce with a not-altogether-appealing metallic tang, but the mussels and new potatoes that bob about in there make up for the slip. At the end there is, according to the menu, "Sherri's mom's cheesecake", and it is a marvel; the cream light, the crumb crisp, the toffee sauce with praline a measured bash of sugar – proof, if it were required, that you need an American mother to make a perfect cheesecake.
Less pleasing is the addition of coconut to a sticky-toffee pudding, topped with spongy macadamias that squeak beneath the teeth. Worse still is the bread. It may once have been a thing of beauty, but that was a good few hours before we got anywhere near it. These are curious slips from a kitchen with a clear generosity of spirit; from a restaurant that knows what it wants to be. They do not tip the scales deeply into the negative, for the Mistley Thorn is too damn likable for that. We are out on England's crumbling edge, but we have been fed as if we were at home.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
