Restaurants

Rockfish Seafood and Chips

8 South Embankment,  Dartmouth,  Devon,  TQ6 9BH
01803 832800  / www.rockfishdevon.co.uk / view map

Surveyed 23/09/2011
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About this restaurant

The restaurant opened in June 2010 and is a venture by Mitch Tonks, an accountant turned fishmonger and television chef who has launched more than a dozen restaurants. It opens daily and gets much of its fish fresh from landings at Brixham harbour. It is in essence a fish and chip restaurant – meals can be taken away as well as eaten in – but one that goes well beyond simply serving cod or haddock with chips. Tonks lays great emphasis on responsible fishing and while keen on fresh fish from the sea he is also an advocate of fish farms that use sustainable methods.

The restaurant has yet to be given a Google rating.

The average cost of a meal is £9 to £10 per person.

They say...

We work tirelessly with our fishermen and merchants to ensure we are only ever buying the best in responsibly caught fish. Our menu includes a wide range of seafood specialities such as potted shrimps, crab salads and sandwiches, cracked crab, smoked salmon and oysters. We serve fish in breadcrumbs (some fish such as sole are better served this way) as well as in batter – such as the usual cod & chips, haddock & chips etc. We have scallops, fresh langoustine tails and a small section of grilled fish such as local mackerel and bass. Most of our fish is landed at Brixham although the langoustines come from Scotland and the smoked salmon is smoked by Mitch Tonks at home. As we are dealing with a fresh wild product some items on our menu may be unavailable or in short supply because of the weather or the demands on the morning's markets, it doesn't happen too often. We also regularly change the menu to reflect the seasons. A warm RockFish welcome awaits you with the best fish in blighty! A great family seafood restaurant.

We buy from well managed fisheries, mainly the South West where quotas are controlled so that fish are not caught beyond the levels of what is safe and recommended. We are in constant conversation with the all parties interested in this issue, Good Catch, the MSC, the Seafish Industry Authority and so on and we would adjust our and policy view if we were advised to.

We say...

Fish2fork greatly admires Mitch Tonks and his approach to sustainability yet his score is rather lower than might be expected. He gets 2.5 blue fish for RockFish, down on the 3 blue fish rating he had previously. This is mostly a reflection of a difference of opinion on the sustainability of some stocks rather than a failure to take the issue seriously. He regards sustainability so seriously that RockFish is one of the few restaurants to have a sustainability policy available to customers. Furthermore, he lists all the seafood he uses and tells diners where it came from, and we welcome his promise to remove wild halibut from the menu. Where he falls down in his Fish2fork rating is in offering plaice from the western end of the English Channel. The area the plaice is taken from is regarded by the MCS as having such depleted stocks that they are close to collapse. Mr Tonks, whose opinion isn’t to be dismissed lightly, strongly disagrees. But were he to take the plaice off the menu his rating would in all likeliness jump to 3 blue fish or higher.