Dermot O'Leary's food doesn't have the X Factor

James heads to Dermot O'Leary's Brighton restaurant, and finds that everything is just fine.

They say it’s much easier to write a rotter than it is a rhapsody. To slate something gives a writer scope for humour and vitriol, while to compose a piece that eulogises and exalts is far trickier. This is true. What is even harder, however, is to review somewhere that is totally and completely ordinary.

No one wants to read about the middle ground – it’s not funny and it’s not sexy and it’s not inspiring. Take the X Factor auditions. The producers offer what are essentially extended highlights of the best and worst bits, because anything in between just isn’t very entertaining.

X Factor presenter Dermot O’Leary’s restaurant Fishy Fishy in Brighton falls plum centre of that middle ground. I’m not going to encourage you to go there and I’m not going to say much that’s all that positive about it, but there isn’t a great deal that is actively bad about the place. What I said in my last review, about context and all that, still stands, and in the context of what it is, Fishy Fishy is fine. It’s really fine.

First impressions

So up I tip and there aren’t any crack addicts littering the doorstep but nor are there any braying chins arf-arfing over buckets of champagne. Sam arrives, and we sit outside and have a lovely time nattering in the sun and slurping a good sauvignon blanc and chewing on perfectly ordinary bread with perfectly ordinary butter.

The waiter is charming and genuine and I have a good feeling about Fishy Fishy. Its menu is about as predictable as it gets but that’s OK – if it’s done well then prawns with garlic mayonnaise and monkfish wrapped in Serrano ham is fine by me. It’s Wednesday afternoon and I’m in Brighton for the day and there really is nothing to get wound up about.  

One of the nice things about an unadventurous menu is that you don’t have to feel guilty for playing it safe. Ordering a prawn cocktail when there’s grilled monkfish liver to be had always seems a bit wet, but at Fishy Fishy, it’s all familiar, and it all sounds pretty good.

Starters

I start with calamari with a Provençale sauce. I would say they are under-seasoned but that would suggest there is some seasoning there, which there is not. Mouthfuls of crisp and soft nothing, a shame, as the rings are well enough cooked.

Sam’s chargrilled squid, on the other hand, is so over-seasoned that I have to check on the menu that it isn’t meant to be salt and pepper squid. Which it isn’t. But again, it’s OK – no rubberiness to speak of, and with a tomato and chilli jam that is very passable (which is more than can be said of the Provençale sauce).

Mains

The Fishy Fishy MLT – mackerel, lettuce and tomato – is an open smoked mackerel sandwich, and is perhaps the best dish of the day. Nicely smoked mackerel, with a good level of stickiness and sweetness and seasoning, and some skinny fries. Overpriced at £10.50 but a success otherwise.

Roasted turbot, which I’m assured by the menu has been allowed to breed for two years, is a well-cooked piece of fish, perched on squished new potatoes. With fleshy, fresh mussels for outriders, it’s let down by a parsley sauce that is so thick you could spread it on toast.

Spicy crab is nothing of the sort, lacking any discernible punch and only limply kissed with ginger. But like all the produce here it seems fresh and well-sourced.

To finish

We finish with a good cheese board and an unrefined but gutsy raspberry brownie with ice cream. No disappointments there, though in the midst of other seemingly good quality produce, the chocolate seems cheap. It’s a kid’s brownie, not a grown-up brownie. Sam, who has two kids of his own and used to drink a grande skinny mocha from Starbucks every day, eats it without complaint.

Verdict

Fishy Fishy would never make it through to the X Factor final. Not because it’s bad, but because it’s entirely forgettable. It’s not Wagner and it’s not Leona. Nor does it have a tragic backstory about how its teachers never believed in it and how it lived on the street eating rotten pilchards and singing at startled passers-by.

It’s an adequate restaurant, owned by a snappy TV presenter and, I imagine, some pretty sharp businessmen, and I’m sure it will do very well. If you’re in Brighton or Poole and you’re a bit stuck for ideas, then do go. You won’t have a terrible meal and you won’t get fleeced. But if you’re looking for somewhere special, somewhere with that ‘x factor’, Fishy Fishy isn’t it. Perhaps it would make it through to the next round of auditions, but it ain’t no Christmas number one.  

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