Chef Marcus Sherry is on a mission to prove running a restaurant based on small-scale suppliers can create something special
Marcus Sherry was ready for change when he tried to quit his job. The only problem was his employers didn't want to let him go. After many years working as the executive chef of the Fife Arms in Braemar, he and his restaurant manager wife craved a different pace of life and had mapped out a move to a remote Scottish island.
But what if we give you a restaurant of your own to run, countered the powers above? His bosses at Artfarm (the Fife's parent company) had found a site in the nearby town of Ballater and wanted someone to run it. Island time could wait, the Sherrys decided.
Its location dictated the restaurant's menu in part, admitting that he originally wanted it to be "a bit more trendy" but "not everyone got it".
"We wanted it to be sharing style, but found people weren't dining the way we wanted them to, so we very quickly said ‘scrap that, let's go with what people enjoy'," he says.
After not even 10 months, Fish Shop has been decorated by industry heavyweights such as Michelin and The Guardian restaurant critic Grace Dent. With the flurry of positive press and the subsequent arrival of a bustling clientele came the natural selection of signature dishes.
"I never set out to have them," Sherry says. "But people dictate them for you." He's talking about the crab crumpets nearly every table orders, adding: "I think if we ever took them off the menu there would be a riot. "We make our own mini crumpets a day in advance because they toast better and absorb more butter if they're a little stale. We top them with the fluffiest claw meat dressed in homemade mayonnaise, chives and aleppo pepper. It's the hot buttery crumpet with the cold mayonnaise on top – the contrast of the textures and temperatures – that works so well. It's not groundbreaking, it's just attention to detail."
There's nowhere to hide when you're serving uncomplicated food like barbecued hispi cabbage hit with a splash of vinegar or Shetland mussels with nduja and tomato, and it all boils down to the ingredients (many of which are a surprise, arriving in mixed boxes bought to help lower waste) that come in daily and keep the menu updated at a similar pace.
"I know every chef says this, but we're produce-led," he says. "There's nothing on the plate that doesn't need to be there. We're not trying too hard to make things fancy. There are no tweezers. I've done fine dining and appreciate it but when it comes down to what I want to cook now it's just very simple, very delicious food."
Some of his favourite produce, Sherry says, is shellfish. "We bang on about our produce all the time, so to mask it in techniques or flavours would be counterproductive". Instead, fat scallops are barbecued, drenched in butter and finely chopped chilli, and gilded with generous amounts of golden garlic crisps. Another starter is cockles in bright green mojo verde generously spooned on top of sourdough toast that soaks up the punchy, coriander sauce and cooking juices to become an intensely flavoured treat at the bottom of the bowl.
The ingredients are mainly sourced from the UK, with 95% of the fish coming from Scottish small-scale suppliers like a man called Donald who catches all the lobster, and oysters from Cape Wrath which, Sherry says, are the best he's ever tried. What, then, if the chain fails? This winter the storms were so bad there simply weren't some of the big hitters coming in off-shore. "We just take dishes off the menu – that's an easy decision for me. We won't compromise our ethos for anything."
When they can get the catch, another customer favourite is the glossy lobster tagliarini. "We make our own pasta, chop poached lobster meat finely and mix it with a sauce made from a lobster nage, which is freshened up with chervil, chilli and garlic," explains Sherry.
With a kitchen garden in the works, a warrant in the pipeline for supplying the royal family with seafood and his eyes on a Michelin green star, Sherry's dreams of a slower paced life appear to be disappearing into the distance.
3 Netherley Place, Ballater AB35 5QE
