London's Parsons Is A Great Fish Place Near Covent Garden
When we're vacationing in London, my wife and I always eat at least one meal in a seafood restaurant: So many of the creatures in British waters are different from those we get at home in New York, and it's a treat to eat them freshly caught and beautifully cooked. For years, our favorites have been J. Sheekey in the theater district and Scott's in Mayfair. Both are big, buzzy, expensive, and traditional, and both are excellent. And then there's Bentley's Oyster Bar & Grill off Piccadilly, which is smaller but possesses all the rest of those attributes. We have no intention of abandoning them.
But on our most recent trip we had post-opera supper at a newcomer just a four-minute amble from the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden: Parsons. It is is almost the opposite of the sleek restaurants mentioned above. It's informal (but entirely professional), not as costly, very small (a row of regular tables with a banquette along one wall and a clutch of high tables and stools across the room), and prettily tiled in white and green, with mirrors and a few nice paintings of shellfish. There's an oyster station at the back with a couple more seats and a kitchen in the basement. Everybody, staff and customers alike, seems happy to be there, which is always a mood-enhancer.
Our mood was enhanced also by a look at the placemat-menu: snacky, tapas-style dishes up top, then first courses, sides, desserts/savories, and wines by the glass or carafe (with bottles listed on the other side: the proprietors also own a wine shop/bar and bistro, The 10 Cases, across the street). Main dishes (all fish) and seafood options change all the time, and these are written on the wall tiles and mirrors, visible from all seats without neck-craning.
At the moment we were there, the available fish were hake, sea bream, Dover sole, and John Dory, all simply pan-fried and served with a butter emulsion, intense roasted carrots, and a do-it-yourself spritz of lemon juice. The John Dory fillet was sweet and plump and of a good size (this fish can run small nowadays), and it was cooked to moist firmness: it could hardly have been better.
We'd been commanded by a friend to order lobster mashed potatoes as a side dish, so we did. They were okay, but the little chunks of lobster and the lobster juices flavoring the dense potatoes did little to enhance them in the way that a moister add-in (like simple sautéed onions or mushrooms) can do.
As satisfying as the John Dory was — just about perfect — the real fun was in those introductory snacks. Shrimp croquettes are nothing new, but potted shrimp croquettes needed to be tasted. Like others of their kind they were based on a thick béchamel sauce dotted with tiny shrimps, but the spices, notably mace, evoked classic English potted shrimps (which are simmered in seasoned butter that takes on their taste and aroma). Mace can overwhelm a dish, but the head chef here, Hiroshi Ishikawa, used it judiciously. There were three croquettes and two of us, and I couldn't resist grabbing the larger half of the third. This was uncharacteristic selfishness on my part and said a lot about how good the croquettes were.
Also from the fryer came salt cod fritters. As expected, their filling consisted of shredded cod blended with soft mashed potato; the unexpected part was the good spicy tomato sauce and the almost brittle coating, which never lost its crispness — a tour de force of frying.
The snack that opened our eyes the widest was listed as brown crab pissaladière. In Britain, brown crab meat is all the stuff you scrape out of the shell after you've extracted the white meat that we in the U.S. are used to eating. Like many foods that are too often discarded, it is the most flavorful part, and here it was spread over a thin disc of tender pastry — it would be wrong to call it pizza dough, but that's not a bad way to describe it — baked to slight crispness, then dotted with blobs of mayonnaise markedly flavored with tarragon. Two of our favorite flavors, brown crab meat and tarragon, and beautifully executed. I hope it never leaves the menu.
If it hadn't been approaching bedtime, we might have followed our snacks with seared mackerel salad with orange dressing, or maybe sea trout tartare with a Bloody Mary gel, but we moved right on to that excellent John Dory, then to an exemplary apple tart, thin, crisp, and freshly baked. The tart was the only sweet dessert that night; the other options were savories, including a steak sandwich possibly meant to evoke the Lisbon seafood house Cervejaria Ramiro, which also serves these for "dessert." I'd have ordered one out of orneriness, but they were sold out.
The experience at Parsons is quite different from that at our other favorite London fish houses, with their tablecloths, maîtres d'hôtel, and extensive menus. How best to put it? It's breezier, not at all dressy, and — for those who are intimidated by fancy restaurants that are known to attract Famous People — more approachable. For me, that would be of no worth if the cooking didn't soar, but it does, so I've added Parsons to our list for whenever we're visiting London. I'll just make sure to reserve long in advance; it's been a runaway success, and tables are hard to get at normal dinner hours.
To get the fresh-from-the-sea taste at home, whip up a delicious seafood dish.