Flashback

Restaurateur Mitch Tonks recalls his fishing debut

I DON’T KNOW if the long summer holidays of my childhood were really as hot and balmy as I remember them. I expect they were just as sodden with drizzle as our summers today seem to be. But I can only recall days like this one. I didn’t know it then, but this precise moment, crouching in the Cornish sand at eight years old, was the beginning of everything.

We were staying – my mother Sue, grandmother, Kitty, and I – in a guest house in Portmellon. Mum had bought me my first ever fishing rod that morning and I was allowed to try it out. On my first attempt, the tide was right in and I was fishing off the road. I cast my first ever line and it landed in my grandmother’s hair. The next day I went down on to the beach. You could do that in those days. Now it’s not so common, though I think they still do it on Chesil Beach in Dorset.

I can still see my nan sitting there smiling at me as I cast off. Pretty soon I had caught a mackerel. My first fish, with my first fishing rod. There’s no feeling like it. You’re standing there, willing a fish to bite, then comes the moment when you feel the tug on your line and it’s a fight between you and the fish. Then the excitement of waiting to see what it will be as it rises out of the water.

Nan cooked the mackerel that night, frying it in butter, as we did all our fish then. We had it with bread and butter. It’s still how I prefer to eat all fish and seafood – unadorned, tasting just as it should, fresh from the sea.

After that holiday I was hooked. I was growing up in Weston-super-mare, on a council estate called the Coronation. I was already in love with the sea, but it was so different where we lived. Cornwall’s crystal-clear blue waters and dinky fishing villages seemed a world away from the black water and muddy beaches of home. Not that that stopped me from heading to the beach every day after school to fish when the tide went out, and pinch a few from people’s nets if I didn’t have any luck.

It wasn’t until I was 27 that it occurred to me to make my passion my work. I had left school with heaps of ambition but no idea what to do with it. I worked various jobs, never finding my place, and then one day I was driving back from London to Bath, where my partner and I lived with our two young children, and I just decided: ‘I’m not doing this any more, I’m going to open a fishmonger’s.’

It was brilliant. We made it just like a European fishmonger’s with a beautiful array of seafood – very different from other fishmonger’s at the time, where you’d just find a bit of cod and haddock and a few eels. I loved it, and soon became even more fascinated with cooking, too. We opened a restaurant above the shop not long after.

Now, we live and run restaurants in south Devon, which I truly believe is one of the most beautiful parts of the world. I’m at the fish market in Brixham first thing in the morning, then I’ll have coffee with our chefs there, then it’s over to Dartmouth where another of our restaurants, The Seahorse, is located. In the summer I’m lucky enough to be able to sail from one place to the next. It’s a pretty idyllic life.

The trick, I think, is to tap into the thing you love most, and make that your work. If you can do that, you’ve cracked it.

— Interview by Eleanor Steafel. Mitch Tonks is celebrating 10 years of The Seahorse restaurant in Dartmouth; mitchtonks.co.uk

I cast my first line and it landed in my grandmother’s hair

Above Mitch Tonks on the beach at Portmellon, showing off his first catch