The Modern Menu: three recipes for langoustines from Adam Riley’s beach-front fish shack in Tynemouth
Is there an eating experience that feels more appropriate, that does a better job of connecting place and plate, than tucking into seafood on a beach? There’s something about the saline hit of an oyster or the straightforwardness of a whole-cooked crab that, when taken with sea air, sand underfoot, in sight of waves, the expanse of blue stretching beyond, feels preordained, correct.
Or such is the feeling I have slumped on a deckchair at King Edward’s Bay in Tynemouth, not far from Newcastle. Directly in front of me is the North Sea and behind me is Riley’s Fish Shack – a simply equipped kitchen cooking delicious things with its bounty. The journey from sea to plate (or take-out box, in this case) feels so direct that, from my place on the beach, I fear I might be in its way.
“A connection to the sea has always been quite close, everywhere I’ve lived. It’s always been about the sea,” explains chef proprietor Adam Riley, who spent “all the years that shape you” on the Isle of Man. He recalls summers spent filling shopping bags with mackerel, gurnard, pollock and codling caught off the pier at Laxey, a small village on the island’s east coast. At 17 he moved to the North East to live and work with his dad’s theatre company, Dodgy Clutch. “When Arts Council funding dried up in 2010, we had to think about other ways to make a living,” says Adam. “It all started with an idea to make a slightly Heath Robinson-esque contraption to cycle around festivals, grilling mackerel and kippers – it was a really simple offering, but one that proved popular.”
Adam’s entrepreneurism, though, quickly took the peripatetic festival operation into something more substantial. “Some events we’d make a killing, others we’d make a loss, and I quickly noticed it wasn’t about how many people there were, but what they were there for,” he says. So, after a trial-run pop-up in Newcastle, Adam decided to set up a monthly event that brought together 15 food traders under the roof of a disused 19th-century warehouse behind the city’s central station where Robert Stephenson built his Rocket train. “It took off,” says Adam, “we were getting up to 6,000 people in every month for two years.”
When the venue closed its doors in 2015, Adam diverted his efforts to King Edward’s Bay, where, for the previous two years, his fish-grilling bicycle had spent the occasional sunny weekend serving punters on makeshift scaffold-board benches. “It was a proof of concept,” says Adam. “We knew that there was an appetite here for what we were doing, so we started working on the shack as it is today.” For that, Adam roped in his architect brother-in-law, Dave Harland, of Harland Architecture, who forged a kitchen, an outdoor deck and a small wood-lined indoor dining area from two shipping containers. It’s not glam, but it doesn’t need to be.
Our visit is on a bright day in late October. The temperature is somewhere between not as bad as I had been warned it would be and chilly enough to be appreciative of the wood-burning stoves that fire away in recesses above our table. We settle in. Adam orders beer made with oyster shells (how, I don’t know) by Flash House Brewing, which, like most of the other brews, is sourced a couple of miles away. Then comes the fish: an enormous hunk of hake, silky and light but lifted with brown butter, capers and lemon; grilled sardines piled with lively green sauce; Rockefeller oysters baked with butter, parsley and breadcrumbs. Adam doesn’t do chips, but any yearning I might have had is sated instead by potatoes crisped up on the wood-fired grill, served with a thick dollop of house-made aioli.
That it doesn’t travel well or last very long when fresh is seafood’s greatest virtue. To eat fish that hasn’t been frozen, canned or cured is to eat it not long after it came out of the ocean – nature’s fast food, if you like. Adam knows this well, and freshness is what this place trades off. Owing to space limitations at the shack, a nearby processing facility and prep kitchen handles all the messier requirements concomitant with running a fish restaurant, with orders won at Tynemouth’s Fish Quay Market worked into manageable filets and cuts for the shack’s grill. Even with winter in sight, this place is busy keeping up with requirements when we visit, but Adam says that in the height of summer the shack’s fleet of delivery vans runs back and forth all day to try and keep up.
That’s an awful lot of fish, and begs the natural question. “I think one of the biggest hurdles to creating a sustainable fishing industry is that now, if restaurants decide they want to serve turbot, a fisherman has to go out and hunt for that turbot, which means they throw away vast amounts of bycatch to land what they’re targeting,” says Adam.
“We work mostly with local fishermen and just work with what comes in. Our menu is set from what’s available, and so it changes every day.” This often includes smaller, less valuable seafood, like langoustines.
“I was talking to a fisherman last night,” says Adam, “and the quota we have up here for langoustines is so big, the boats don’t ever have the capacity to reach it. All of the langoustines around here are caught with very little bycatch too.” Unfortunately, explains Adam, most (about 95 per cent) are sent overseas as the UK market isn’t quite there.
“We export our langoustines to buy intensively farmed soft-shell prawns from South East Asia. That ought to change,” says Adam.
In that vein, here’s a tri-part recipe from Adam that uses native langoustines in three distinct ways, all served in an Asian-inspired broth. Happy cooking.
Broth
1kg langoustine shells
4 banana shallots, roughly chopped 10 garlic cloves, crushed
100g ginger, roughly chopped
4-6 bird’s eye chillies, split lengthways 2 stalks lemongrass
First, some prep. In a hot pan, cook off the shells until they are lightly coloured. Add in all other ingredients and cook for five minutes.
Cover with water and leave to simmer for about an hour so that the broth is infused. Strain through a fine sieve, discarding shells.
Sweet and sour mix
100ml rice wine vinegar 20ml fish sauce
50ml soy sauce
100g clear honey
Mix all the ingredients together in a jug and set aside.
Once the broth is passed through, gradually add in the sweet and sour mix, tasting as you go to get a good balance of hot, sweet, sour and salty notes.
First make the filling
1 side of boneless, skinless cod 100g sea salt
100g langoustine meat
1 chilli
Sprinkle a layer of salt onto a tray, lay the cod on top and cover with remaining salt.
Set aside for half an hour in the fridge, then rinse off with cold water and pat dry.
Finely chop the salted cod, langoustine meat and chill and mix together. Set aside in a bowl once ready.
Langoustine money bags (dumplings)
Langoustine filling
Wonton wrappers (you can find these in Asian supermarkets)
Vegetable oil
Heat oil in a fryer to 180C. Place a ball of the filling into the middle of a wonton wrapper. Draw edges up and twist to resemble a money bag.
Fry until golden brown and cooked through. Lightly season with salt when just out of the fryer.
Cabbage parcels
1 outer leaf of a sweetheart cabbage
50-75g salt cod and langoustine filling
Garlic butter
Lay out cabbage leaf and add mixture. Fold the edges in to resemble a rectangle, making sure the cabbage wraps around all the filling to seal it in.
Lightly oil and season and place on a BBQ, sealing off each side and then baste with garlic butter as it cooks.
BBQ langoustine
2 langoustines
250g unsalted butter
6 cloves garlic, very finely chopped 1 lemon
Butterfly langoustines by carefully cutting through from the belly side towards the back, making sure to not cut too deep and split the langoustine.
Melt butter in a pan with garlic and set to one side.
Lightly season and oil flesh side and place flesh side down on a BBQ. Once sealed, flip over and baste with garlic butter until cooked. Finish with a good squeeze of lemon juice.
Plating up
Spring onions, finely chopped
Fresh chilli, sliced
Soy sauce
Add 170-200ml of broth to your chosen bowl. Then place in either a BBQ langoustine, money bag or cabbage parcel.
Sprinkle with chopped spring onions and sliced fresh chillies to taste and add a drizzle of soy sauce.
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