As the Anglo-Irish satirist and author Jonathan Swift once said, “he was a bold man that first ate an oyster.” Indeed; I mean, they’re a bit weird-looking, aren’t they? But I was once that bold (wo)man, eating an oyster for the very first time almost two decades ago (at the start of a cookery class, as it happens, which makes the ensuing debacle doubly embarrassing).
Without going into too much detail (I generally aim to encourage your appetite, not put you off your food for days) my first oyster didn’t, erm, stay with me for long. Put it this way: the chef/teacher at the cookery school said that he’d never seen anybody throw anything as far across a room without using their hands.
Hundreds of restaurant reviews, chef interviews, foodie travels and fish dinners later, and I’m sitting at a beautifully-dressed table in a beautifully-dressed restaurant reading a menu that reads like the kind of menu you generally only encounter in a modern fish bistro on one of those gorgeous coastal roads along the French Riviera, with a vibe to match (super-chic décor; sparkly lights; mellow sophistication a go-go from the get-go)… and I’m told that fresh oysters are the start-off dish of the day.
At this point, my partner’s eyes light up – and I knew what he was thinking: “she’ll say yes please, ‘cos she doesn’t want to look unsophisticated. But she won’t touch them, and I’ll get to keep them to myself and gobble them all up…”.
And he was right: I did indeed say yes please. And he said he’d cut a corner of an oyster off for me, just so I could say I tasted one. And then I tasted that sliver. And then… he had to fight me for the rest of the plate, ‘cos I’d never tasted anything so – well, weirdly wonderful, and deep-dive oceanic, and totally texturally unique, and – yes! – sexy… and all those clichés that are associated with oysters, within which there’s no room for me to try and come up with a new one. Okay, the experience may have been amplified by the fact that I downed a French 75 with my oysters – another new experience that I’m also keen to revisit. But anyway! Talking of new experiences…
Despite having opened its doors towards the end of last October, Flute is still widely referred to as the ‘new’ seafood cafe-bar right on the George Street/Bartlett Street junction. Why do Bathonians insist on calling every restaurant that opened in the last five years ‘new’? Ah well, whatevs; that’s a theme for another day.
If Bartlett Street itself is fast becoming Bath’s most fascinating foodie ‘quarter’ (which it is), Flute is the first pitstop along the way, standing out as a shimmering beacon of polished but welcoming promise, offering menus that specialises in fish, seafood and shellfish… and cocktails. Do not overlook the cocktails here! They’re properly fabulous, and the restaurant operates as a really cool bar too, with a dedicated, upmarket ‘drinking den’ (or private hire/restaurant overflow room) towards the rear and those all-important pavement tables out front.
You can fish for all moods and occasions at Flute, from early until late; if Lobster Benedict on the Brunch menu isn’t enough to get you out of bed in the morning, I don’t know what is. All the fish on the menu is impeccably sourced, 100% sustainable and always seasonal, with regular deliveries from Wing of St Mawes bringing the very best catches of the day directly to Bath resulting in the kind of selection (and the kind of simple, best-advantage preparation and cooking of that selection) that Rick Stein gets all pink-cheeked and super-excited about on his various food tours.
After our oyster party, we started our own tour of the Flute menu with three small plates: buttery soft shell crab, almost lobster-like in intensity of flavour, the crunch of the edible shell adding crisp texture at every bite. Distinctly non-bouncy, super-succulent squid, mildly nutty, sweetly fishy. And, for me, the star of the trio: an utterly beautiful plate of octopus carpaccio sliced so thinly it was almost translucent, but packing a huge flavour punch that teased and flirted around the point where bracing brine meets a unique, velvety creaminess that one wouldn’t normally associate with Cephalopoda, offset by a smooth, smooth dressing and crispy shallots for added crunch.
All three dishes were outstanding in inspiration, preparation and execution, presented with a refined elegance that matched our surroundings. But Flute hadn’t played its coda yet!
We moved on to a beautifully-balanced seafood pasta laden with all the good stuff that seafood pasta should be laden with including mussels, and more squid, and glistening prawns, and smooth slabs of the freshest white fish, all tangled in and around silky pasta in a broth that gently nudged at the boundary where stock meets bouillabaisse base without overpowering any element of the finished dish – clever, subtly complex, and deeply infused with care and attention.
By contrast, our tuna – just-about-crusted on the outer limits, pink and meltingly tender within – was allowed to take it’s own, barely diddled-about with centre stage spotlight as the star of the plate (apart from the addition of a drizzle of vibrant, herb-laden oil that will have had a properly cheffy name that I didn’t take note of, sorry), and did that wonderfully almost-weird thing that tuna, when cooked properly, can do: messed with our heads by forcing us to use words like ‘meaty’ for a fish. Other words that came easily to mind included sensual, and smart, and stylish… and then I went and spoilt it all by saying something stupid like, “oh, we gotta have chips!”. But when crab and hollandaise fries are on your radar, those words aren’t stupid at all: when I say that they were the most fabulous, fish-themed fries that I’ve ever encountered, I’m not kidding.
We didn’t opt for full-on desserts this time around (can you blame us, after all that?) even though the table across the way from us said that the chocolate mousse is “heaven in a dish”. Instead, we shared a couple of madeleines in a deeply enchanting butterscotch sauce and made plans to revisit Flute very, very soon, not least of all because, at the time of writing, the Flute Seafood Platter has launched, and the Seafood Boil experience has yet to be sampled. Oh, and there’ll always be oysters… and as we’ve now established, I never, ever refuse the prospect of an oyster…
The Prandial Playground, Bath and Beyond... 