Loch Fyne at Bluewater

The choice of places to eat at Bluewater shopping centre are close to infinite.  As well as all the usual fast-food rubbish and mall food-court suspects there is a Yo-Sushi, a brasserie, a Leon and a Loch Fyne restaurant that stand out as being better than the rest.  Yesterday we opted for Loch Fyne, being in the mood for some good seafood, and it turned out to be quite a good decision!

We went in past the fresh wet-fish counter, where you can buy lobster, dressed crab, crayfish, langoustine, sole, trout fillets, salmon....the list goes on.  It was all well presented and gave the restaurant area a market feel.  The fairly short menu features a wide variety of seafood dishes, from the traditional cod and chips to the ever present fish pie, mostly between around £10 and £17 with a few exceptions at either end of the scale.  There are a couple of non fish dishes too, including sausage and mash (which looked pretty good, actually!), a veggie dish and an informative wine list.  The specials board had a couple of starters and three main courses, all fresh fish caught that morning in Scotland.

We got off to a fairly slow start, given plenty of time to choose from the menu.  That said, once we had ordered, the drinks and food arrived pretty quickly and the service was friendly and relaxed.

We both decided to go for some slightly off-beat dishes (what a surprise, I hear you shout!) rather than one of the fillet or fish steak staples.  Dee had a delicious monkfish and prawn thai green curry with sticky rice and a handful of prawn crackers.  The green curry was zingy and tasty, with a good chilli kick at the end, using monkfish was a good choice because it is meaty enough to stand up to the big thai flavours that come to the fore.

I opted for prawns and scallops (scallops are my favourite thing!) on a bed of sautéed mushrooms and spinach with chilli jam and sticky rice.  The scallops were cooked perfectly, the prawns were delicious, the rice was certainly sticky!  The chilli jam?  Well, it could have been great, but it reminded me of burnt hoisin sauce more than anything else.  It was tasty, and it worked with the prawns and rice etc, but it overpowered the scallops.  Shame, because as just a prawn dish it probably would have worked.

We both managed to stick to our guns on this occasion and skip the deserts.  First time for everything, eh?  So next time you're at Bluewater and starting to get peckish, keep on walking past all the stuff you see in every high street and try some nice fresh Scottish fish for a change!