The shop
A fishmonger is a slab first, and ours comes with a smokehouse in the yard, a crab bench at the back, a Friday box that fills the shop at four, a van that is at twenty kitchen doors before nine, and a Saturday school where you learn to do what we do. Each has a page with what it costs and how it works.
01
Twenty-odd lines on the slab on a normal day: cod, haddock, hake and pollock from the Milford day boats, plaice, sole and turbot when they land, bass and bream in season, mackerel and herring, sardines in summer, and whatever the night brought that we did not expect. Whole or filleted while you wait, priced per kilo or each, the boat on the ticket.
Cod fillet £24.
02
Behind the shop is a brick kiln Gethin's father built in 1984. Herring become kippers over oak; haddock is brined and cold-smoked pale, without the dye; salmon is cured and cold-smoked for a day and a night; mackerel is hot-smoked with pepper. Smoked on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays; the smokehouse page says what is in the kiln this week.
Kippers £4.
03
The crab and lobster come from three boats off the Gower and arrive alive; we cook them in the yard each morning and dress the crab by hand. Menai Strait mussels by the kilo, rock oysters from Pembrokeshire, scallops in the shell when the divers go out, langoustines, prawns and a cockle from Penclawdd. Lobster to order, cooked or live.
Dressed crab £7.
04
A box for two, four or six, ordered by Thursday 6pm and collected on Friday between four and seven: skinless haddock or cod fillets from that morning's landing, our batter mix, chips cut from Pembrokeshire potatoes and par-cooked, mushy peas, tartare made here, a lemon, and a card that gets it on the table in twenty minutes. The order page takes it.
The box for two £19, for four £36, for six £52.
05
About twenty kitchens get the van before nine, Tuesday to Saturday: pubs in the Vale, restaurants in Penarth and Cardiff, two cafés, a hotel. The same fish as the counter from the same boats, filleted and portioned to spec, with the day's price sheet by text at half past six, a £120 minimum, and a thirty-day account after three months.
Trade prices about fifteen per cent under the counter, texted at 6:30am each day.
06
Two hours on a Saturday morning at the back bench with Siân: how to tell a fresh fish, how to gut and fillet a round fish and a flat fish, how to skin and pin-bone, how to open an oyster and dress a crab, and how to cook what you have done. Six people, £45, your own knife to keep, and you take your fish home. Dates and seats on the order page.
£45 a person for two hours, a filleting knife to keep, and the fish you filleted to take home.
Where it comes from
Out at dusk, back at dawn, the catch sold on the market floor at half past four to Gethin, who has bought from the same skippers for thirty years. Cod, haddock, hake, pollock, whiting, the flat fish, monkfish, gurnard and whatever the night brings. The boat is on the ticket.
One boat for the line-caught bass and the mackerel; three pot boats for the crab and lobster, which come up on Monday and Thursday nights and arrive alive in the yard at seven. Undersized, berried or out of condition goes back, and we say so.
Mussels from a rope farm in the Menai Strait, cleaned and debearded; rock oysters from a Pembrokeshire creek, which are sweeter in the cold months; cockles boiled at Penclawdd the old way; scallops from two divers out of Milford when the sea is calm enough.
The Welsh boats do not catch salmon, so ours comes from a single farm on a Scottish sea loch that Gethin and Siân have visited and would go back to: low density, slow growth, a fat content that smokes well. We say it is farmed, because it is.
A box for two, four or six: haddock or cod landed that morning, batter mix, blanched chips, mushy peas, tartare, a lemon and the card. Order by Thursday 6pm, collect Friday four till seven or have it delivered within five miles. The same form takes a counter order, a lobster, or a seat at fish school.
