Seafood Restaurant Newsletter

Newsletter

January 2012

Happy New Year to you. Thank you for your support and business over the last year. Despite the world-wide doom and gloom, the changes and introductions to our menus have done well in persuading many more of you to come and dine with us, and I hope that you have enjoyed your visits. I am always looking for feedback so we can improve our standards as a team and provide you with a better and better service. If you ever want to contact me or any of my staff for any reason, please email me on tim@theseafoodrestaurant.com or the restaurant directly on StAndrews@theseafoodrestaurant.com.

In September we introduced the Express Lunch Menu. This is a 2 course (starter and main) lunch menu for only £12.95. This menu was primarily aimed at local business people to offer an inexpensive and healthy lunch option which could be had within a 1 hour lunch break. In St Andrews there seems to be an abundance of snack bars, sandwich shops and cafes but very few opportunities to eat fresh, well-cooked food. At £12.95 this menu competes directly with these fast-food outlets and we have seen a huge increase in the number of our lunch customers as a result of this. We are able to produce this amazing deal by working closely with our suppliers and the markets.

You may have heard of the issues surrounding the fishing industry and in particular of something called by-catch. What Hugh’s Fish Fight is trying to do is to force fishermen to land their by-catch, which is the other fish they catch when targeting another, usually more profitable, species. This by-catch arrives at the markets and is frequently sold as a ‘mixed box’. We make use of these mixed boxes by using them on our Express Lunch Menu, so by choosing to eat from our Express Menu you are doing your bit to help the problem of throwing away perfectly good fish.

www.itison.com

 We have agreed to put up a couple of offers on www.itison.com, the Scottish daily deals website. These deals will be available on Monday 9th January for 24 hours only, so make sure you are signed up to www.itison.com to take advantage. These deals are exclusive to itison.com members and run until the 29th February 2012.

YouTube

I am thinking about starting a YouTube channel for the restaurant (mainly because everywhere else is doing it!) Various ideas that have risen are to provide mini-vids on cooking and preparing seafood and other cooking skills; quick wine recomendations and in particular food and wine pairing or working with Luvians on wines that are readily accessible for the St Andrews locals; behind the scenes clips of running a restaurant or some live footage of the kitchens during service. If you have any ideas or thoughts about this, I would really welcome them.

Facebook and Twitter

Remember to come and join us on your preferred social site. Our ever-changing Express Lunch is posted every day as well as other offers. Or come and join in the conversations and laughs.

Become a fan of our Facebook page by clicking here.

Follow us on Twitter here.

Festive Menus

Check out our new Festive Menus page on the website.

http://www.theseafoodrestaurant.com/st-andrews/festive-menus/

If you want these sent to you by newsletter, please sign up to the mailing list asap as we will be running a mail shot over the next few days.

Now time to get the decorations out the loft…

Good Luck to Craig Millar

With all the recent work in our St Monans restaurant coming to completion, it is now time to wish my ex-colleague, Craig Millar, all the best in realising his life goal of being his own boss and the re-opening of The Seafood Restaurant, St Monans as Craig Millar@16 West End. When I first interviewed Craig for the position of Head Chef in February 1998, I asked him then what his ambitions were in his career. He told me then that one day he would run his own restaurant. Hopefully, the last 13 years of partnership with me has not dented his eagerness and that his passion, that was so evident back then, is undiminished. I can’t wait to go to St Monans as a proper customer for the first time in 17 years.

Good luck, Craig.

This time Twitter or you’re getting it!

Wish me luck, everyone. I think I forgot to save my settings and options last time which resulted in a successful Facebook update but nada from Twitter.
Apoogies for everyone getting bombarded in Facebook, and Neil…this is work!

First blog to test the new site

As I wait for the world’s DNS servers to refresh, which will put our new site live, this is just to test the connectability between my blogs and our business Facebook page. If all goes well, our Twitter feed will also be updated in sequence.
Here goes…

MSC accredited Scottish Haddock – Raymond Blanc’s blog

A few weeks ago, I was fishing for lobster in Pittenweem, Fife. While there were plenty of lobsters in those waters, I was alarmed to see that the white fish such as haddock, cod and whiting were not present; they had gone. But today, light the beacons, sound the trumpets and fire off a celebratory rocket or two. Just over two and a half years ago I met Mike Berthet of M & J Seafoods (http://www.mjseafood.com/), who was talking in Oxford about a fish supply scheme. I challenged him about whether it was really eco-friendly to use Scottish haddock. To my real surprise, Mike said there were plenty of those particular fish in the North Sea. Then to show how confident he was, he flew Gary Jones and me to Peterhead, where, on a perfectly ordinary morning, we counted 7,500 boxes of haddock for sale!

Well that did indeed prove there was a lot of Scottish haddock around. The snag however, is that it did not prove was that this haddock was caught in a sustainable fashion.

But this morning, in what is really a fantastic event for the UK and for Scottish fisheries, Mike is bringing me the first landed Scottish Fisheries Sustainable Accredited haddock, and I will be cooking the first Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) Accredited haddock at Le Manoir for lunch.

They say good news comes in pairs. Well, the UK’s GDP for the summer quarter was twice what was expected; and North Sea haddock is the first Scottish whitefish to be certified with the gold standard of sustainability. Last year the catch was 34.7 thousand tonnes and it was worth £34.2m to the Scottish economy. As Alex Salmond, the very appropriately named first minister of Scotland says, haddock is of huge economic importance to the entire UK, as it ranks fourth in volume and retail sale of in shot up year on year to 30th September by 5.4% in value and 17.7% in volume.

The hoops the Scottish fisheries have had to jump though to are truly formidable – these are serious, difficult to meet criteria – and the certification body is truly independent. So this is a huge victory for our food supply, for common sense, and for our purses and appetites. Haddock is, after all, one of our most delicious species, a complete joy to cook and a fish absolutely beloved by the British consumer. Before you hug your local chippy, just check that what he’s frying tonight is MSC accredited North Sea Haddock. But this is a win-every-which-way situation – and heaven knows we need a few of those just now.

Scottish fishing vessels arrested