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Lemon Sole Restaurant & Crofts, Old Portsmouth
You can't fail to miss Lemon Sole, its lemon façade decked out like part of the Chelsea Flower Show on Old Portsmouth's High Street.
Sunil Sood, its owner and manager who has previously worked for such luminary companies as Fortnum and Mason, Harrods and the Taj group of hotels, bills Lemon Sole (he also runs Crofts below the foliage) as 'the south's first pick your own seafood and fish restaurant' – 'you've never had fresh fish this good' proclaimed information on each table and on his colourful website.
With this fine working pedigree and such exultant words you might expect a wondrous, heightened fishy experience to rival the best that many a French seaport in comparable size to Portsmouth has to offer. Or London for that matter. Or Cornwall. Or the Orkneys.
The restaurant divides into three parts, the first one more intimate than the other two open-plan ones, one of which houses the fish counter.
Driftwood in the shape of a conger eel, head and jaws bowed, is draped over a heater, a large battleship grey tuna takes pride of place in the bow window and a myriad of modern pastel seafaring pictures line the lemon coloured walls.
Eurovision song contest music plays.
I sit in the first, more characterful part, the waitress, however charming, not returning with an offer of a drink once having shown me to a table. I join the other diners at the fish counter, all of them staring up at the list of fish and sauces to choose from which, on a Bank Holiday Monday night, bears little resemblance to what is on offer.
I choose a fish chowder to start with but quickly change my mind when faced with the high price of each fish, sold by the 100g.
The sparse collection (pollock, sea bream, plaice, skate, salmon) didn't include lemon sole, monkfish or other billed fish, the lowly pollock, when weighed, costing 18 as did a plaice.
I settle for skate (20) the best looking bet and cancel the chowder, the fish big enough for several meals with no offer of it being cut into two.
Fish is, of course, almost a luxury these days thanks to over-fishing resulting in perilously dwindling stocks. But sea bream is often of the farmed variety, salmon equally, pollock a much cheaper option – but not here.
After a 30-minute wait – and a 15-minute one for someone to come along and take a drinks order – the beast hoved into view, the only accompaniment to the 20 price-tagged fish being sauted potatoes.
No bread to while away the wait, no spinach or other vegetable offered with or without a charge.
I expected the skate to have been sauted in butter, the classical way, small capers, the best quality, adding a welcome tartness to the dish.
I suspect this skate met its final exit via an oven, the capers coarse and tasteless, olive oil adding zilch to the pleasures of the flesh.
Disgracefully overcooked potatoes swimming in oil didn't make the grade either, a glass of poor quality over-oaked Chilean Sauvignon Blanc removed in favour of a marginally better but cheapo Cotes de Gasgogne (4.95) adding further disenchantment.
A sherry trifle with neither sherry nor biscuits soaked in the stuff followed, shards of apple (apple? Delia would be horrified!) instead of soft fruit was this sorry excuse of a 5.50 dessert.
I recently ate a superb fish meal at Bentleys just off Regent's Street, London, for a third of the cost of Lemon Sole, my bill here coming to an eye-watering 33.49 with a service charge included.
Lemon Sole seems to be working in the restaurant's, not customers', favour.
Sorry, Sunil, but Bentleys or those French fish restaurants mostly get my vote when it comes to fish.
As a past restaurateur-chef I can see how to make it into magnet for lovers of fish. It's got the ethos but not the kudos.
Lemon Sole Restaurant & Crofts, 123 High Street, Old Portsmouth PO1 2HW. (023) 9281 1303.
Open: 11.30a,-2.30pm for lunch Mon-Sat (Sun: 11.30am-3pm), 5.30pm-10pm (Sun-Thurs), 5.30pm-10.30pm (Fri-Sat).
Food: ***
Service: ***
Atmosphere: ***
Disabled access: Narrow entrance may be tricky for wheelchairs.
How to get there: The High Street is in Old Portsmouth between Clarence Parade and Esplanade and Battery Point, the restaurant on the same side of the street as Portsmouth Cathedral. Parking on-street.
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Weather for Portsmouth
Wednesday 23 May 2012
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