You could be forgiven for turning up your nose at tinned fish in the UK. Until recently, it has been more reminiscent of school lunches than restaurant menus: cheap, dry and mushy. But that is changing fast, thanks to retailers and chefs importing high-end, artisanal cans from the continent. The contents of these – think large, gleaming flakes of bonito tuna and silvery slippers of sardines bathing in olive oil – are about as far removed from sandwich fillers as a grass-fed steak is from Spam.
At Spring-to-Go, the deli version of Skye Gyngell’s fine-dining restaurant, the chef offers small-batch, limited-edition seafood from the “tin-to-table” brand Pyscis. At Prawn on the Farm, a Cornish outpost of the London fish restaurant Prawn on the Lawn, Rick and Katie Toogood offer a separate menu of tinned fish, sourced from Rockfish, a British tinned seafood brand launched in November by the Devon-based chef Mitch Tonks. Tinned fish is so in that it has featured in Vogue, which called the Los Angeles-based tinned fish brand Fishwife “the stylish, sustainably sourced tinned fish you want in your kitchen”.
