Food ✪✪✪✪ Ambience ✪✪✪✪
Service ✪✪✪✪
Coble Quay
Amble
Northumberland
NE65 0DJ
01665 712111
Accessibility? Yes
Gluten free? Yes
facebook.com/fatmermaidamble
[Really sad to see this place close. Fortunately you can still enjoy Jonny Bird's excellent cooking in Amble at Sea&Soil]
There is a certain art to writing a good menu. As with so much in life, it’s about getting things in proper balance.
There is a certain art to writing a good menu. As with so much in life, it’s about getting things in proper balance.
Take the level of detail. At one extreme, some menus - especially in your hipster-habituated newer places, sporting a font that looks like it was produced by a Dymo machine - are overly terse, offering only a list of principal ingredients. “Prawn, citrus, peanut” – that type of thing. All well and good, but what have you done with them? I want to know what I’m eating, not your shopping list.
On the other hand, you have the purple prose over-revealers. You know the sort: “Our famous best-ever house cured salmon, sashaying nonchalantly on a bed of wilted spinach, drizzled with chef’s own signature relish and served at a 45 degree angle to a dome of audaciously boiled rice”. I’m happy for a menu to show a bit of leg, but not to get its kit off before I’ve even been served a drink.
Also of importance is the issue of familiarity. Are you serving up the same tired staples as every other place since decimalisation? Or are you seeking to shock, by clattering together ingredients that have no business sharing a plate?
The well written carte should offer something for the curious and the customary diner alike.
On all these fronts the main menu at Fat Mermaid in Amble is a triumph. Over 5 sections, with sensible titles like “From the Sea”, “From the Garden” or “Snacks”, are proposed that rare thing: a bunch of dishes any one of which I’d be happy to order.
