The essence of good seafood is about
from net to plate being as close as you can
from getting it out of the sea
to getting it onto the platter.
- So it's signature dish time and we're here
in Randall & Aubin, beautiful and we're with
legend Ed Baines, nice to meet you.
- Flattered.
- How's it going?
- Yeah good, good, very well.
- Good stuff, so your signature dish,
I'm sure people have noticed, it is here.
So plat fruits de mer?
Bit of french.
That alright?
- Plat De Fruits De Mer.
- Much better.
- This is the big boy, this is the biggest dish on the menu
obviously it's a selection of all different
varieties of crustacean,
which is what it's all about really.
The first thing, it's a protein fest,
it's all extremely healthy, you know
it's all good and if we work our way through it
what you get is this would be a sharing platter.
Four of you could go for this, two of you could go for it,
it's a minimum of two people, I don't think
anyone's ever sat there individually
and ploughed their way through that
cause it's just too much.
But obviously you've got lots of different
varieties of seafood.
The essence of good sea food is about from net to plate,
being as close as you can from
getting it out of the sea to getting it onto the platter.
So for example the crab, when you eat that,
you know you're looking at something
that's three hours fresh.
I mean it's about as fresh as you get.
Working here you've got the whelks.
Down in the south east,
because obviously there's a Randall & Aubin
in London, we're in bridge street here.
Down in the southeast, might be more popular
the whelks down there than they are here.
But one of those things, whelks are like,
you know, try it, to me I love the flavour
of whelks, a nice bit of shallot vinegar,
a little bit of light blue cheese,
you get the long picks and you pull out the whelks.
These come from Kent.
Pinkies okay so these are Dartmouth pink prawns,
again from the southwest, fantastic they come up,
sometimes we get them in from Scandinavia.
The shell on, okay there's a little bit of work there
but when you go through your Plats De Fruits De Mer,
it's not about oh a quick bite to eat,
you take your time, you get your hands in there
nice bit of mayonnaise, you know pink prawns
and mayonnaise.
The difference between this and something in a bag
that's frozen obviously, you know,
number one these aren't, number two is the sweetness.
You get that lovely sweet flavour.
Working our way around here, we've got the
palaud clams, so these again come in from Dorset.
You dig them up on the beach,
so the guys have got, they're like ploughs
so they run them up and down the beach and dig
up the clams, give them a really good rinse.
Okay we finish them off with a little bit
of dry chili, mixed with salt and cherry vinegar.
Toss them through on the plate,
then we've got our scallops, we've got
diver scallops, they come from the Orkney Isles
so again come in beautiful big plump scallops,
that's served raw, just lemon juice, bit of salt.
Certainly put some lead in your pencil that one.
And then we've got the mussels over here
okay so the mussels we buy in Randall & Aubin
as much as possible we try and buy all our seafood
indigenously from the UK.
But the mussels we've got a great source
coming in from Holland.
Right up in the north of Holland, very very pure water.
The best seafood always comes where you've got
low population densities because humans
generally pollute.
Okay so where there's not a lot of people,
you usually find there's great seafood.
And that's the way to look at it.
Don't want too much shipping,
you want very very pure water.
With these mussels we've been buying these now
for about five years from Holland,
never had an issue, never had a problem.
They're lovely and white, the meats really pure,
they haven't got that strong flavour,
they're just very very light.
Then down the lower level here,
this is a fruits de mer royal, so it comes with
the lobster.
So the lobster's, there is a season for British lobster
and the main thing is about obviously in the winter
it's harder to get UK lobsters because
the tides become so ferocious.
So it's very hard to pull up lobster pots.
They're quite far out, you get these really strong tides,
can be tricky so I always try and get British lobster,
they come in from Cornwall, they come in from a chap
from Devils Harvest in fact, he calls himself.
If we can't get the British lobsters,
we tend to get the ones from North America.
They're amazing things crustaceans,
you know prehistoric creature, it can lose
every bit of it and regrow every year,
it just keeps, pull its claws off,
throw it back in the sea and it will
just regrow them every year.
And they're not quite sure how long they go on for,
they reckon, they know there's a few crab
out there three, four hundred years old,
they think but they're not that sure
because obviously none of us are around
long enough to know.
Finally here we've got the oysters okay so
fascinating species oyster.
It's an hermaphrodite so it
goes from female, spawns, becomes a male,
female, male, female, male.
So and that basically happens around the
temperature of the water.
So what you find with the old saying
the R in the month, what it relates to is
the season of the year.
But these are Gigas oysters, rock oysters
so now they're very good at farming these
to the point that you can put cold water
hence why they put them in locks,
you get this mountain streams running off them.
As long as the water stays below 17 degrees,
you get a nice oyster that's a male.
If they get a bit creamy and some people
are like oh I love them when they're creamy.
You don't want to eat those.
They're female, they've become female
and they get all creamy because they've got eggs
in them right, so you've got a lovely clear oyster,
that's what you wanna look for,
lovely and clean, this is a rock oyster,
we've got three varieties that we sell
in Randall & Aubin, so we've got the French ones
which are called Findeclares, from Omaha beach
in Normandy, we've got the Irish oysters,
northwest Ireland, fantastic pure,
again no ones there, there's not many people there,
lots of rocks, not a lot of shipping, fantastic
oysters we get from Ireland.
And finally the English oysters,
the irony is we don't actually really
get them from England, they're from Jersey.
These bad boys, you shuck em live,
obviously they're still alive and you eat
them live basically, you squeeze the vinegar
on them, or lemon juice and that's how you eat them.
You don't wanna eat a dead oyster,
because you'll become a dead man.
We always get our oysters coming in with,
they give you a five day ticket on an oyster,
from when it arrives, from the day it's pulled
from the sea, it can survive for five days.
In Randall & Aubin we only serve them
up to three days on the ticket
and then if in doubt deep fry them,
oysters tempura on day four.
There's nothing wrong with them,
if you see oysters tempura on the menu
don't think oh no you've given it away.
- Done me over.
- No we're still two days ahead but obviously
once you cook an oyster it becomes much safer
in the respect that you're taking it above
74 degrees, so you cooked it.
These bad boys you know, they're raw, they're fresh.
So that's how it works, it's a funny old thing
in the restaurant, you send one of these out
and you get a run, especially at the weekend.
- Yeah because it's impressive isn't it?
Especially if, as you said, you're on a date or something.
You see some guy producing that.
- You're thinking I want that.
You know the other thing I think that
you know is different about the seafood
than any other variety of food
really apart from game is it's all wild,
apart from the oysters, they farm the oysters
but this is all wild food,
its collected, it's harvested wild, you know.
And it's a little bit like the fish of course.
You know people go out and they hunt it.
And we get all of our fish, most of our fish
from Peterhead and Brixton.
Directly from boats.
We have a policy at Randall & Aubin
from net to plate.
So while I'm binging it away.
Brian is the head chef on WhatsApp,
they're out at sea, we're telling them what we want
and obviously they're not just catching
for us, they're catching a lot of fish out there now.
But the lovely thing is I know for example
all that fish arrived this morning.
That left Peterhead last night,
came in first thing this morning.
Cracked the boxes open, all you can smell
is the sea, none of that smelly fish stuff.
- I mean this, this doesn't smell either
I mean that's a sign of fresh fish isn't it?
- What you wanna smell is the ocean.
Bit like when you walk down the beach
and you kick a bit of seaweed,
but not the smelly seaweed, when it's all nice
and salty and fresh, that's what you want.
Golden rule with oysters is always you look at them
and you just see for example, that's all just lovely
clear, clear fluid.
Nothing just all I can smell is the ocean there.
All I can smell it's just,
- Yeah.
- Salt water.
You've got to be very guarded, we're very careful
the way we work with this stuff,
what we do, everything's recorded,
the date labels, and it's all about
from net to plate as quickly as possible.
That's where the flavor comes from.
Best thing to eat with seafood really,
bubbles are good.
- Yeah cause I was going to ask you,
you're sat here and you're thinking right
what should I have and you're not gonna have
a pint of Vimto or you know.
Champagne and bubbles.
- Champagne, Prosecco, Cava,
what you're looking for is something
that's got acidity.
Because it works so well.
Seafood especially like this,
crustacean it's quite buttery,
it's quite rich.
So you want a wine that's sharp
and obviously champagne often is quite sharp,
you don't want something too sweet
so a very sweet prosecco, it gets all too much,
it's overload.
You need acidity so champagne works perfectly,
a dry prosecco, that's always a nice drop.
Or white wine, you want a nice,
like a bourgogne, a lovely crisp sharp wine
a good chardonnay,
if your feeling flush a white burgundy
always goes down well.
It's nice and just it blends beautifully
with the seafood.
Never really red wine, you're playing
with your life, with red wine it's
too rich red wine, you have red wine and oysters,
you know or red wine and mussels.
If you've got a stomach of iron you'd be alright
but you've got to remember that this is pretty
powerful stuff you know.
You're eating all the platter,
the Plats De Fruits De Mer, you plough through one of these
you know, what you gonna have for dessert,
well you know, keep it simple,
you know maybe a nice little lemon tart
or you know, you don't want to go too heavy.
The one thing that does work beautifully
of course with oysters is a stout.
Bottle of stout, yeah stout is great with oysters.
You know it's the Irish thing,
oysters and Guinness, you know.
And that does work very very well.
People now are coming up with new ones,
you know whiskey and oysters.
- Yeah, doesn't that do you in?
- I think it does, I think it does
but you know, many a whiskey maker out there
would wanna string me up for saying that.
But I'm
for me, you know someone else came up
with doing oysters with gin,
to me that's a bit ferocious, you know,
I mean I'd have a nice cooked piece of fish
maybe with a bit of gin on the side
but for me, I am old school,
they always laugh at me them,
I'm a right traditionalist
and I just think oysters, for me it's
oysters and champagne every time.
- Yeah I think so.
- And that works and it's a good think, you know.