After nailing fish & chips at Hook in Camden, Simon Whiteside has gone south of the river for his first solo restaurant Roe, which celebrates sustainable British and Irish seafood. He’s taken over one of the shipping containers in Pop Brixton, and though you’re sitting in what is essentially a long box, it does feel like a proper, if rustic, restaurant with white tiled walls and two communal wooden tables.

It’s a bit cliche to say but Roe really is one of those places where you could eat the entire menu – and actually you can have a good crack at least half of it between two. We started with a glass (Dry-ish Jan is about as far as we’ll go) of Contesa Pecorino, a lesser-known Italian white, which was a great recommendation, a couple of oysters and the ink and Guinness soda bread. Yes this is the kind of seafood restaurant that puts a fishy element in literally every dish bar the desserts. The bread comes with seaweed butter but you should definitely add the mackerel pate too.

We went for a good spread of smaller and main plates, and we particularly loved the fried anchovies with hot sauce, the red gurnard carpaccio, which came with excellent pickled shiitake mushrooms, and the skate wing with earthy jerusalem artichoke puree and wild mushrooms – a great wintry dish without being heavy. Make sure you check out the whole fish special too; on our visit it was a Thai-style deep fried John Dory with a mushroom and noodle broth on the side.

If you like seafood, you need to row, row, row your boat down to Roe pronto.

Pop Brixton, 49 Brixton Station Road, London, SW9 8PQ
@roebrixton

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