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Hello and welcome to Table Talk, the Spectator's Food and Drink podcast. I'm Olivia Potts.

And I'm Laura Prendergast. And today we are delighted to be joined by Mitch Tonks.

Mitch is an award-winning restaurateur and chef.

As well as running the Rockfish restaurant group in Devon and Dorset and the Seahorse in Dartmouth,

he has written several seafood cookery books and regularly appears on television.

His latest book, Rockfish, was published in May last year. Mitch, welcome to Table Talk.

Thank you for having me. Mitch, as listeners know, we always start this podcast with the same

question. What are your earliest memories of food? My earliest memories of food are with my grandmother.

I used to live a couple of doors away with my mum and I'd always be

popping down the road to see her and I used to remember things like Christmas puddings being

made in October and we would shove her sixpence into it and there'd be bottles of Mackison. It was

always quite a joyful day in the house. And you grew up in Western Supermare. Was fish an important part of the family meal?

It was. My grandmother was an incredible cook, and like many of the people in Western, she was

an evacuee from London during the war and settled there. And so she was very frugal with what she made,

and she knew her ingredients. And we used to have a fishmonger down

on the corner called McFisheries and so I would go down there with her and you know I can still

close my eyes and smell the kind of boiled crab smell in that fish shop it wasn't a tall fish

it was just really wonderful and there'd be piles of brown shrimps on this slab and fish of all kinds and piles

of crab and so I used to go home and peel brown shrimps for sandwiches and pick crab with her and it was

just a joy. Children can be fussy about eating but particularly about about fish and shellfish

were you always open to trying that sort of thing, willing to go for it?

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