The Curious Case of the Unchanging Fish Menu
Seasonality is one of the most frequently used words in hospitality.
It appears on menus, websites, social media posts and marketing materials. We are told that ingredients are local, fresh, sustainable and guided by what nature provides.
In principle, it sounds straightforward.
The difficulty is that nature has a habit of ignoring business plans.
Storms arrive. Fuel prices rise. Fish move. Water temperatures change. Quotas change. Markets fluctuate. Boats stay tied up in harbour. Species that were once abundant become scarce, while others appear where they were rarely seen before.
And yet some menus appear remarkably stable.
Year after year.
The same dishes. The same species. The same availability.
A remarkable achievement.
Is the Menu Following the Fish?
A genuinely seasonal menu starts with availability.
What can be bought changes from week to week, sometimes from day to day. Species move through the year. Weather affects catches. Prices rise and fall. Some fish become plentiful, while others become difficult to source.
A menu built around these realities naturally changes.
Perhaps not every day, and not dramatically every week, but noticeably over time.
When a menu remains almost identical for years, it raises an interesting question:
Is the menu following the fish, or is the fish being sourced to fit the menu?
Neither approach is inherently right or wrong. They are simply very different business models.
The Economics of Fresh Fish
One of the most common questions in hospitality is why fish is expensive.
The answer is usually hidden long before the fish reaches the plate.
A premium fish such as turbot can currently cost around £10 for a modest restaurant portion before a chef has touched it. Before preparation, before service, before rent, wages, utilities, VAT or waste are considered.
By the time all of those costs are accounted for, the mathematics can become uncomfortable.
The reality is that many businesses serving genuinely fresh seafood are operating under significant financial pressure.
Customers often see a menu price.
Operators see an entire chain of costs sitting behind it.
The Romance of the Day Boat
There is something undeniably appealing about the idea of seafood arriving directly from local boats each morning.
And sometimes that does happen.
The challenge is that fish are not manufactured.
An individual boat cannot guarantee what it will catch. Weather cannot be guaranteed. Volumes cannot be guaranteed. Species cannot be guaranteed.
The sea is wonderfully resistant to consistency.
The more a business depends on genuinely local landings, the more it must adapt to uncertainty.
Which brings us back to menus.
Nature tends to be variable.
Menus built around nature often reflect that variability.
The Skills Nobody Talks About
Fresh fish arrives with responsibilities attached.
Buying whole fish often means scaling, gutting, filleting, trimming and preparing it before it ever reaches a customer.
Those skills were once common throughout the industry.
Today they are becoming less so.
The public often imagines fresh fish arriving neatly prepared and ready for service. The reality is considerably messier, more labour intensive and more dependent on specialist knowledge.
Freshness is not simply a purchasing decision.
It is a capability.
The Ocean Is Changing
Perhaps the biggest challenge is that the sea itself is changing.
Many local fishermen speak about shifts that would have seemed unusual only a few years ago.
Bluefin tuna have returned to Cornish waters.
Mackerel, once viewed as an abundant and affordable staple, can now be surprisingly valuable.
Octopus have become increasingly common visitors to lobster and crab pots, sometimes damaging or reducing catches of premium shellfish before the pots are even hauled.
The ecosystem is moving.
Businesses that genuinely rely on the sea must move with it.
Business Health and Reality
One of the themes of these notes is business health.
Healthy businesses are not necessarily those that promise certainty.
They are often the ones that adapt successfully to uncertainty.
The fishing industry understands this better than most.
Every day involves variables that cannot be controlled.
Weather.
Markets.
Fuel.
Fish.
The further a business operates from these realities, the easier consistency becomes.
The closer a business operates to them, the more adaptation is required.
Perhaps the simplest question customers can ask is not whether a menu claims to be seasonal.
It is whether the menu behaves seasonally.
Because if everything around the fish is changing, it seems reasonable to expect the menu to change too.
