Seafood lovers rejoice! There is a new restaurant in town that is just for you. Let us introduce Bucket.
Started in Notting Hill by husband and wife team Georgie Godik Hayward and Adam Hayward, previously of the Gaucho group, at Bucket you get great seafood in a relaxed and comfortable setting. The interiors remind you of a plush and luxurious beachside cafe with cushioned booths, a sleek bar with great cocktails and an open kitchen.
We sit down and waitress Anna comes over and recommends the snack of squid ink crackers and the seaweed crisps. The perfect appetisers. There are of course more on the menu but these I wish I could get packets of and have them all the time.
The simplicity of the name of the restaurant alludes as well to how your food comes….by the bucket-load! Simply pick the bucket size (the large ones really are huge) and what you want in it. The mussels are the signature dish (or bucket!) here and you have 4 mouth-watering options. We went for the Lobster and brandy sauce. Rich and creamy and full of flavour. They somehow made a bucket of mussels decadent. Tempting as it was to even further on the scale and order the champagne to accompany it (Charles Heidsieck, a personal favourite) a lovely Muscadet sur-lie went beautifully with it. Fresh, dry and minerally, exactly what you want on a hot day. The wine list is, at least with the whites, very complimentary to seafood, with a tempting Saint-Veran by the bottle. Maybe next time. I was told by Anna again there was also a Manzanilla sherry behind the bar. If I had known before we ordered the Muscadet. Manzanilla sherry, bone dry and saline goes perfectly with prawns and shellfish. Unorthodox perhaps but well worth putting on the menu and well worth trying!
Oh yes, there’s another bucket on the table. Fritto misto! Crunchy tempura batter with perfectly cooked squid and prawns and octopus and… I could go on but we don’t have the time. Those mussels have to be gobbled up and that sauce! I think I already mentioned how good that was. To make sure we were also being a little healthy we had the little side salad of cucumber and seaweed. There is seaweed all over the menu and that’s great. More of it! Maybe slightly smaller chunks of cucumber though…
Dessert? I could squeeze something in after all those mussels. It was a lovely pineapple carpaccio with pink peppercorns and a coconut sorbet. The sorbet was surprisingly rich and complemented the pineapple perfectly.
Great food, friendly and knowledgeable service, a comfortable and happy atmosphere. A great new restaurant that every seafood lover should head to. Especially as they will be starting an oyster happy hour. £1 oysters? Yaaaas.
– CS-P
GO TO: bucketrestaurant.com
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