Sunday Times Style
Hix Oyster & Fish House, Cobb Road, Lyme Regis, Dorset — this must be the most romantic address and breathtaking location of any restaurant in Dorset, or indeed, the whole of England. Yes, it was a day of pearly luminescence, with the spring sun bouncing off plump green hills and sheer cliffs, with seagulls wheeling in the sky and the sea a soft, sheeny blue, and everything looks better in the sunshine. But the restaurant is perched on a steep hill above the Cobb and has a deck like the prow of a ship, complete with prow and flagpole, where you can sit and sip Manzanilla, and slip the sea down your throat while watching the fishing smacks chug in and out, and the toddlers paddle in the strand below. It is impossible not to feel a faint twinge of wellbeing.
Our oyster count was three Helford River, six Portland Royal and four Colchester, but I’d also greedily ordered the baked spider crab starter (£12.75, more than enough for two). Sitting at the bar on the poop deck, screening out the mini-golf off the port bow and the teenagers snogging under the prow, waiting for the Macon Blanc to arrive, dipping the home-made white bread thickly spread from a pat of cheesy yellow butter into the crab shell — well, this was about as good as it gets.
I was sighing with pleasure in expectation of my main course — a generous-fleshed whole sea bream with bright green sauce, plus meaty, rosemary-roasted jerusalem artichokes — when the ship’s captain, Mark Hix, clad in a battered T-shirt saying Applecrumble & Fish on it, wandered over. Soon his front of house man, Jonny, brought him fish and chips and minted pea purée. My hand stole towards his fat yellow fries as I hoped against hope that he would offer me one of his lethally famous cocktails, called the Hix fix. If he did, see, I’d got what I was going to say all planned out. My friend Alexa had two of them and keeled over, so I was going to say, “Chicks nix Hix fix”, a brilliant-though-I-say-so reworking of the Variety headline that declared country folk fed up with films about rural life (Sticks nix hick pix).
So on a fine day, preferably with a cold glass of white burgundy in your hand and oysters on their way, you can see hope from up here. You can see the future. Yes, just give it a couple of hours at Mark Hix’s crab shack on the Jurassic coast, and it really does seem as if everything is going to be all right after all.
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