MCA Introduces: Rockfish Exeter

Of all the myriad challenges facing operators in Brexit Britain, staff recruitment is frequently high up the list.

Yet with an impressive 1,400 applications for his latest regional opening in Exeter, it’s not an issue Mitch Tonks is currently experiencing.

It’s a happy problem the chef-owner credits to careful brand-building over the last nine years, which has seen the seafood concept open six sites so far (with a further three in the pipeline) as well its work on creating a strong people policy and staff benefits.

“People want to be part of a great group that’s going somewhere,” Tonks explains, during the opening week of Exeter.

“We have spent years building our brand, focussing on people, how we treat them, pay rises, incentives, paddleboarding trips.”

Tonks is well aware he is one of a select group of good multisite operators in the South West, such as Hubbox, which he cites as key to the appeal of Rockfish as a place to work.

“I don’t think there are many others that are growing and expanding with integrity,” he says.

While Exeter is no bigger than previous iterations of Rockfish, with 90 covers inside, Tonks sees it as the most ambitious, due to it being away from the seaside, albeit on the city’s quayside.

This makes for a different type of restaurant – it’s a wholly new build, with a less tourist-reliant consumer – though the ethos of a destination, everyday restaurant remains the same.

There were some hold-ups with the opening, with an original plan sent back to the drawing board over sensitivities of building on a grassy space, but Tonks is satisfied with the glass fronted site, and says the community are now firmly on side.

“Let’s not pretend this is a shack by the sea. It’s a seafood restaurant in a city in a glass building,” Tonks says.

“It feels quite Antipodean. In Australia you see a lot of modern fish restaurants not dissimilar to this. The climate down there lends itself to buildings with glass doors.”

With his higher end restaurant The Seahorse in Dartmouth, Tonks maintains a place alongside top tier chefs such as Nathan Outlaw, Michael Caines and Paul Ainsworth in the region.

But again it’s the everyday occasion, and the middle ground between the high end and the fish and chip shop, which was the inspiration, and remains the core focus of Rockfish.

“I want this to be a place where you and I could come and have oysters, dover sole and a bottle of Chablis,” he says. “The next table might want some whiting and chips and a beer. The table along might have walked the dog, and come in for a crab salad.

“It’s filling the gap and bringing seafood to everyone. We do fun things like bring your own wine a Wednesday. We make the restaurants feel like part of the community.

“I always feel restaurants should belong to the locals. People have got to feel it’s their restaurant, their place I come. I think Rockfish opens the door for people to be able to do that.”

While the restaurant group looks to become part of small seaside communities, it has the backing of A-list restaurateurs such as Hawksmoor founder Will Beckett, as well as Gresham House private equity.

Meanwhile Dave Strauss, formerly of Burger & Lobster, has recently come in as restaurant director, to focus in particular on the new territory of Dorset, with Weymouth and Poole opening next.

“You don’t realise until you’re doing it what you can learn from people like Will, who has walked that path with Hawksmoor,” Tonk says. 

“It helps me in my thinking and how I deal with my teams and put everything together - it’s been transformational.”

Strauss was a friend of Beckett’s and joined in opportune moment. 

“Dave is a real grassroots restaurant man, and knows everting about running them, mainly them from the floor,” Tonks adds. 

“I don’t care that he doesn’t do spreadsheets. He does what restaurants people should do which is run restaurants.”

Is it a big shift in culture for someone like Strauss going from a premium city group to a more regional operation. Not really, Tonks says.

“We’re not an ordinary regional brand,” Tonks says. “There’s not many outside the city aiming for the levels we are. It’s hard. Sometimes it’s easier to take a compromise or easy route, but that’s not what we want to.”

As well as his experienced board, Tonks has his own experience running and founding Fishworks to draw upon.

In many ways, he says the fishmonger-cum-restaurant group, which had 30 sites at its peak, went through the same issues the casual dining market is going through today.

“Being a public company, every decision we made was on year end numbers and profit,” he says.

“Business was being driven for the wrong reasons. The pace of openings was far too quick. There was no time to bed down the restaurants we’d opened or make good decisions about our pipeline.

“We were opening a restaurant every six weeks. In the first week we were brilliant. By the third week they were falling apart.”

Having seen how things can go wrong, Tonks is happy to be growing at a more sustainable pace, with the right investment.

Yet while the style of doing business might have changed, Tonks’ devotion to seafood is firmly intact, with the freshness of the source pithily convey in the tagline: ‘tomorrow’s fish is still in the sea’.

Such is the dedication to sourcing quality, Rockfish has its fish supply business, becoming a primary buyer on the market, giving it better prices, and greater oversight over the supply chain, from preparation to delivery.

Rockfish only sells what is available, even if it means a limited selection on opening week.

“Last week all the boats were in,” Tonks says. “It meant we could only serve one or two species in our opening week. We told people that’s the deal. That’s how real it is. We don’t get a load of frozen stuff in.”

As well as serving familiar fish – cod, skate, monkfish, dover sole and whiting – Tonks is also trying to promote less eaten species such as cuttlefish.

Selling it as ‘Brixham calamari’, 30 tons of cuttlefish are landed in the UK every day – but the majority is shipped to Spain and Italy.

“We want to see that kind of stuff being eaten. It’s something we’re really going to champion and get into.”

Back to Brexit, and fishermen were vocal leave supporters, arguing it would give them greater control over quotas.

But Tonks doubts there’s much in it for fishermen.

“People who have quotas aren’t suddenly going to give them up now. What you’re going to find is if that it does happen, they wouldn’t buy our fish. 90% of south coast fish is exported to Europe. If they didn’t buy our fish – we’ve got all this bass turbot, lobster - we won’t eat it. We eat white fish. You won’t find the price dropping.”