The posted menu at Monty's Bistro in Lerwick made us hungry mid-morning, and we rushed inside as soon as it opened officially at noon. It resides in a 130-year-old building nestled behind the main intersection of town, with a bar on the first floor and a restaurant on the second. The room sports the original stone walls and wooden floor, with friendly servers and fetching blackboard specials.
This lunch plate at Monty's Bistro sells for £7.50 and is billed as "Grilled undyed smoked haddock fishcake." It's served with an herb-dressed green grape and cucumber salad, and drizzled with a sweet mustard sauce. Smoked haddock on its own is a typical Shetlands dish, and the cake's body was subsidized by gobs of mashed potato, which provided a pleasant dilution to the smoky and oily attributes of the haddock.
Apparently undyed fish is a local point of pride; I've seen it lauded in several brochures for the Shetlands. I never realized before that smoked fish was dyed; I was never even sure that it was dead.
Posts
Well it looks delicious in the photo. Nice picture. The question is / was would you order it again?
ReplyDeleteExcellent question. As it happens, I'm fiercely partisan about seafood cakes of any sort.
ReplyDeleteThe gold standard is the Maryland crab cake. Thus, I'm skeptical of any cake that uses filler of any kind. These cakes, cut by mashed potatoes, were probably better as is than if they hadn't been. Smoked haddock is too strong a taste to dominate the ingredients, I think. But Maryland still wins.
In its defense, for me, the Shetland cake surpasses the very popular street food fish cake of Scandinavia. This version is kind of a pudding, poached or baked in a bath or something. It's kind of pureed and too sort of rubbery for my taste. But they're ubiquitous, and at least affordable, even in Norway.
To answer the question directly, I'd order anything from Monty's Bistro. That and the museum restaurant Hay's Dock were hands-down the best places to eat in town.