Lazy Sundays: Café Fish

If you're in Durban and you want to eat out on the water, you can't find a much better location than Café Fish. Situated on a pier that juts from the city into the ocean at the Durban Yacht Basin, one can easily take in the pleasure boats of the Point Yacht Club to one side and the tall red cranes and multi-hued container boats of the Harbour to the other. The venue makes the most of its position, with high floor to ceiling windows that spill light across the widely spaced tables, simply decorated in nautical blue and white.

Apparently if you are there at the right time you can watch the seafood being offloaded from a boat right at the kitchen door. I was happy to settle for watching it being offloaded from the arms of the waitress onto the table. Lunch had arrived, in the form of a traditional beer battered fish and chips and grilled peri-peri prawns.

Given the name of Café Fish, the eponymous dish needed to be good - and it was. The beer battered fish and chips were good value, with two large fillets of moist and flaky fish surrounded by a batter that managed to be simultaneously pillowy-soft and deep-fried crisp. The tartar sauce was generously spiked with roughly chopped pickles, the chips were hot and fresh and the whole dish went down very well drenched in lemon juice.

The grilled peri-peri prawns lived up to their simple name and arrived with the benefit of a large wire basket to gather the shells, which were picked completely clean before being discarded. The peri-peri sauce could have been a little hotter, but it was well balanced with garlic and lemon.

The menu looks as though it would benefit from a thorough exploration, with the Vietnamese style calamari  (chilli, mint, garlic, pineapple and peanuts) and the cajun linefish in particular catching my eye. Sadly, the pudding menu looked rather dull in comparison (unless you enjoy Banoffie Pie), so we opted to finish with coffee, which was good enough, but took a while to arrive.

Café Olé!