Vogue loves the retro-artwork on the labels, while chefs love the high-end ingredients inside. Forget dusty cans of dry tuna – posh cans of fish are now surprisingly cool
You could be forgiven for turning up your nose at tinned fish in the UK. Until recently, it has been more reminiscent of school lunches than restaurant menus: cheap, dry and mushy. But that is changing fast, thanks to retailers and chefs importing high-end, artisanal cans from the continent. The contents of these – think large, gleaming flakes of bonito tuna and silvery slippers of sardines bathing in olive oil – are about as far removed from sandwich fillers as a grass-fed steak is from Spam.
At Spring-to-Go, the deli version of Skye Gyngell’s fine-dining restaurant, the chef offers small-batch, limited-edition seafood from the “tin-to-table” brand Pyscis. At Prawn on the Farm, a Cornish outpost of the London fish restaurant Prawn on the Lawn, Rick and Katie Toogood offer a separate menu of tinned fish, sourced from Rockfish, a British tinned seafood brand launched in November by the Devon-based chef Mitch Tonks. Tinned fish is so in that it has featured in Vogue, which called the Los Angeles-based tinned fish brand Fishwife “the stylish, sustainably sourced tinned fish you want in your kitchen”.
