Why Riley’s Fish Shop is catch of the day

At 6am every morning, a stream of fishing boats leaves North Shields Fish Quay on England’s north-east coast. Returning at 6pm during the winter, they sell their North Sea catches to the highest bidder at the daily fish market, which is open to local businesses: exporters, wholesalers or Adam Riley, co-owner of local shop and restaurant Riley’s Fish Shop. 

Fifteen years ago, Riley was working as a theatre set designer in a workshop near the Fish Quay. Some 1,500 tonnes of seafood are landed at the 800-year-old fishing port each year, but with much of it exported, Riley felt that it remained inaccessible. “I used to see all this fish going in, thinking, ‘Why can’t you eat any of this in a restaurant locally?’” Riley, a trained chef, and his wife Lucy opened Riley’s Fish Shack in 2015, serving oven-fired fresh seafood from a pair of shipping containers on the sand in a tiny local bay. The Tynemouth venue quickly boomed in popularity, drawing in Blur frontman Damon Albarn and food critic Jay Rayner. With customers (an estimated 22,000 last summer) spilling out beyond the shack’s limits, expansion was almost obligatory – and so Riley’s Fish Shop was born.

The shop opened in 2021 as the shack’s more refined sibling, with exposed brick walls and a sleek metal seafood counter. A restaurant by night and shop by day, it sells all the ingredients for customers to make the dishes from both Riley’s establishments at home. “The idea was always to sell the fish that we were cooking,” explains Riley. He describes it as a “build-your-own meal kit”. “Sometimes we’ll just start throwing extra bits of stuff in: ‘Go on, have some of that, that’ll make it nice.’” In winter, they run courses on fish filleting and other cookery techniques.

The idea was always to sell the fish that we were cooking

Fish is filleted and prepared by Riley’s team and sold by weight. Stock varies according to supply, but a recent visit found the counter lined with red mullet (£25 a kg), brill (£29 a kg), turbot chops (£46 a kg), house-salted cod (£14 a kg), skate wings (£11 a kg) and oysters (£1.90 each). To round out a meal, there was a selection of fresh vegetables, compound butters flavoured with different herbs (£2 for 60g) and anchovy salt (£2), which serves as a “nice seasoning for a salad”, says Riley. And then there are “all the core things that we make at the shack”: caperberry salad (£3.50), aïoli and chipotle chilli sauce (both £2 for 60g) and dough for baking at home (£1.95 for 250g).

The vast majority of Riley’s fish is “incidentally caught” rather than targeted, avoiding the depletion that comes when a particular species is in fashion. Most is sourced from the North Shields market, five minutes down the road. North Shields is England’s largest langoustine port, while kippers come from Craster, the Northumberland village home to a famous smokehouse. Oysters range from Northumberland’s Lindisfarne to the south coast’s Mersea Island and Jersey. 

“I like the idea that people can come in and talk, and be a bit more interactive about local industry,” says Riley. “It’s about telling the stories [behind the fish],” which might come from the team’s in-house fishmonger, Andrew, or 82-year-old John Ellis, a fish merchant who has worked at the quay for more than six decades. 

The shop’s reach goes beyond the north-east (and beyond fish, also: Riley will happily prepare a seed-seasoned, barbecued aubergine for a group of vegan diners). During the pandemic, with many transport systems down, Riley did 80 wholesale deliveries a week, taking North Shields’ lobsters, langoustines and crabs to shops like the Notting Hill Fish + Meat Shop. At some point, he’d also love to open another venue down south. Ultimately, though, the shop is happy where it is. “We’re really lucky to be here,” says Riley.