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Wednesday 19 August 2026
The Sea Bream That Had to Be Recreated
A recent girls’ trip to Folkestone delivered one of those rare restaurant dishes you immediately know you need to eat again.
BY PAIGE NORMAN
There are some restaurant dishes you enjoy, talk about for five minutes afterwards and then forget about. And then there are the ones you immediately decide you need to eat again. A recent girls’ trip to Folkestone resulted in exactly that. We’d headed down for a little seaside escape and, naturally, food, wine and lots of frozen daiquiris featured pretty heavily on the agenda. One of the highlights was a long, leisurely lunch at Rocksalt, overlooking the harbour. It was exactly my kind of lunch: sunshine, wine, seafood and a table where everyone orders different things so you can try half the menu. I am very thankful for these types of friends! Amongst the scallops, flatbreads and various plates making their way around the table was a beautifully simple whole sea bream served with salsa verde.
Naturally, my first thought was: Jake could make this. And by “Jake could make this”, I obviously meant, I would like Jake to make this for me.
At Home
So when the girls came over for dinner a little while later, it felt only right that I made him recreate one of our favourite dishes from the trip. What started as a request to recreate the sea bream quickly escalated into a full Mediterranean feast, and Jake definitely understood the assignment. He roasted whole sea bream with lemon, tomatoes and olives until beautifully tender, alongside a huge bowl of homemade salsa verde to spoon over the top. Then came harissa roasted potatoes with red onion, crispy around the edges, spicy and slightly caramelised (he has never made me a bad potato), followed by an enormous Greek salad piled with tomatoes, cucumber, peppers, red onion, olives and feta. Basically, everything you want to put in the middle of a table with your girlfriends and a few bottles of wine.
And I think that’s what made it even better. We’d gone from sitting together by the sea in Folkestone, eating the dish that had inspired it all, to being back around my dining table together eating Jake’s take on it. It’s also one of my favourite things about eating out. As much as I love discovering new restaurants, sometimes the best dishes are the ones that follow you home and inspire you to cook again. Although admittedly, this system works particularly well when your fiancé is the one who actually has to do the cooking.
So, thank you Rocksalt for a brilliant girls’ lunch and the inspiration.
And thank you Jake for learning that whenever I come home from a restaurant and say “I had the most amazing thing…”, there is a very strong chance that sentence is going to end with “…so I thought you could make it.”
Our home recreation