EIGHTEEN months ago, we visited the Otter & Fish at Hurworth for a taste of its new special menu, which offered two cost conscious courses for £18 and three for £22. The food, we concluded, was a little formulaic and without the finesse of the fine dining establishments down the road at the Bay Horse and Rockliffe, but it was well cooked and tasty and it got an eight out of 10 for value for money – “a little light in these dark times”, we said as inflation raged at 10 per cent and the cost of living crisis howled all around. READ MORE: AS IT WAS 18 MONTHS AGO It was a pub that understood its place in the world.
The new team at the Otter & Fish in Hurworth In March, the Otter & Fish was taken over and given a £50,000 refit . Front of house, though, looks exactly the same (perhaps a couple of ornamental wooden shapes have been moved) but its name has grown an appendage: it is now the Otter & Fish Bar and Grill. The menu is very much of the 2020s.
In the old days in a pub you’d get rubbery chicken in a basket with chips and be grateful, but this menu is filled with the tastes of today: Teriyaki salmon, Cajun chicken and Katsu curry. Plus there is the steakhouse grill, which shows a completely different approach to the Otter’s old cost conscious ways: there’s a Chateaubriand for two for £72, a Tomahawk steak for one at £72, and a sharing steak board for £139 for two. My family were under strict instructions to look elsewhere on the menu.
There was a potpourri of.