Review: The Ship in Distress, 66 Stanpit, Christchurch (From Bournemouth Echo)

Review: The Ship in Distress, 66 Stanpit, Christchurch

1:30pm Friday 9th July 2010 in

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THESE days you can find dozens of pubs dressed up as restaurants purporting to serve fine food but failing miserably (and often at the expense of the drinks side of their business).

But the Ship in Distress succeeds on both fronts – managing to remain a popular watering hole while boasting a superb restaurant.

It has been an inn for 300 years and was once the haunt of smugglers breaking the law. Today everything is above board or, more precisely, chalked on the blackboards.

The atmospheric pub is also a specialist fish restaurant offering more than a dozen fresh dishes daily. It’s cosy, managing to squeeze in about 40 diners, and decorated with framed seashells and prints of old ships.

Miniature oil lights on the tables give a pleasant glow. But the imaginatively prepared food is the thing.

Mixing the best facets of a modern restaurant with the salty, nautical charm of a seaside public house, this is a gastro pub in the true sense.

There are exciting starters and shellfish dishes on the menu such as grilled diver-caught scallops in garlic and herb butter, Brixham scallops grilled with garlic and herb butter, and moules marinere that sit alongside slightly more pub-like options such as assiette of prawns with mayonnaise.

For my main course I tried the whole baked seabass, while my partner chose the whole oven-baked lemon sole.

Both fish were again extremely fresh and had a slightly flamegrilled, almost barbecued flavour. My seabass was served with the tried and tested combination of a good stuffing of marjoram and lemon, pan fried mashed potato cake and roasted cherry vine tomatoes.

The lemon sole was accompanied by new potatoes and buttered baby vegetables.

With a lager and glass of red wine the total was just over £40.

Certainly no distress here – more like sheer bliss.