Fishy Fishy

Fishy Fishy has stood on Kinsale's Pier Road, directly across from the harbour, for over twenty years — Martin Shanahan's original West Cork seafood room that has since spawned cookbooks, a cookery school and an RTÉ television series. The dining room is large, bright and informal: timber floors, white-and-blue tile, an open kitchen along the back wall, and a long wraparound terrace that doubles the dining capacity in summer.

The cooking is unfussy Atlantic seafood, executed with the kind of competence that thirty years on the same coast produces. A signature seafood platter — Bandon oysters, Castletownbere prawns, Sandycove scallops, smoked Atlantic salmon, brown crab — that is the obvious first order. Whole grilled fish of the day. A still-famous chowder thick with prawn, mussel, salmon and smoked haddock. Hand-dived scallops with bacon and pea purée.

The wine list is broad, well-priced and built for the food — deep on Loire and Burgundian whites, a useful Italian section, a properly serious Champagne list, and an excellent by-the-glass programme. The dessert programme is family-recipe straightforward — sticky toffee pudding, brown-bread ice cream, lemon tart.

Dinner with wine lands around 60 EUR per guest. Fishy Fishy is the Kinsale room every visitor and local recommends for the same reasons — generous, reliable, properly local, and entirely unpretentious. The room handles groups of 8-30 without losing service quality.

Fishy Fishy is the Kinsale team-dinner room. The shared seafood-platter format takes ordering pressure off everyone, the long pier-side tables seat groups of ten without anyone feeling crammed, the wine list is broad enough to keep everyone happy, and the harbour view gives you something to look at while conversation finds its rhythm. Book the back terrace tables for summer groups.