We’ve noticed that while the UK often looks outward to distant shores, we’ve long overlooked the breathtaking underwater landscapes and seafood-rich coastlines right on our doorstep.
We’re here to turn the tide… spotlighting the beauty and bounty of our own waters through stories that reconnect us with the sea that surrounds us.
Pierre Melion
Hi I’m Pierre👋 I’m from a Chinese-French background and I was very lucky to experience lots of different foods growing up. With my father I would do a lot of spearfishing, something you tend to see more across Europe, for example in Portugal, France and Spain.
What I noticed when relocating to the North East, with the UK being an island, is it has such great seafood all around, but it doesn’t have as much of a culture where people go out and source their own food. So exposing what’s available on our doorstep is what pushed us towards launching Tide to Table so we can get people to look at not just cod, tuna and salmon, but lots of different local seafood which they might not have known about.
Helen Burt
Hi I’m Helen👋 My great-grandmother was a Herring Girl from Barra - tough as nails and able to pack barrels of fish faster than most could say “Iongantach!” She followed the boats from Scotland to Suffolk, gutting and salting as she went.
Four generations later, and here I was: hopeless in the kitchen, baffled by anything that lived in water, and more familiar with tinned tuna than anything resembling my heritage.
Then I met Pierre, a French fisherman with a taste for fine food and a love of local catch. When we first met, I thought he was a snob. He, in turn, assumed I was woefully uneducated. We were both right.
What started as mutual confusion turned into mutual curiosity. He taught me how to freedive and showed me how to prepare fish without fear. This year, I plan to shoot my first fish and prepare it from scratch.