‘It feels pretty emotional opening our doors this week as the project is the culmination of our love and obsession of food but also a bigger dream to dare to create something in the vision we really believe,’ the Bakers told Weekly. ‘Pêtchi is all about the heady joy of a good meal, inspired by a sort of Basque reverence of produce and place, then applying that to our own part of the world.’
While the menu focuses on seafood – ‘pêtchi’ means ‘to try to catch a fish’ in the traditional Jersey language – ingredients from the land feature too. On the opening menu are raw Jersey beef with nori, hen of the wood mushrooms with buffalo sauce, and smoked Jersey ice cream with raspberries. Nods to Spanish flavours come in dishes of iberico lamb sweetbreads and Galician octopus.
Cooking will be over live fire which ‘is raw and beautiful and we feel truly makes food taste great’, the couple said.
Occupying the top floor in the former harbourmaster’s office, the restaurant has a contemporary feel with an open kitchen, and light flooding in from tall windows overlooking Liberation Square. ‘We feel like the offering will be something interesting and different for St Helier and Jersey. This summer we just hope to make people happy and have a busy, buzzy dining room.’
