New restaurant to dish up leftover fish

The restaurant boss who brought Nobu to London aims to make his new seafood venture the most sustainable in the capital — by serving “waste” fish.

Kurt Zdesar, former director of Nobu Europe, has opened Bouillabaisse in Mayfair, which uses the bycatch often thrown away by fishermen.

The restaurateur said: “We have baby Dover sole on the menu. It’s the sort of fish that would get thrown back in because there’s no market for it.

“It might appear it’s a bad thing to have, but it is caught, it is dead, and that’s a more sustainable way to use it than let it go back in the sea.”

He claims “100 per cent” of the seafood at the Mill Street venue is sustainable, but admits it means it is not cheap. Most of it comes off a boat in Devon, with less popular wild fish such as gurnard on the menu. Mr Zdesar, 42, uses an app which “shows us where the boat went out, when it fished, where it fished, what time it was caught and landed”.

He worked for Nobu from 1996 to 2004. It has been criticised for serving endangered bluefin tuna, although Mr Zdesar said: “I wasn’t a part of Nobu when this whole thing happened.”