Two fish tacos in a metal stand on a wooden table at Fisk, seen from above: battered fish in soft flour tortillas with slaw, chopped tomato and red onion salsa and spiced mayonnaise, with a glass of white wine and a tumbler of water behind them.
Davey John’s Forge · Journal

Five o’clock at Fisk

We queued half an hour before the doors opened and were still a third of the way back. Dinner at the little seafood bar beside the Harbour Bar in Downings, and why nobody minds the wait.

My brother and sister-in-law are up visiting, so we did the thing you have to do at least once when people come to stay: we went to Fisk, in Downings, for a five o’clock meal.

The queue is the bit I keep thinking about. We got there a full half hour before the doors opened, and even then we were only about a third of the way back, with the line fishtailing round behind us. Inside, the lounge of the Harbour Bar was already full of people sitting at tables waiting for their turn to order. That is a Tuesday, in a village of a few hundred people, for a restaurant that does not take a single booking.

It did not disappoint.

The pass inside Fisk against pale blue tongue-and-groove panelling in late evening sun: plates of oysters, sourdough toasts with whipped cheese and tomatoes, brown soda bread and a bowl of olives waiting to go out, on stacked dark serving trays.
The pass, with the evening building. Everything goes out from a room the size of a kitchen.
What we ate

Two of the mussels, a dozen oysters, and three of the tacos

We ordered across the table and shared most of it, which is how the menu wants to be eaten. Two portions of mussels. Scampi and chips for my brother. A dozen oysters. Three portions of the fish tacos, which are always a favourite in our house and were the first thing anybody asked for.

Two fish tacos close up in a metal stand: battered fish in soft flour tortillas with cabbage and carrot slaw, a chopped salsa of tomato, cucumber, red onion and dill, and a piped drizzle of pale orange spiced mayonnaise.
The tacos, ordered three times over, and not for the last time.
A dozen oysters on the half shell arranged in a circle on a white blue-speckled platter, lemon wedges in the middle, with a bottle of Tabasco and a lit candle behind.
A dozen, lemon, Tabasco, and no ceremony about it.

And one we had not had before: the spicy prawn cocktail tostada, up on the specials board rather than the printed menu. Prawns bound in a warm orange sauce with herbs through it, on a crisp tostada base, with pickled red onion and micro-leaves on top. It was the best thing on the table. If it is on the board the night you go, order it.

The spicy prawn cocktail tostada: prawns in a pale orange sauce flecked with herbs, over shredded lettuce on a crisp fried tostada base, with pickled red onion and a nest of micro-leaves on top, on a plate lined with a Fisk napkin.
The spicy prawn cocktail tostada, off the specials board, and the pick of the night.
A bowl of scampi and chips: breadcrumbed prawns, golden and salted, on thick-cut chips with a leaf salad, pickled red onion, olives and a lemon wedge, with a small dish of pale aioli alongside.
Scampi and chips, which my brother had no intention of sharing.
The welcome

There is a knack to the door

There are not many tables inside, eighteen seats by the guides’ count, so we were lucky to get a table for four. Everything else went off perfectly, apart from the fact that I could not work the door handle. I was not alone in that. Plenty of people struggled with it while we were there, and one of the staff came over smiling and told me there is a knack to it.

Take that as the measure of the place. A room that busy, with a queue out the front and the bar next door filling up, and the staff still have the time to laugh with you about a door. Nobody rushed us at our table either, which I noticed precisely because I knew what was waiting outside.

A spread of small plates on a dark table: two bowls of smoked fish pate with micro-leaves, lemon and triangles of brown soda bread, two plates of sourdough toasts topped with whipped cheese, blistered cherry tomatoes and pistachios, and a bowl of green olives.
Small plates, brown bread and olives, on the Fisk plates with the fish mark round the rim.
Why the queue

A small seafood bar with a shelf of awards

Fisk is Tony Davidson and Lina Reppert’s place, and it has been going beside the Harbour Bar since the spring of 2018. Tony was named Seafood Chef of the Year in the Georgina Campbell Irish Food and Hospitality Awards in 2023, and the citation put it better than I could: Fisk is very much its own place, and the local produce is shown off in a way you will not see anywhere else.

This year it took the Casual Dining award for Donegal in the Irish Restaurant Awards, described there as a buzzing no-bookings seafood bar specialising in the fresh local catch. The Irish Times has named it the best fish and chips in the county, and put it on a list of fourteen seafood restaurants to visit this summer, calling it some of the most creative and fun seafood on the island. The kitchen buys close to home, and among the suppliers are the Mulroy Bay mussels that come out of the same water we look at from the house.

For your stay

No bookings, so go early

Fisk is at the Harbour Bar in Downings, about eight kilometres from us and ten minutes in the car. There are no reservations and no phone bookings: it is first come, first served, and the queue forms before the doors open. The opening times move with the season, so it is worth checking their own site or their social before you set off.

My advice, having done it the hard way: get there well before opening, send someone up the line, and have a pint in the Harbour Bar next door while you wait. Half the room is doing exactly that. And if you are staying with us and would rather cook at home, the lobster off the boat is still the other way to eat well here.

The photographs are all Nihal’s. She is a bit of a food critic in her own right, and much better at photographing a plate than I am.

Close by

Staying with us puts Downings ten minutes up the coast road, the beach and the harbour with it, and Mulroy Bay on the doorstep. Here’s where you’d stay, and what else is close by.

Ruby’s Cottage Rae’s Cabin Margaret’s Cabin What’s close by All journal posts