Breakfast on the beach

Matthew Owsley-Brown is moving quickly. It's not clear whether the rain will hold off and he has two hungry boys champing at the bit for breakfast. Everyone lends a hand unloading the boat, while Matthew finds a sheltered spot in the dunes to fire up the Primus stoves. Soon crumpets are sizzling in one pan and scrambled eggs are being cracked into another, while his sons Farrer, 12, and Christopher, ten, are helping themselves to hunks of bread. They don't have long to wait. Matthew unwraps plump fillets of sea trout and haddock, and within eight minutes he has smoked them over oak chippings, producing the most drippingly juicy, mouthwatering fish imaginable. ‘You can't beat this,' says Matthew's wife, Caroline. ‘We love getting out early with the boys to explore the coast - we always intend to walk first and eat later, but the fresh air gets to us every time so breakfast comes first!'

It was the outdoor life and proximity to good, fresh ingredients that drew chef Matthew, 45, and Caroline, 42, to Norfolk six years ago, to open their seafood restaurant Fishes. It's in Burnham Market, which sits in an affluent corner of East Anglia, popular with ex-Londoners and about a mile from the coast. Fishes has found a good niche here, providing the locals, incomers and second-homers with a sassy, metropolitan vibe in a quintessentially English village-green setting. Thoughtfully, they open for hearty breakfast servings, as well as lunch and dinner, six days a week and run it along French family restaurant lines. ‘There's nothing pretentious. Just great food drawing on fresh ingredients and imaginatively flavoured,' Matthew says. ‘The kind of food I like to eat myself.'

Casting a wide net
Matthew's background includes stints working with some of the greats: Anton Mosimann at The Belfry and Henry Harris at Fifth Floor Harvey [quote]Nichols - both in London - and Rick Stein in Padstow, and he's brought all that experience to bear in the way he and Caroline run Fishes. ‘Rick opened my eyes to the rich possibilities of cooking with fish. You'd come back from a break and find a 50kg shark waiting for you. It was amazing.'

Matthew believes that the UK has the best fishing waters in the world and he is always pushing the boundaries of what he can source. (Recent additions to his repertoire include smoothhound shark, garfish, witch sole, wolf fish and blonde and starry ray.) It takes a while to build up good suppliers and at times Matthew has felt like a pioneer, but he has been delighted by what he's found in the area. ‘We get oysters, mussels and lobsters from Brancaster, crabs from Cromer and Stukey Blue cockles from Stiffkey. Fresh deliveries come in every day and new suppliers are coming to us now,' he says. Matthew monitors sustainability, too. ‘Our customers ask more questions and so we ask more questions. It keeps our suppliers on their toes.'

When they first opened, he offered one meat choice, a steak, but too many customers were ordering it and he got bored. Now he doesn't give them the chance to opt out. ‘The clue is in the name,' he laughs. ‘The fact is, we can offer quite a lot of unusual fish that maybe other restaurants can't. I like to surprise people and introduce them to new flavours.'

A family business
Matthew loves the fact that he and Caroline run Fishes as a husband-and-wife team. She worked at Rick Stein's, too, having long ago concluded that she would have to be in the restaurant business as well if she was ever going to see him. ‘Our skills complement each other. I am out back cooking, which is what I love most, while Caroline is better with people than I am, so she deals with the front-of-house stuff. We share the business side. At Harvey Nichols we served 700 people a day and I swore I'd never do that volume again. You lose the love of it. Fishes seats 42 - that's a good size. We can keep it personal and friendly.' They found the premises - already a seafood restaurant - by chance while taking a holiday in Norfolk. ‘It was a really big step but we knew we had found a prime location, so we borrowed £500,000 against our London house and plunged in,' Matthew says. ‘Our business plan was fairly conservative and in fact we have doubled the turnover that we expected.'

Fishes was shortlisted in the ‘most original' category in The Tatler-Louis Roederer Restaurant Awards 2007, and Matthew and Caroline have just expanded the business by opening two guest rooms upstairs in the space that used to be their family flat. ‘Now people can travel here from further away and don't have to worry about driving home after dinner,' Caroline says. Recognising their market, they have opted for high-end fittings and muted colour schemes. Judging by some of the comments in the Visitors' Book, they're getting it just right: ‘First-class everything' and ‘Absolutely everything is impeccable' read two of them.

In the off-season, Matthew has started holding occasional cookery workshops in the kitchen at their new home, a barn conversion in the next village. The first two covered basic fish preparation and bread making, and sauces, stocks and marinades for fish. More are planned.

‘Running your own business is fantastic,' Matthew says. ‘Sometimes it's difficult juggling childcare, but the life we can lead as a family here is brilliant. There's so much freedom and so much to see. We feel very connected to this place. We love it.'