Seafood smorgasbord on Stevens

New hotels keep popping up these days, and the latest are the Mercure and Novotel on Stevens Road.

The location is slightly hidden - it is the former location of The Pines country club - but it is so quiet and peaceful there.

One early resident in the area is the all-seafood restaurant FiSK Seafoodbar & Market.

Everything there is tidy, clean and sparse.

Even the way the food is plated is purposeful and connected.

When the (above) Smoked Salmon "Pulpit Rock" ($10.50 for lunch) arrived on my table, the plate looked almost bare.

It was just three neat piles of food. Yet each component was excellent: The delicately flavoured eggs were fluffy; the smoked Norwegian salmon belly turned out to be a great balance of smokiness and smoothness; and the flatbread was appropriately bland so as not to overshadow the fish, yet still provided crunch.

Another example of simple but effective presentation was the Prawns on Ice ($6 for every 100g). Greenland cold water prawns are imported by FiSK frozen. It is just a heap of sweet prawns, mostly with roe.

TWO SOUPS IN ONE

(above) The Creamed Fish and Shellfish Soup Fish (from $7.50) is actually two soups in one.

A white fish stock (made with fennel seeds, coriander seeds, bay leaves, onions and celeriac root) and a shellfish stock (from lobster and langoustine shells) are combined, and the result is a soup that is deeply flavourful, rich but not overwhelmingly so and memorable.

Best of all, if you want to recreate this, you can buy the individual stock from the supermarket.

Imagine this as a base for your next hotpot.

Compared with the other dishes, the Open-Face Smorrebrod Sandwich with rye ($6, available for lunch only) looks almost fussy (above).

There are different versions of it, decided by the toppings, and the one I tried - house-smoked and torched mackerel, lumpfish roe, sour cream - was a knockout of flavours and texture.

The fish left a deep impression for its smokiness and hint of tart.

This is the dish I am dying to make a return visit for.

I was slightly disappointed that the signature brininess of the sea urchin was absent from Uni Ice Cream ($16, above)) but overall, it was a good mix of salty and sweet.

Eating this was not as big as an adventure as I thought it would have been, but it was nice enough.