Seafood in a Day

This unique day will take you from sea to plate via Pinney’s well known smokehouse at Butley Creek, near Orford on the Suffolk coast. Weather-permitting, we’ll start the day with a couple of hours on our chartered boat on the beautiful river Ore around Havergate Island and the internationally important nature reserve Orford Ness.

Our skipper will demonstrate lifting and baiting up of lobster pots and looking at the many different types of sea life and we hope to catch lobsters, edible, spider and hermit crabs, and other fish and shellfish.

Back on dry land we’ll take a behind the scenes tour of Pinney’s at Butley Creek, where oysters have been cultivated for centuries and Richard Pinney started smoking fish in the 1950s. We’ll learn about how all the fish are first salted or brined, and then hung in the smokehouse where they are then flavoured and preserved by smoke that is produced by gently smouldering whole oak logs in a specially designed smokebox.

We’ll return to Pinney’s own restaurant, The Butley Orford Oyesterage in Orford’s pretty market square where we’ll have a hands-on demonstration of how to carve a whole salmon. Finally we’ll enjoy a relaxing seafood lunch.

Food Safari’s founders are Polly and Tim Robinson, who share a passion for sourcing, cooking and eating food made from fresh local produce. We have put down roots in the Suffolk countryside after many years in London.

Like many people, we were shopping more and more at farmers' markets to get our hands on fresh, local food and we really enjoyed meeting the producers who are so full of infectious enthusiasm for their produce.

Part of Polly’s family have been farming organically in North Wales since the 1970s, so we both knew there was incredible hard work and dedication behind the finished product. We wanted to find a way to get to meet these food heroes, to hear the unique stories, fascinating insights, and to experience the beautiful landscapes of the Suffolk countryside.

Suffolk is firmly on the food map and its outstanding natural countryside and coastal beauty combined with an abundance of local producers, restaurants, specialist food shops and the acclaimed annual Aldeburgh Food and Drink Festival make it a perfect destination for foodie holidays. We hope Food Safari will become a new way to explore Suffolk and get to know the people and landscapes that make it special.