It might be that they’re cheap. It might be that they’re healthy. But, in all likelihood, it’s “because they are just delicious”, says seafood chef Mitch Tonks. Whatever the reason, mussels are having a moment. Where once moules meant marinière (the classic French dish with white wine and parsley), now you can find them skewered, popcorned, pickled, barbecued, and even breaded and served in a burger bun.
Mussels are making waves not just along the coast of Britain but in restaurants and recipes across the land. And they are being greeted with growing excitement, too, because, unlike the majority of food that becomes a fad, creating spikes in demand that cannot help but damage a group of people or their environment, there are no downsides to going mad for mussels.
They are “a no-brainer”, says Charles Banks, co-founder and director of The Food People, the global food trends agency. “It’s not often you get those foods that make economic and ecological sense and are delicious as well as healthy.” Ask Banks, Tonks or, indeed, anyone who knows anything about mussels why they are perfect, and the resulting eulogy is like a bivalve version of the sonnet “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”.
“They grow quickly, and on their own; they don’t need external feed or chemicals or anything. They just naturally feed from their environment,” says Anthony Pender, the founder of London seafood restaurant Faber, speaking from Wales where he’s visiting one of his mussel suppliers. Câr y Môr is Wales’s first regenerative seaweed and shellfish farm, whose goal is to support coastal communities and restore the health of the water – and mussels play a vital role in both. “They grow on ropes, which are strung up, down and along – the perfect example of vertical farming at sea – and they are low-intensity, because they require no inputs, create no waste and the generation of their shells sequesters carbon from the water. Meanwhile, inside, the bivalve is cleaning the water through filter-feeding,” Pender adds, “to the extent there is more wildlife in the water now at Câr y Môr than when they started [mussel farming] six years ago.”
This way of feeding is partly what makes mussels so cheap – “They are a genuinely affordable shellfish, which sounds like an oxymoron!” laughs Banks – but it is also what makes them so beneficial for the coastal environment. In Lyme Bay, where Tonks’ mussels are sourced for his Rockfish restaurants in the south-west and for his canned seafood business, the bay’s biodiversity has been transformed by careful management and mussel-growing ropes, which in 2013 were slung into a seascape decimated by decades of destructive fishing. The filter-feeding process by which the mussels extract nutrients from the water counteracts the effects of eutrophication, caused by the excess run-off of agricultural chemicals. Meanwhile, the infrastructure of the ropes, hanging well below the surface of the waves and heavy with mussels, creates a reef-like haven, encouraging smaller fish to shelter and breed.
“They are just a great species,” enthuses chef Jamie Savage, who adds to mussels’ list of qualities omega 3 fatty acids, vitamins A, B and D, and the fact that their shells can be repurposed in dog medicine, chicken food and homeware. So smitten is Savage with mussels, in fact, that he’s dedicated his entire restaurant, Savages Mussels, to them: “I fell in love with them when I was a kid going to Eurocamp in the school holidays. I thought it would be mint to have a restaurant using them in different ways.” Savage, the man behind the mussel burger, has even incorporated them into a chilli. “I think people associate them with being on holiday, so there’s a nostalgia about them, too, which is great – but I wanted to teach people about mussels at home. Since opening, I’ve had forty- and fiftysomethings coming in saying they’ve never had mussels in Macclesfield before!”
For years, many British people were wary of mussels – not of moules marinière in a French bistro, but of preparing them at home, which feels fiddly and fraught with risk. There’s the faff of debearding, and the fear of a having a “dodgy” one, which hangs over mussels as it does all bivalves. “People are nervous about cooking something live,” Tonks accepts, “but the basic rule is, if they stay open when you tap them, discard them, and if they don’t open when you cook them, discard them.” The merits of mussels grown on ropes in the open water means there is far less likelihood of grit and sand in the shells, too, while mussel sourcing and processing has improved greatly in recent decades.
Besides, debearding is easy. “I posted a video of my four-year-old daughter doing this recently,” laughs Ben King, founder of Pesky Fish, an online fish market that sources seafood from regenerative sources. Since launching Pesky in 2018, King has seen sales of mussels rise steadily, in part because customers are seeing them more in restaurants and feel more confident about cooking them, but mostly because the average price of more popular fish such as hake and sole has rocketed, making mussels an increasingly attractive choice. “They are our third-most popular line,” King says of his mussels, which are handpicked off beaches in Pembrokeshire and cleaned before being reaching homes 20 hours later.
Nick Jefferson, founder of Wylde Market, another online retailer of regenerative produce, calls them “nature’s fast food”. “In the time you have even placed your Deliveroo order, let alone waited for it to arrive soggy and cold, you could have prepared and cooked mussels,” he points out. “Chillies, wild garlic, sherry – I do all sorts, depending on what’s in the cupboard.” Indeed, there have never been so many mussel recipes out there. Tonks uses them in place of clams in chowder; Nigel Slater pairs them with pasta and dill; Yotam Ottolenghi steams them alla vodka, or in a spicy, lapsang souchong broth. “They pair just as well with rich, creamy sauces as they do delicate herbs and citruses – and they are a perfect vehicle for deeply spiced and layered broths,” says Gurdeep Loyal, whose latest book, Flavour Heroes, suggests a “marinière” of yuzu koshō and smoky bacon.
“The sky’s the limit,” says Matthew Ryle, executive chef of Maison François in London. His was one of the first restaurants to make mussels a signature dish, with a warm, parsley-buttered flatbread draped with mussels that is a homage to “that last, best mouthful of a moules marinière, when you dip in the bread to soak up the sauce”. Many other restaurants have follow suit, opening with hero mussel dishes such as the moules farcies snack at Wildflowers in central London, the asparagus and mussels at Cardinal in Edinburgh, or the cherry-glazed barbecued catfish with dried grated mussels at Ukrainian restaurant Sino in London. “The quality is better, plus it’s a time when chefs and customers are [particularly] conscious of prices, so they are more readily accepted than an oyster,” Ryle continues.
Thanks to the number of sources around the coast, mussels also tend to transcend the seasons, so they can remain on the menu year-round. When the southern coast gets too warm for mussels to fatten properly, Shetland steps in. “The waters are incredibly cold, deep and full of nutrients,” says Scottish restaurateur Stephen Lironi. His seafood tapas bar in Soho, Maresco, was born of his wish to support small coastal communities in Scotland, for which mussels present a huge economic opportunity, and of his learning how much of Scotland’s seafood gets exported, particularly to Spain.
“The Spanish can’t get enough of mussels,” he says. They are fried, then canned, in a variety of sauces, then dished up in tapas bars on potato crisps or toast. “They consider tinned mussels a premium product,” he continues. Yet in Britain, too, the popularity and availability of canned mussels is growing: “We went from a standing start to selling 12,000 tins a year,” Tonks says of his own tinned mussels, which launched only two years ago.
Sea Sisters, the only tinned seafood company with a cannery actually in Britain (Tonks’ is in Spain) have championed mussels since the start: “We chose to launch with them in 2021 because they are, in our eyes, the most sustainable protein in the world,” co-founder Charlotte Dawe says. “They have always been a top-selling product. We even have customers who are vegan say they eat mussels, because they are a sustainable and ethical source of protein.” This bivalve veganism, as it’s become known, is premised on the fact that oysters and mussels have no centralised, complex nervous system, or brain, so it follows that killing and consuming them causes them no (or little) suffering.
With that knowledge, the only remaining objection to mussels seems to float away. They are ethical as well as sustainable, healthy, affordable and delicious. Concerns around preparing them, which are arguably overstated, are allayed by tins and those supermarket vacuum packs that are a good (if overpriced) option for those who want the taste of “fresh” mussels without the faff. “Having mussels at home feels like being in a restaurant, even though they are easy and cheap,” Ryle says. “We should definitely be cooking more of them.” Meanwhile, the pressure to cut costs and provide more sustainable, great-value options means that, in restaurants, the mussels trend is going nowhere. Banks is right; they are a no-brainer, in every sense of the phrase.
