Mitch Tonks

Chef-restaurateur-author Mitch Tonks is as intrinsically linked to fish as Exeter Chiefs are to insect-based rucks. But his fish empire that includes the famed Seahorse of Dartmouth, the mini-chain of Rockfish restaurants and now a sea-to-stove online delivery service, Seafood at Home, wouldn’t have happened had it not been for rugby. 

I played rugby for Hornets in Weston-Super-Mare. I still remember how cold the changing rooms were; the concrete walls; the smell of liniment; mud and straw on the floor; and then walking out on to the pitch and thinking how big it was. Running end-to-end of a pitch for your first game at under-10s was a big effort.

I was quite a small kid. It was the days of ‘fighter pilots’ in the backs and ‘bomber pilots’ in the forwards, so I played scrum-half at first, but then I moved to flanker and loved it, I got really stuck in, I could wiggle a ball out of any ruck.

I stopped playing at seventeen. It was when I started smoking (although I don’t now) and drinking too much, when anything that involved running too far was too much effort. And girls of course. I did play again years later in a father and sons game at the Rec, and scored a try and celebrated as if I was being watched by thousands of people.

My father played against JPR Williams at Cardiff Arms Park. He was fly-half, his name was Norman Mellowship, but he was known as Chips. He played for Somerset and I think he had England trials a long, long time ago. He was totally committed as a rugby player. 

I can still feel and hear the thud of leather ball with laces from when he used to pass it to me. He could spin this ball for miles, and it would come to me like a missile, and always land on chest. He taught me everything, including how to tackle – ‘head to one side, below the knees, grip and then fucking hold them’. Once I was able to tackle him, I had a confidence that meant nobody would get past me in a game. 

Dad’s school friends married Welsh ladies. It meant we’d go to Wales games at the Arms Park, and we could get tickets by becoming a vice president of Llantrisant rugby club!

The restaurant we’d go to was called La Brasserie. It had sawdust on the floor, a suckling pig roasting at the back, a big fridge from which you’d choose your steak and venison. This was before the days of all-day opening so pubs were closed after the game, but the restaurant would let us in for a few beers because we had lunch there. They had this bottle of Armagnac, Janneau 1901, £20 a shot, and every time we went there he promised we’d have one and one day we actually did.

Rugby started my restaurant career. Before I went to this restaurant, I was going in a completely different direction career-wise, but it was the warmth, the smells, the fridge full of stuff, the blackboard, the £100 wines, the whole thing of La Brasserie that made me want to go to restaurants all the time. 

Dad died of cancer six years ago. We’d had this weekend planned in London, when we’d go off to Hawksmoor and eat steak together, but his condition dropped so we couldn’t go. Will [Beckett], a good friend of mine who runs Hawksmoor, said he’d send Hawksmoor to us instead. He sent his executive chef down to cook, and we had this amazing bottle of wine – Chateau Cantemerle 2000, which is now a lamp on my desk. Then I took dad home, we watched the 1973 Barbarians v All Blacks game, the 2003 Rugby World Cup final, and then I got him into bed and lay next to him. I held his hand, he told me he loved me, fell asleep and died the following day.

Friendships you make through rugby are special. I just will always remember dad and all of his friends being so incredibly close, even being sat around a table saying they’d all be dead one day, and now they sadly are.

I got all my coaching badges when my son played. He started for Bath at under six and stayed until he was twelve, he was a good little player. That’s how I ended up playing at the Rec, and at the time the likes of Jeremy Guscott and Phil de Glanville were around, so I’d ask them to come and do team talks for us.

I used to take a 1972 campervan down to Devon. It was before I moved to Brixham, and on the last trip down I had a DVD of the 2003 Rugby World Cup in the player. Then we moved to the area and so mothballed the van. The next time I got it out, four years later, was when I was doing a TV series with Matt Dawson – Mitch and Matt’s Big Fish, for Dave – and we were in the van and he started looking at the player. He said, ‘what’s in the DVD?’. I said, ‘you’re not going to believe this...’.”

Rugby has this amazing spirit. It’s unlike football, with the violence, I think rugby has a generosity about it. You always remember the characters, the Frenchmen letting the cockerels go, the streaker Erica Roe, the Irishman pissing on the terrace! I just think rugby was more fun, it had this camaraderie, beer-drinking men enjoying a day out. That’s what dad’s ending was like too, it had the Hawksmoor generosity, the camaraderie of family and then rugby, just brilliant.

Subliminally, I think when dad died, maybe rugby died a bit for me too. I don’t know what happened, maybe something inside moved on. The last time I went to Brixham rugby club was six years ago. It wasn’t a conscious choice, I think I just lost interest. But I do love Brixham rugby club, the whole community supports it, every local business supports it, everyone knows everyone there, all the family comes to the club, and it’s just a community hub.  

I’m going to see Exeter Chiefs in March. As I said it’s my first match in a long time. But what they’ve done is amazing and I think rugby still has a raw feeling to it down here, which has been lost at places like Twickenham and the Millennium Stadium. Rob Baxter is a fantastic bloke and it just feels like when the players are going to and from games in their bus, it doesn’t seem glamorous or big-time, it feels like blokes going to play rugby.