Fino, Norfolk: this restaurant is ‘a massive deal’

Norfolk hardly needs reminding of AA Gill’s slurs. In a 2011 review, the late restaurant critic described the county as a “hernia on the end of England”, committing most of his word count to clichéd slights, including incest, idiocy and witchcraft. Naturally, I was outraged. I may have grown up in London, but I will always consider myself a child of Norfolk, it being the place of my ancestors, my parents’ home – they met as editorial interns on the Eastern Daily Press, the same local paper that printed a poster of Gill with the caption “Wanted for crimes against Norfolk” – and where virtually all of my family still reside. Yes, we all have ten fingers and toes.

But defend Norfolk as I will, it can be a curious place when it comes to food, good for only certain things, such as fish and seafood, beer and cheese, despite the latter being something of a rarity, since this is one of the UK’s most productive arable counties. Agriculture here is a tough, volume-driven game, with little of the cottagey biodynamic scene that sends foodies aflutter in the West Country. (My own uncle, disillusioned with spraying and tractor injuries, gave up farming in favour of photography and a sideline in pro-democracy counterspeech on X). Grain abounds, and yet really good bakeries are few and far between. For us near Holt, good bread has inspired pilgrimages to Downham Market or Holme-next-the-Sea – several options that were closer didn’t last, a symptom, I suspect, of a slump in out-of-season demand. Paying £7 for sourdough is a lot, even for the bougie Londoners who want it during their coastal holibobs.

And then there are the restaurants, of which there is a surprising scarcity: a handful of tasting-menu types that cater to visitors, and a lot of pubs (a combination of excellent malting barley, river transport and a thirsty urban population in Norwich made Norfolk quite the brewing county. A t the end of the 19th century, Norwich alone was said to have a pub for every day of the year, and a church for every week). Some of Norfolk’s pubs serve truly great food – Sculthorpe Mill, the Gunton Arms, Suffield Arms, beloved of locals and visitors alike – but pubs they are, and for years there has been little else by way of restaurants to tempt me away from eating cheese on the sofa, gazing at a barn owl circling the water meadow.

That was before Fino. This neighbourhood wine bar and restaurant of 30 covers, which opened on Garden Street in Cromer in October 2024, is a breath of fresh, blustery sea air with a flavour of dry sherry. As you may have guessed from its name, sherry is a bit of a theme on the drinks list. I visited in the lull between Christmas and New Year, accompanied by my cousin, who was devastated to realise that Fino opened just after she moved from Cromer to Paris. Clearly, she’s spoilt for restaurants now, but over cocktails (a fino-infused gin martini for her, and an Adonis – half fino, half sweet vermouth – for me) at the L-shaped copper bar, she turned to me with a mouthful of gilda and said, “I think I need to take a moment and say what a massive deal it is to have this in Cromer.” She is not the only person to feel this way – Fino has been turning heads across the flatlands, and was awarded the best restaurant in Central and East of England in 2025’s Good Food Guide’s 100 Best Local Restaurants

When I was a kid, Cromer – known variously for its crab, pier show and cameo in David Copperfield – was less a food hotspot than a municipal point of interest (cinema, hospital). It now has the kind of fading charm that attracts craft coffeehouses and millennials with city fatigue. In my family, it is also, famously, home to the branch of Lidl where another cousin met the love of his life in the crisp aisle. My father still refers to her as Golden Wonder. But I digress. From a food perspective, the town has been on the up since local celeb chef Galton Blackiston opened his fish and chip shop here in 2013.

Fino is the brainchild of a husband and wife duo, chef Dan Goff and artist Ruth Butler. During the refurb they discovered a terracotta floor and glossy white wall tiles from when the site was a butcher’s shop. This is the restaurant’s interior canvas, to which they have added sleek oak wishbone chairs, a wall of glittering aperitif bottles and Butler’s geometric technicolour paintings: the opposite of seaside twee. But Fino isn’t just somewhere pretty to eat your dinner; it invites you to make an evening of it, with drinks at the bar before graduating to the dining room. This we do and, installed at a table with warm sourdough and miso butter and two glasses of Antech Crémant de Limoux, feel quite delighted.

Goff and his team previously ran the Dun Cow pub in nearby Salthouse. (This is a village populated by a cohort of my relatives who go to the pub a lot. And so, while being served by a good friend of my crisp-aisle-cousin, I had to work hard to uphold the pseudonym I’d used for the reservation.) Goff’s cooking wouldn’t be out of place in a good pub – it has a whiff of Margot Henderson’s Three Horseshoes in Batcombe about it – but it is most at home in an intimate joint like this, where the staff can nerdily chinwag about local produce, such as Willie Athill’s Stiffkey oysters or Sharon Harvey’s honeycomb, and check in to make sure you have enough crémant, or bread for mopping up a suite of delicious saucy things.

I should flag here that my cousin and I are both mostly vegetarians who dabble in fish occasionally. I tend only to do so when I’m somewhere I know it’ll be fresh, responsibly sourced and deftly cooked, and Fino didn’t disappoint. A starter of salt cod was silkily tender and served in a punchy puttanesca-esque sauce. Meanwhile, in our halibut fillet main, a decadent piece of fish crowned the real star of the show: braised fennel in a buttery fennel velouté. They don’t skimp on the butter here, which came out with jazz hands in a golden, melting onion and gruyère tart, also a celeriac and potato dauphinoise.

This was my liver’s last hurrah before Veganuary, and we made it a loud one. For the LDL-conscious, the Middle Eastern-inspired whipped, spiced yoghurt number was one of our favourite things, and came with roasted cherry tomatoes, marinated artichokes and a side of tenderstem broccoli vinaigrette to cut through the richness, but on the whole, this isn’t somewhere to bring the consultant lipidologist in your life.

And so it felt only right that we should finish things off with an amaretto-drenched tiramisu for two. Not always a go-to pudding for me – next time, and there will be a next time, I shall head straight for the treacle tart – but it felt the respectful way to bid goodbye to dairy for a month. We ate this back at the bar with a glass of Alsatian riesling as the quick wind from a high tide thwacked the window behind us, and reflected that, really, the evening hadn’t been so bad for a hernia of a county full of “six-fingered sister shaggers”.

Fino, 9 Garden Street, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 9HN (01263 687 813; finocromer.co.uk). Snacks from £3, starters from £9, mains from £17, desserts from £7, Fino martini £10