FISH restaurant Loch Fyne in Jericho has closed down.

One of the area’s longest-serving dining establishments opened in Walton Street in 2001 and shut its doors to customers for the last time on Sunday.

The Seafood & Grill restaurant was part of a chain owned by brewers Greene King and the closure follows the end of the Henley branch in May after two decades.

Oxford Mail:

A statement on Loch Fyne’s website said: “We are sorry to say that our Oxford restaurant will be permanently closed from the October 7, 2018, and we wanted to say thank you for being a loyal customer.

“We are aware that some of you may have placed bookings with us and we are sorry that we will be unable to deliver these for you.

“A member of the team will be in touch to resolve this with you directly.

“The great news though, is that there are many other fantastic Loch Fyne restaurants up and down the UK, including Milton Keynes, Woburn and Wokingham.

“For now though, from all of us here in Oxford it’s thank you and farewell.”

Although Loch Fyne has closed Oxford has many new restaurants including those at Westgate.

When the Walton Street restaurant opened in April, 2001, staff flagged up its connections with Loch Fyne, the largest salt water loch in Scotland, where mussels and oysters were bred for diners’ table.

The website also said: “We know the food is of a high quality but eating out now has to tick more boxes than just good food.”

Asian restaurant chain Itsu opened a new branch at Westgate earlier this year which has proved popular.

While some diners from Oxford are sorry Loch Fyne is closing others are not so concerned.

Oxford Mail reader Andrew from Oxford posted that Loch Fyne staff were the 'ultimate purveyors of portion control'.

He added: "Will never forget the farce that was an office Christmas Dinner in one of their restaurants.

"We advised them 48 hours beforehand that the numbers attending would be dropping from 14 to 12.

"They insisted that we had to pay for 14 meals (obviously we understood that that we'd lose the two deposits), they then refused to serve the two spare meals, that we had to pay for, to the table as there would only be 12 seated.

"For the starter, they'd run out of the parfait so served two oatcakes, portion of butter and a sprig of salad to 5 of us at the table.

"Our Gluten intolerant colleague was told, as he was served the main course, that "you know you should be charged extra for that - it's a set menu" before it was slammed down.

When it was time for pudding, four of us had our dessert served, then swiftly removed and taken back to the kitchen. Only for it to be returned a few minutes later with just one scoop of ice cream instead of two. We were told that a mistake had been made and we were only entitled to one scoop - never again."