Jumpin' Jay's Fish Café

I came here during restaurant week and got their prix fix menu. Wonderful food. Would definitely come back again if I ever visit Portsmouth again. Very fresh bread rolls and butter, nice that it came with garlic. All very fresh, high quality ingredients. Nice atmosphere. Good, attentive service.

Great restaurant! First thing I noticed is the happiness of the employees o thing but smiles. Everyone working helped each other and they seemed to be a team who enjoys working with each other because of that our service was impeccable. From drinks to the food everything was delicious. We started with fried calamari cooked perfectly, we had warm rolls served with soft butter ,roasted garlic and olives. We ordered the salmon and monk fish both cooked with so much flavor and the presentation was beautiful. Then for dessert we ordered the banana cake new on the menu I’m not a sweet eater but this was perfect not too sweet…..definitely everyone should visit this restaurant.

I had high expectations for our seafood dinner here and they exceeded my expectations! The service was great, the dinner was amazing. Perfectly flavored and cooked, very large portions. I don’t normally really like fish, but it was so fresh, flavored, and cooked well.

The dessert was amazing as well! They have their own pastry chef and they are outstanding. Don’t forget to order dessert.

Buck a shuck oyster Tuesdays at the bar last 2 weeks.
Great drinks and friendly bartenders.
Gets busy so make reservations or if like go bar, early and late are the best options, or just wait. It’s worth it.

Fantastic fresh seafood in a comfortable classy atmosphere. Oysters, tuna tartar and crudo from the raw bar were the perfect way to start. Cod with roasted corn basil cream sauce with pumpkin tortellini was SO good. No room for dessert, but the offerings looked amazing.

Went here for our 56th anniversary Saturday night! This is the second time we’ve been here and not been able to order an entree because of the apps! We got PEI mussels and the calamari. My husband is a big eater but after drinks and these starters, we couldn’t eat another bite! Next time we are going to get one app to share and then hopefully have room enough for an entree! Service was great, drinks super! A cosmo and a dark and stormy. Will definitely be back again and again!

Loved everything. Best calamari, awesome monk fish, beef medallions melt in your mouth. Cocktails, perfection. They fit in a table of 9 of us. Staff was so awesome! Highly recommended!!!

Except for a little reservation snafu, the staff and owner were glorious, and it kicked off our vacation right with delicious seafood and wonderful wine. If I am in Portsmouth again, this will be my first choice for a dining experience. Close to my hotel as well. Heart of the city.

From out of town - the name honestly didn’t sell it but we’re so glad we tried. Everything was incredible. Food. Service. Atmosphere. All the above. Portions are great. Very accommodating for certain food restrictions. 100/10

We had a wonderful evening here tonight, Friday night. We had reservations for 7:30 but finished in town early and arrived a few minutes after 6, we were invited to sit at the bar until a table was prepared for us. They returned maybe 15 minutes later to get us but we were enjoying ourselves at the bar and ended up eating there I had the sweet heat drink and it was a slow build but I very much enjoyed it. We split appetizers, the tuna tartare and the Thai mussels and finished with the Japanese cheesecake and it was all perfect. Super service, cool music (not too loud), nice ambient lighting, wonderful food and honestly a pretty reasonable price, 3 drinks, 2 appetizers and a dessert for $90. Super happy and planning our next visit.

Went with my significant other and shared New England chowder appetizer, monkfish, and salmon entrees. All the food was excellent, service attentive and helpful. Portions large enough that we with our small appetites didn't have room to try dessert, to my disappointment. Worth going again if we get back to Portsmouth. Not a cheap date.

Fantastic seafood restaurant, cool southwest vibe. Ellen our waitress made wonderful suggestions.. the salmon crudo in Serrano infused oil was amazing, like velvet , it melted in your mouth. Go with the specials. We had the cod and haddock piccata which were perfectly prepared and for dessert was blown away by the stout infused chocolate caramel cake… it was one of the best desserts we have ever had. Thank you for making our anniversary dinner a memorable event.

Best all around experience we have had in a very long time. Wonderful service (Marilu), great drinks and fantastic food. All four of us loved the 3 apps we shared, the entrees and dessert. Fresh seafood without the fishy smell. The smells were just yummy. We highly recommend this place when in the Portsmouth area.

Amazing restaurant and Timeena made us feel like family!

Everything from the staff to the food was perfect! I had the halibut and it was out of bounds! The raw bar, forget about it!
I paired the fish with sangria and white wine!
The wait staff was amazing and made sure we were taken care off.

The fish art in the bathroom was very beautiful

This was a very good experience with really only one significant downside, which I'll get to. But first the good stuff. Now, I'm from Portsmouth, but I've been living in other places for decades before recently returning to the area, and this is my first time eating at this place. I probably felt a little weird prejudice along the lines of "how can a place in my hometown be actually very good?" But it was great. Not that the recipes were that crazily inventive or even necessarily effective - the Vietnamese inflected herbs didn't quite match perfectly with my wife's scallops, for example. But the execution was nearly perfect. I ate the black pepper fettuccine, which came with mussels, shrimp, and scallops, all things that are easy to overcook, but everything was done exactly perfectly. Seared scallops, nice consistency, a bit rare in the center: perfect. Shrimp was similarly awesome. We shared a caramel pudding for dessert, and my wife said "why did we bother with dinner, this is what we should have been eating," also pretty much true. So really, the food was truly great. Service was fine, friendly, knowledgeable, maybe a little rushed but not terribly so.

To be honest the only real complaint I have has to do with the physical layout of the place. There's a bar area kind of raised above the middle of the dining room. This kind of seems out of place in a restaurant like this, and it made dinner a little less enjoyable to have to overhear loud, drunk, occasionally profanity laden conversations the whole time we were sitting there. Not that this offends me, particularly, but it's definitely not what I would prefer during an otherwise nice dinner like this, and it's maybe enough to make me avoid eating here in the future if it's particularly busy.

Came for a second time and it was delicious!! Great drinks, great food, and great atmosphere. The fish was super fresh and portions were smaller than other local joints, but quality and presentation were above par. Our waitress, Timeena, was AMAZING!! Bartender and servers were fantastic. I loved the pomegranate spicy marg "Granada" and the wine selection. We got the daily halibut, the black pepper fettuccine and the yellowfin tuna. No complaints here!!!

Menu below, including cocktails 🍹🍸 😉

They did a great job with covid precautions as well, empty tables between every seated table and ha d sanitizer available at the door. Outdoor seating also looked super cute, but we ate indoors.

We read an article that said this was the best seafood in New Hampshire and it definitely lived up to the hype. Akef was great during a very busy evening service. We split the shrimp bang pow (pow bang Batman?) appetizer, radicchio salad, halibut risotto, and the creme brulee for dessert. Everything was excellent. The halibut was perfectly cooked, one of the best fish dishes we’ve ever had. We were blown away! We’ll definitely be back.

Excellently prepared seafood. For both the tuna and scallops, just the perfect level of heat (not raw or well done) which is not easy. Creative cocktails and excellent service from the whole staff. Minimalist, funky decor.

Oysters were ridiculously small--very disappointing, but the waiter brought me an additional one to compensate. Monkfish Saltimbocca was minimal amount ofl fish, strangely shaped gnocchi, tasteless broccoli (?) no sage taste. Not a saltimbocca. Slapping a piece of prosciutto on a piece of fish does not make it saltimbocca.

One of the best meals I have ever had. The Oyster were shucked well, no cuts on the belly or pieces of shell and the liquid was still inside. The swordfish and scallops were cooked perfectly.