There are few things we here at Whistler Towers like more than a bit of jazz in the evening. And maybe some really really good food. And maybe some splendid drinks. So imagine our delight when we tripped all the way over there in Kemp Town (or Kemptown – you choose) to The Bronze, where on the first Thursday of every month, they feature live jazz. The nght we went down we saw the very fine One Hat Trio (pictured) – Eddie Myer, Lol Thomas and Luke Rattenbury – who “play classic guitar trio hard bop with echoes of Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrell and Pat Martino, with added Afro-Cuban rhythm”. (nicked that from their Facebook page – you might have guessed). And I guess that’s probably true. They’re very good and very cool. They’ve got a residency at The Brunswick, too.
Your Gull About Town has written about the food at The Bronze before and I’m not surprised. The “slow and low smokehouse” serves up locally sourced smoked food at its finest. Chef David has the best smile and greeting and… Oh, come on. Good food, fine drink and kicking jazz. What’s not to like?
Our new regular feature looking into what’s new in food and drink
SWOOPING INTO Jubilee Square, the Gull has sniffed the air and discovered a little Singapore-style hawker experience at the back of The Chilli Pickle. Those clever Sperrings, Alun and Dawn who brought their off-road family adventures in India to Brighton 11 years ago, have always loved a shrimp krupuk with plum sauce and black pepper lamb ribs and trialled Hawkerman as a pop-up to make the most of their space in the restaurant. And they’ve done it well; West Hillers will remember their Chilli Pickle pop up at the Polygon on Seven Dials in 2017. And despite an October launch ahead of an inevitable lockdown, this little toe dip in the rough waters of hospitality has gone down swimmingly with the local as Brighton’s spice lovers took advantage of the double take-away option from Jubilee Square’s Asian one-stop shop.
THE GULL LOVES nothing better than rummaging around in the bins of West Hill on a Friday night and has been tucking into some rather exotic flavours from the newly arrived Dishoom, the Irani-Bombay experience so beloved by our London cousins. It’s only available via Deliveroo so far, but the menu is as top notch and includes plenty for vegans and vegetarians such as the Pau Bhaji, much-loved Mattar Paneer, Jackfruit Biryani, samosas and bowls of chole. It even delivers drinks – Bombay sodas, Limca and Thums Up alongside Dishoom’s Mango Lassi. And the Gull is happy to report all the packaging is made from reclaimed and renewable sugar cane pulp packaging and carbon-neutral PLA (a smart compostable bioplastic made from plants), are recyclable once rinsed or compostable. And each take away is matched with the donation of a meal through Akshaya Patra, a charity in India which offers free school meals to hungry children.
https://delivery.dishoom.com.
RIDING THE THERMALS towards Shoreham Port, the Gull has got wind of a new kitchen opening next summer. The Port Kitchen will be next to the lock gates at the award-winning Lady Bee Enterprise Centre and plans to serve visitors as they pass through the locks, as well as the Port’s thriving business community and tourists visiting the area. It seems that the council has a plan to make this hitherto industrial space into an iconic food destination with proper coffee, fresh food and, take it from a bird, unparalleled views across the harbour.
What do you do after the jungles of French Guiana and Chicago? Jed Novick finds out
I’m outside the newly revamped Eddy, enjoying an afternoon drink and chat with Mark and Hatt, the new guardians of this particular galaxy. A car comes down the road and stops outside the pub. I don’t even notce, but Mark’s up and over there. Hatt turns, looks, smiles, carries on. Seconds later, a young lad, all muscles and tatts and with a face like a kid who’s been told to clear up his dinner plates, is walking over to the recycling bins carrying a lone bottle. He drops the bottle in the bin and throws us a half-hearted sneer, but Mark’s already back with us and the story is done. “He was just going to leave the bottle on the pavement” says Mark. “This is our community. We live here. We all live here. Have a bit of respect”.
Hatt – Harriet Eaton – and Mark – Mark Reed – took over The Eddy in January and from there till now, it hasn’t been a straight line. But one look at Hatt and Mark and somehow you know they’re familiar with picaresque journeys. They’ve got stories.
She’s all bangles, tattoos and rings. An artist. Originally from West Sussex, the road to West Hill hasn’t been a straight one. Went to Paris when she was 18, worked in fashion, married a doctor. “He wanted to specialise in the tropical diseases. So we went and lived in South America for three years in French Guiana in a place called Maripasoula, right in the middle of the jungle. It’s like a tiny plane or three days on a boat to get out. So that was interesting. Mostly”.
As you do when you find yourself in the middle of the jungle days away from anywhere, Hatt set up a textile business “because that’s what I’d done in Paris and that went really well – beach towels and robes” but then life intervened – kids, parents, school, the usual – and the path led back to Brighton working behind the bar in a pub not far from where we’re sitting now.
Originally from Hastings, Mark also took a few detours before getting the keys to The Eddy. “I had a few pubs and clubs in Hastings, pubs and clubs in Brighton”. Anything I’d know? “Yeah. The old Club Savannah, which is where Club Revenge is now above Harry Ramsden”. How far are we going back here? “This is back in the early to mid-Eighties. Then I moved to America and I worked in the music industry in America, going on tour with bands for a number of years, lived out hotel rooms for about five. I worked for EMI and then I was a writer for a while and then my… Then the music industry career got parlayed into partnerships in nightclubs and bars and restaurants in Chicago, um, over, uh, over a long period of time. And then alongside that, I also got into the car industry and worked for a major US Volkswagen dealership”. But then Mark’s life intervened…
So Mark came back after 25 years away, and Hatt taught herself how pubs worked and when the landlord of the pub where Hatt worked moved on… Well, opportunity knocks.
Opportunity knocks and then opportunity pulls the rug away. In January they got the keys. A couple of months later… the world stopped. Words like “global pandemic” and “lockdown” probably weren’t in the original business plan. What was the conversation like on March 19th, the night before the lights went out? “We’ve got a lovely little film of the last night before we shut and there was great atmosphere and everybody was wow, this is our last night for a while.
“I think people just thought it was going to be about a month or a couple of weeks, and then we’d be back open again. And I think that we were sort of ignorant of how long it was going to be. But, you know, things happen and it’s just a question of how you look at it. For us, lockdown was fantastic. We just completely embraced it and changed the pub to who we are. Re-painted everything, cleaned everything, changed everything. The cellars, the toilets, everything. It’s like being in my front room really, you know, we really, really have made it our own.
One sweet thing that came out of lockdown was that the idea of community really kicked in. “When we closed down, John at The Yeoman created a WhatsApp group for the four pubs on the block. We called ourselves The Manor and there’s definitely a sense of care between us, but yeah, it’s very sad that some of these pubs are too small to open. John’s been there for 15 years and his whole business plan has had to change. And it’s really tough”.
What do you want from all this? “The last owner was more…, um, he didn’t really understand the concept of the community, but that’s what we love. We live here. We live above the pub. It’s our home”.
“It’s not what you get with Deliveroo”, Red Snapper’s Pam and Philippe tell Gilly Smith
Panwad (Pam) ManeeTapho and her Belgian husband Philippe Ghenet are sitting at a table as the early autumn sunlight pours into the Red Snapper, until lockdown one of the most popular restaurants in Seven Dials. They’re talking about their plans to expand it into a casual lunch stop, a couple of tables outside and three inside. It’s all suitably distanced, which will add to the transformation of the busy buzzy evening eatery.
The restaurant, which has always been a celebration of the fresh seafood and herb-flavoured dishes from their eastern Thailand home, has been replaced by a shop where customers can browse through the restaurant’s silver starter plates, the stacks of gluten-free fish sauce and Thai ginger shots stacked on the upcycled shelving. An orange 1977 Honda Novio scooter is the centrepiece, a cool, vintage reminder of where Red Snapper comes from.
“That’s my mum’s” says Pam. The couple plan to use it for deliveries. “Imagine that turning up outside your door”, Philippe smiles. “It’s not what you get with Deliveroo.”
Red Snapper is a triumph of creativity and lockdown lateral thinking. “We saw it coming” says Philippe who grew up in Italy and heard from relatives there what COVID was already doing to its economy. “It’s the end of the world, right? In a way it was like, come on guys, this is Nostradamus!”
At first, the couple held their heads in their hands, but they quickly realised that lock-down could give them time to think about what they really wanted from their life. “After 16 years of working in the restaurant, sweeping, cooking, cleaning, it was spinning so fast that sometimes we didn’t have time to stop and think which way we want to channel the business”, says Pam who with her younger sister has worked with her parents in the restaurant since she was 16. “Four months of lockdown made us think, think, think, write down, plan, plan, plan. Which path are we going to take?” For them, it was always about the food. “We know what our customers like and what we can offer,” says Pam. It’s the quality of the food. The flowery stuff, the service, the music, the smells, the incense, the candles… it all comes after.”
They decided to offer the best take-away experience they could; while Pam and her father, Turmphan cook downstairs, Philippe chats to their customers upstairs, telling his stories and charming them with his laid-back style. “I like it this way. We’re done by 9pm and I can watch a movie with my son.”
They first shared a flat when Philippe had just graduated in Media at Brighton University and Pam was studying Art, Design & Fashion at Northbrooke College, and they’ve spent months using their creativity, repurposing items from home for this cool, new look. “That was where we stored our linens,” says Philippe pointing to the beautifully battered vintage suitcase now housing an old set of scales and a pink neon heart light. “We choose to be our own bosses, so we might as well add our identity.”
He sees Red Snapper as a Thai market-style café. “Maybe you’re coming back from town; Churchill Square is closed but you still want to have a coffee”, he says. “We like to be a bit of a community market where you can pop in and get some ginger tea. Or maybe just a take-away.”
As we sit in the late summer sunshine, nine-year-old Finlay is on his second day back at school and Pam and Philippe are feeling philosophical. As working owners, school is an essential part of the child-care, hence the move to daytime food which will reflect the ethos of the original Snapper; accessible, but made in-house from scratch.
“We offer passion” says Pam. “This is our career, our life. Before COVID we were too busy, we had too much to lose. We might as well shape the life that we want.”
It’s The West Hill Tavern, but not as you know it. This family run independent has had a little freshen up and is now a “Cafe-Bar-Art space” open from 10.30am on weekdays offering a space to work, drink, meet and eat. A home-from-home on the hill, featuring work for sale from local artists and makers, Black Rock coffee, grilled sandwiches, homemade cakes, cocktails, free wifi and of course….beer.
‘We’ve always had the community at the heart of what we do’ said Heather Pistor. ‘and like everyone, we’ve had to adapt. We’ve looked at the needs of our neighbours; the work-from-homers, the coffee catcher up’ers and those who just need a space during the day to sit and sip, or eat in a relaxed spacious environment. And we thought …we can provide this.
‘We are, and always will be a pub, but in developing our new Pub Hub we’ve created a lovely space to eat, drink, work and play.’
If you’d like to book a table or showcase your own work, please mail: thewestiebn1@gmail.com.
WHERE WERE YOU when Lockdown eased? It’ll be one of those questions that people will ask for years to come, but unlike the moments that stopped in your tracks when Elvis died, when we crossed into a new millennium, when you got your first mobile phone, you’ll probably remember the end of Lockdown as the night you stayed in. Again.
We went to the pub, the Ram Inn at Firle, a treat of a country pub, far enough away from the madding crowd but full, we hoped, of cheerful locals raising a glass. But what to wear? Patterned cloth mask or Boots’ whitest? Gloves: blue plastic or a pastichey yellow Marigold perhaps?
By the time you read this, you’ll gasp at the answer. Reader, we were naked. Well, our faces were anyway. And we weren’t alone. No-one, not our friends who sat opposite us unaware of the aerosol potential of a leaky laugh, or the staff wore anything to hide our wide smiles at the sheer joy of leaving the house.
But my vision of a delightful feast in the company of fellow foodies, was less of a warm hug and more of a socially distanced ankle rub. There was more room at the Inn than any needy traveller could have dreamed of that night. The 4th of July went out with less of a bang and more of a whimper.
By the time The Whistler hits the streets, we’ll know more about the impact of that lacklustre welcome back to the locals. The wheat will have been sorted from the chaff and the redundancies will be strewn over the pavements like butt ends after a Friday night in the old days. Or maybe not.
Across Brighton, the gourmet scene was booked solid. Steven Edwards at etch. in Hove (beautiful plate pictured below) was ready to set off the fireworks on July 4th with not one but two openings. His new restaurant, The Bingham Riverhouse in Richmond had only just launched when Lockdown closed its doors in March, but the 2013 winner of MasterChef: The Professionals reports both restaurants are back and firing on all cylinders.
Brighton Restaurants have compiled an up to date list of the Brighton restaurants which are bravely marching on.
https://restaurantsbrighton.co.uk
Do them a favour and don a mask, wash your hands and head down to your local pub or restaurant, or if you can’t leave home just yet, order a take-away. What would Brighton be without its food scene? What would life be without a pub?
It’s been a cook’s dream, these last few months of Lockdown, a chance to rifle through new recipes, follow our favourite chefs on Instagram Live and finally nail that sour dough. It seems that time and incarceration has finally taught Britain how to cook. But two months of isolation with a 21-year-old vegetarian daughter and a pescatarian husband has left me salivating for a locally sourced, high welfare pork belly, lamb shank or butter-soft tenderloin. We (ok, I) have a rule in our house: one dish at any one mealtime. The days of cooking pasta for the kids, fish for husband and meat for me are way gone; eating these days is for grown-ups.
Except when we get a take-away.
Ah the joys of a banquet of bowls of steaming spices and mix and match flavours, a treat I’d thought was on hold in these days of empty restaurants and furloughed chefs. ‘Park by the Waggon and Horses and we’ll bring it up’ said Dawn from The Chilli Pickle, our favourite Indian with its dishes drawn from the Sperring’s annual family adventures across the sub-continent. I’ve listened to their stories of the long drives and extraordinary finds across India as they follow tips and hunches and head to hill stations and toddy shops, beach shacks and street markets to find the best food in off-road India and bring it back to Brighton; it’s why it’s always in the top 20 Brighton Best Restaurants.
It’s heart breaking to look at that list and wonder if the chefs and teams that work so hard to bring Brighton such extraordinary variety and quality will recover.
So what a glorious treat to find The Chilli Pickle open for take-away. And of course, it’s not just any old take-away; they’ve been delivering since before Deliveroo came to town, their dishes prettily divided into sweet little railway trays, inspired by those served on the long train journeys still so much a part of Indian life and which Alun and Dawn first discovered on their honeymoon. We peeled them open to find Jed’s Keralan fish curry and Loulou’s aubergine and peanut curry while my Old Delhi tandoori chicken breasts on the bone were too unwieldy for such pretty compartments, and oozed fenugreek butter into tin foil which I drizzled into my fluffy basmati.
Tonight, we’ll be back to beans, Mexican black, Italian cannellini, French flageolet or English carlin, always delicious with endless herbs, spices and sauces to make dinner time a treat. But a Thursday night Chilli Pickle while West Hill claps for the NHS? I think it could become a thing.
When the Flour Pot café in Seven Dials was forced into lockdown at the end of March, there was little warning. Like the rest of the city’s hospitality industry, its team had to think quickly. Loulou Tamadon-Nejad is the communications manager at Flour Pot’s seven stores across Brighton; ‘Overnight, we had to come up with a new model’, she said. ‘We still had our vans and our drivers, so we realised that we could quickly change to a home delivery service while still selling bread, pastries and essentials such as milk, butter and eggs for customers willing to queue to buy them through the window.’ As friends and neighbours faced going out of business, Loulou and her team offered to sell and deliver their goods too. You can now buy flowers from Gunn’s the Florist, Smors hummus, cheese from the Cheeseman and Curing Rebels charcuterie from your local Flour Pot cafes.
But it wasn’t just its own survival that The Flour Pot was thinking about; it is part of a city-wide campaign to feed Brighton’s hospital staff via the Facebook page, Brighton & Hove NHS Food Bank which coordinates local food and drink businesses as well as individuals in feeding the health workers on the front line of COVID-19. Its recent fundraiser, Brighton and Hove Feed the NHS aimed to raise £5,000 when it launched in early April with prizes worth over £10,000 including a cocktail masterclass and chef-cooked meals at the winner’s home, but smashed its goal by 322% with over £16,000 donated in just one week. By the beginning of May, they had raised nearly £40,000 which now provides 4 meals a day to the Royal Sussex in Brighton and the Princess Royal in Haywards Heath.
Set up in March by Simon Livermore from Hove and Seven Dials resident Petra Exton, the Brighton & Hove NHS Foodbank began by providing food and groceries to NHS staff during the battle against Coronavirus. But it quickly attracted the attention of the Brighton Restaurants Association and its members and now delivers four delicious meals 24 hours a day to the front-line Critical Care team at the Royal Sussex County Hospital (RSCH) in Brighton and the Princess Royal in Haywards Heath, a total of 4,300 meals a day.
Founder of the Brighton & Hove NHS Foodbank, Simon Livermore said: ‘It started off as a nice idea to send basics like rice and beans to staff who were suddenly too busy to eat, but ity seemed like everyone wanted to do something.’ Simon and Petra also realised that accepting offers from local restaurants would be a way of keeping them in the public eye during lockdown at what seemed an impossible time for the industry; ‘Nurses were telling me that they’d love their burrito bowls with fresh salsa from La Choza or a curry from Easy Tiger so much that they’d order a take-away from there on their night off’ said Petra ‘It was a way of helping both NHS frontline staff by feeding them amazing food and supporting local businesses.’
Simon and Petra have been overwhelmed by the love shown on the Facebook page; ‘I’ve shed tears on many occasions,’ said Simon. ‘This is not just about putting food in their bellies. It’s about morale.’
Gilly Smith
Nurse from the Royal Sussex tucks into a BagelMan bagel
News and views from West Hill and Seven Dials in Brighton
