The metropolitan elite are in for a bit of a shock when they start their inevitable stampede to the UK’s newly crowned No 1 restaurant, the Sportsman in Seasalter, Kent. Sure, there’s a windswept, barren beauty to the coast road from Whitstable, but this joint ain’t exactly a looker – even the Sportsman’s own Twitter account says it’s a “grotty rundown pub by the sea”.
It’s not much better inside: old-school bar, mismatched wooden tables and chairs, simple blackboard menu. First-timers could be forgiven for heading back out to the car park and doublechecking the satnav.
Then again, chef/patron Stephen Harris isn’t your average star chef. In 1996, at the age of 34, this self-taught cook jacked in a lucrative career in finance for the slog of the professional kitchen, and three years later wound up here, down the road from his home town of Whitstable.
Harris is “gobsmacked” about topping the 2016 National Restaurant awards. “We’ve always done quite well in these sort of lists,” he says, “but to be No 1 is something else.”
It’s not as if they do anything that out of the ordinary, he insists: “We’re basically two restaurants in one: a pub with a dining room that also does a tasting menu. The tasting menu is all about terroirs, this area, but otherwise it’s the standard starter, main and pud deal.” Which is just as well when your customers are as likely to be local fishermen and farmers at the bar as poncy foodies and chefs down from London.
That £45 tasting menu isn’t one to scare the horses, either, but rather a showcase for local produce. “I even make my own salt,” Harris says, “but that’s more a hookline, a romantic gesture to Kent and the sea.” His slipsole in seaweed butter, say, is both signature dish and modern classic, but it’s also one of the plainest plates of food you’ll ever see in a Michelin-starred restaurant: pearly-white slipsole brushed with green-flecked (homemade) butter on an otherwise pristine plate.
Plus, you get a day trip to the seaside into the bargain. Hell, lunch at the Sportsman is almost like going on holiday – and we could all do with one of those right now.
