The Sportsman
The Sportsman
Faversham Road
Seasalter
Whitstable
England
Tel: +44 (0)1227 273370
Serves lunch and dinner Tuesday to Sunday lunch; bookings advised; children welcome.
Just before you get to the seaside town of Whitstable, take the slip road to Seasalter and you’ll find yourself in a melancholy hinterland of pylons standing like sci-fi giants on flat marshland and beachhuts in shades as colourless as the sea. The Sportsman, a scruffy, butter-coloured pub by the road, looks like the kind of place where you might meet trouble. But the inside is awash with light. Happy families squeeze round the scrubbed, rickety tables; hunks in leather jackets knock back oysters and chorizo and even the odd celeb can be seen tucking into chef Steve Harris’ sublime slow-roast chicken.
Here is a chef – self-taught, obsessive, enthralled by taste – who really thinks. He loves the flavours achieved by the culinary stars – it was a meal at Nico Ladenis’ that made him give up his job as a newspaper sub and take to the stove – but he hates the ponciness of restaurants. ‘I wanted to do haute cuisine stripped bare: Nico Ladenis food in a pub,’ he says.
Lucky for diners that he made that choice, because here you get knock-out food at bargain prices, and Stephen’s experiments with culinary science push his cooking ever further. His rhubarb sorbet, for example, is made by macerating the raw fruit in sugar for two days and then using the extracted juice. Paired with a little pot of burnt cream, this is a sensational taste experience, and it’s only one of the many pleasures here. The Sportsman is a delight.