The Urchin, Hove

As soon as the sun comes out on a bank holiday, it feels like half of London heads down to the south coast, and Brighton in particular. And though that town certainly has a lot going for it, not least a thriving restaurant and pub/wine scene that can show you a great time at all budgets, I'm afraid the thought of fighting my way through those narrow Lanes alleyways on the hottest days of the year gives me the heebie jeebies.

The next time you feel like heading to the Sussex coast, then, consider the short diversion to Hove. True it doesn't have quite the abundance of choice of interesting eateries and drinkeries as its big sister Brighton, but it does still have more than you've any right to expect, with the added benefit that you're much more likely to be able to find a table. And what it also has - and this is a huge plus point - is seafood-forward gastropub the Urchin.

Combining all the best things about a quaint old boozer with a skilled kitchen serving proper live seafood at reasonable prices is an idea so blatantly brilliant it's a mystery why there aren't more of them. The Wright Bros had a bash at their place in Helford, the Ferry Boat Inn, back in the day, though I notice it's long since changed hands and now serves scampi and chips for £17.50. The Oystercatcher all the way up in Loch Fyne is closer to the ideal and really does serve some lovely food, but its so remote it may as well be parked on the moon.

Taking inspiration, I'm sure, from certain London steakhouses, the Urchin have a menu of regular dishes that doesn't change much (if at all) from day to day, and a chalkboard of "specials" that get scrubbed off once ordered - think whole brown crab and lobster - organised into various different weights and price points. We started though, with a tray of Jersey rocks, superbly cool and lean, which arrived in two styles - au naturelle, and with a very interesting pickled walnut and crispy "seaweed" (Chinese-takeaway style fried cabbage). Both were great.

Oysters dispatched, it was time to turn our attention to the big boys (or possibly girls). £30 got us a giant brown crab boasting huge fat claws, served simply with a little clump of samphire. All the bigger beasties come in these clever covered metal bowls - think two woks hinged together - meaning you eat out of one side and discard your empty pieces of shell in the other. It's a great system.

If I'm going to be brutal I'd say that - unlike the crab - the lobster needed just a slight bit more seasoning, or rather should have been cooked in slightly more saline water. Not a disastrous mistake, and one I could have quite easily corrected if there had been any salt on the table, but there wasn't. Still, you did get plenty of animal for your £61, and the chips were wonderful too, crisp and golden and moreish.

We were having so much fun by this point we didn't want it to end, so added on a cheeseboard. Can't for the life of me remember what they were, but the four varieties covered all the usual bases, being a firm cheddar, a soft, creamy blue, a Tunworth-y brie-style (which was more than likely to have in fact been Tunworth) and a nice soft goat's.

With two pints of excellent hazy IPA (brewed on-site!) and a carafe of Albarino to help wash down the seafood, the bill came to £93 each - pretty much what you should be paying for this kind of thing. If you didn't have quite the weakness for premium shellfish, and weren't quite so determined to sample all corners of the drinks menu then you might get away with something like £50pp, but honestly where would be the fun in that?

We wobbled back to the station via the Watchmaker's Arms, a craft beer bar manned by lovely and enthusiastic staff, then fell asleep on the train home. It was one of those hazy bank holiday days where everything seemed to go right, and you end up wondering to yourself why all Saturdays can't be like this. The Urchin makes the whole business of cooking and serving fresh shellfish so easy and enjoyable that it deserves to be the template for any number of "shellfish pubs" (their own description of themselves) in any number of seaside towns up and down the country, and who knows, soon enough, perhaps it will. Fingers crossed.

8/10

Pascere, Brighton

As you may have noticed, I'm a hopeless restaurant spod, and in common with many other hopeless restaurant spods my attitude towards any part of the world is inextricably linked with my experience of eating there. I love Bristol, for example, where Bell's Diner and the Lido and of course the annual Grillstock barbeque competition means memories of that beautiful city are always shining gold. I took a while to warm to Manchester (I am from Liverpool after all) but thanks to the French and Manchester House I look forward to trips there now as much as anywhere. Similarly Cornwall, and Yorkshire, and Lancashire, and anywhere that has fed me well - that's more or less all it takes to win me over. I mean, access by train helps but isn't essential.

Brighton, then, after a desperately disappointing meal at the Salt Room, had a lot of work to do. Just as I (perhaps unrealistically) idealise anywhere I've had a great meal, I'm also prone to dismiss anywhere that hasn't impressed, and I was ready to file the seaside town alongside Liverpool (trip to Wreckfish pending) and Winchester in the "must do better" pile.

Fortunately, there is as good reason to jump on the train down south (or in the case of this last weekend, the train then a bloody bus replacement service from Hayward's Heath), and it's a lovely friendly little bistro in the Lanes called Pascere. Small but perfectly formed, Pascere has about 20 seats downstairs and a handful more upstairs where there's an attractive "kitchen table" bar area. As far as I'm concerned, the smaller the restaurant the better - if I barely have to glance up to attract the attention of a member of staff, this is all to the good - and it's to Pascere's credit that tables are still nicely spaced out and the place feels airy and bright.

The menu is short, full of lots of attractive, exciting things that normal people want to eat, and remarkably good value considering the quality - and generosity - of cooking on display. Croquettes feature in a couple of guises, firstly these containing chicken, with a clever chicken 'powder' scattered over the top and a chicken skin mayonnaise beneath. Chicken three-ways, all of them good.

Next stone bass croquettes, strikingly darkened with squid ink with a similarly Vantablack mayo, had a perfect fish-potato mix (as in around 50/50) and also came with a dairy-free tartare of chopped sweet pickles and capers. They were also very nice, although this being 2017 they must suffer the reality of existing in a world where José Pizarro's chicken, and fish, croquettas are also available to buy. Still, at £6.50 for three you could hardly complain too much.

Also from the 'snacks' menu were these beautiful things - Portland crab tarts, containing a huge mound of sweet white crab meat and topped with a kind of bisque-y hollandaise. Another intelligent balance of texture, ingredient and seasoning.

And we hadn't even got to the starters yet. Baby squid suffered a little from overseasoning but was still an impressive bit of work, with a gentle parsley cream binding some noodly thin mushrooms, and topped with a very Rogan-esque (I'm sure they won't mind me saying) squid ink cracker. Underneath it all was a perfect bright green square of something else that tasted vaguely vegetal, but we couldn't work out exactly what it was. Looked nice, though.

Braised ox-cheek next, rolled up inside breadcrumbs, with pickled red cabbage. I think we'd liked to have seen a bit more of the advertised black pudding purée and, after two courses of croquettes, a little less breadcrumb, but this was probably just as much our fault as theirs. The little cubes of ox tongue were lovely, too - bouncy and salty with bags of flavour.

Both mains were more than up to the task. Roast duck, pink and juicy, came with a (-nother) breadcrumbed nugget of richly-flavoured leg meat and various bits of winter veg dressed in a nice dark jus. I'm not a fan of parsnip, so I'll recuse myself from criticising that element of the dish - suffice to say my chef friend loved it.

My own main course was an impossibly vast chunk of ox-cheek, tenderly cooked and beautifully textured, drenched in another addictive Bovril-y sauce and on a bed of pasta so delicate and wisper-thin that the beef seemed to float above it. I'm not ashamed to admit that thanks to the number - and size - of the preceeding courses I didn't quite manage to finish this, but what I ate was beautiful - my favourite in fact of all the dishes at Pascere.

We shared a dessert - a lemongrass mousse affair with mint meringue and passionfruit sorbet which was just as cleverly concieved and executed as everything that had come before. If some of the dishes at Pascere use too many ingredients, as arguably in this dessert and perhaps also the roast duck, it was never at the expense of fun and flavour. I'm looking for things to criticise because, well, that's my job - by anyone's standards these guys certainly know what they're doing.

Perhaps the most notable, and laudable, thing about Pascere is the overwhelming sense that these are a bunch of people with hospitality in their very bones. Yes, there were issues here and there with loading the table with ingredients, and an over-reliance on breadcrumbed nuggets of meat, but they could hardly be accused of laziness, of skimping on portion size or technique, of charging too much for too little. This charming place is doing almost everything that's required of a local restaurant, and much more besides, and deserves all of the praise and custom coming its way. Brighton should be very proud indeed to call it their own.

8/10

I was invited to Pascere

The Salt Room, Brighton

On paper, or rather PDF, Salt Room looked like an absolute sure thing. A proper, grown-up seafood restaurant in a town that knows a thing or two about eating well, it seemed to fit the bill exactly; we were aware of big Brighton names like 64 Degrees, Pascere and Chilli Pickle but had settled on the Salt Room because we wanted something informal yet sophisticated, somewhere we could get messy on fresh shellfish and drink good cocktails and then spill out onto the pier for faded Victorian seaside fun.

And things started well. Happy to escape the insane number of people that flock to Brighton of a weekend - good lord, this place is busy - the warm welcome of the Salt Room bar and the attentions of their head barman soon settled our nerves. Martinis were ice cold, made with an interesting gin from Islay, and a cute Bloody Mary style thing came with a mini pot of nacho chips and pineapple chilli salsa as a garnish. We were about halfway through these when a 20-strong crowd of hen-doers arrived so, thanking our lucky stars we'd got our drinks order in already, we headed for the restaurant.

Apparently all the nice, bright, quiet window seats had been taken by people who had been here before, and knew to request them, so we were sat near the toilets between two massive tables of noisy families with toddlers. Quite why anyone would bring a 3-year-old to a smart seafood restaurant is beyond me - even if they find anything to enjoy about the food they'll be bored witless after ten minutes and want to race around the place screaming.

Amidst all the darkness, chaos and the screaming, there were bits and pieces to enjoy. Clams in sherry with chorizo and beans were a tad on the salty side but contained plenty of plump bivalves if not much chorizo.

Fishcakes had a nice smooth consistency and delicate crust, even if it was a bit low on fish - still, I can enjoy a deep-fried potato croquette as much as I can a fish cake, so this wasn't too much of an issue.

Some of the slices of bread were a bit stale on one side, like they'd been sliced a good while ago. Again, not a terrible failure once they'd been dunked in the leftover clam sauce or spread with the nice homemade tartar sauce but it all added to the impression that their attention wasn't on the details. Even the menu contained a few spelling mistakes (we think they mean XO sauce that came with the crab, not ox...), and details, in a place like this, are eveything.

It all rested, then, on the main seafood platter. If it had been up to scratch, all the issues with oversalting and stale bread and the squealing toddlers would be forgiven. We'd have knocked it all back, polished off a bottle of Picpoul de Pinet and been back on the streets of Brighton with a spring in our step. Sadly, it wasn't to be. But first, the good bits - oysters were full of brine and flavour, and the house mignonette was good. Raw scallop was nice, too, gently dressed with lime.

But the rest of it? I was immediately suspicious that the Salt Room, a specialist seafood restaurant, only offers crab claws and not whole dressed or cooked crab. This makes me think that rather than buying in whole fresh crab, they're getting hold of frozen claws separately. I can't say they do this for certain, but that's the impression I got, and having tasted the end result I'm going to need a lot of persuading that they don't. Similarly the langoustine, desperately overcooked to mushy, had strange, bendy shells - again, if they were cooked from fresh I'd be very surprised. Prawns were similarly mealy and bland. And the less said about some terrible soily, chewy chips the better.

Of course, the tragedy of poor seafood platters is that they still generally cost quite a whack. After having drowned our sorrows in a second bottle of Picpoul the bill came to £62.30 a head, a decent amount to pay for a good seafood lunch perhaps, but for this half-hearted display, served with only the occasional glimmer of competence from an Italian member of staff that, to be fair, was acting as half-waiter half-babysitter for most of the afternoon, it really didn't feel like value.

I hesitate to denigrate an entire city based on one dodgy meal, but I wonder if at least some of the problems with the Salt Room are that they operate in an area so oversubscribed with day trippers that even the mediocre places do well. Maybe when they first opened they served fresh crab and bought in live langoustine and made their mark, but have gradually realised they make just as much money buying in frozen and using yesterday's bread. Who knows.

What Brighton does have going for it, though, is faded Victorian seaside attractions, and lovely cozy old pubs. So we had a go on a ricketty old roller coaster, and a couple of pints in the Pull & Pump, and soon disappointing crab was a distant memory. I will try Brighton again - and very soon in fact, I'm booked in at Pascere next month. But for now, I'll choose my fruit de mer more carefully. Life's too short for mediocre seafood.

5/10