The Gallivant, Camber Sands

A few weeks after restaurants and pubs started reopening in earnest, the novelty of going out and have a professional chef cook meals for me is still nowhere near wearing off. Maybe - hopefully - it never will. I like to think I never exactly took the hospitality industry for granted - it's given me way too much joy over the years for that - but over the last few months I've watched in awe as restaurants I already held in high regard pivoted to delivery, delis, home kits and YouTube instructional videos with enthusiasm and creativity, finding a myriad of new ways of sharing their talent with a covid-battered country.

You'll no doubt all have your own lockdown favourites but I should make special mention of the Belzan/Madre team in Liverpool whose home meal kits were a real treat, Passyunk Avenue in London whose clear instructions managed to guide even this rubbish cook towards excellent buffalo wings & Philly cheese steaks, the Ethical Butcher, who delivered just about the best steak I've ever eaten in my life, and Clays Hyderabadi Kitchen who were kind enough to gift me enough excellent curry to sink a battleship. Oh and Bombay Bustle, the highest of high-end Indian delivery services but for a special occasion, absolutely worth the money and then some.

But as I say, it's nice to be back eating food where the only instructions are to sanitise your hands before sitting down, and to follow the one-way system to the toilets. The Gallivant is a tranquil, sun-kissed beachside hotel just a few minutes out of the pretty medieval town of Rye, and as well as being a rather nice place to stay (as I discovered back in 2014) in recent years they've spent a lot of energy upping their food game, recently hiring a new head chef Jamie Guy and stripping back what was a rather large and unweildy menu into a short, tasteful selection of local seasonal produce.

These are whelk fritters, and were lovely, which is more than I can say for normal raw whelks, the horrible snotty little things. Here, they had sensibly been transformed beyond all recognition into a soft mixture and deep-fried, a bit like seafood satay, and presented with a nice tangy tartare.

Courgettes came both green, sliced thin, and yellow, roasted as chunks. Sat on a bed of nice oily home made hummus they were a colourful and wholesome starter, making the most of local ingredients and would have lit up the room with the joys of summer even if it had been bucketing down, I'm sure.

Only slightly less successful was another starter of gem lettuce, which was crunchy and fresh enough but I'm afraid seemed to have no sign of the advertised Kent Blue cheese at all. And while baby gem covered in buttermilk, parmesan and chives is perfectly nice to eat, it really could have done with some big chunks of tangy blue cheese to lift it. Just some would have been nice.

There's a little section for sandwiches on the Gallivant lunch menu, which is a lovely unpretentious touch and will suit anyone not willing to commit to a full 3-course menu of a lunchtime. This is a "crispy plaice" sandwich, the fish being moist and crunchy in all the right places and a great sandwich ingredient - think posh fish fingers. But better still was a pile of what I can only describe as 'ribbon fries', a worryingly addictive invention somewhere between pommes soufflé and a cornershop snack, which demands you throw great fistfuls of it down your throat until they're all gone and then wish you had some more. I'm usually pretty terrible at food trend predictions, but I'll be very surprised if you don't start seeing these at your favourite local gastropub some time soon.

You'd hope a restaurant sat right on the beach would know how to cook a bit of fish, but quite how stunningly realised and executed this dish was came as a delightful shock. It was, in every way, the perfect fish dish. Not only was the skin on the bream crisp and delicate, and the flesh moist and timed perfectly, but the Mediterranean tomato sauce (a kind of panzanella) underneath, studded with crunchy sourdough croutons and fresh herbs, was a riot of flavour and colour, worth the price of admission even if it hadn't been topped with such blindingly good seafood.

So there we have it - a charming little operation altogether, striking exactly the right balance between smart and unpretentious, that would be a highpoint of any day trip to East Sussex. The bill for 3 people came to a very reasonable £87.75 including service charge, although I should point out that 3 glasses of excellent English sparkling (from Oxney organic vineyard just up the road) did very kindly not appear on the bill, so that would have bumped the cost up a bit. Even so, it's hardly an amount of money you'd begrudge paying to sit in this garden in the sun and eat whelk fritters, ribbon fries and sea bream. In fact, I'd go back the very next chance I get.

8/10

The George Grill, Rye

The are some incredibly talented people working at the George, a handsome old hotel and bar on the High St in Rye. Whoever designed the menu, for example, knows exactly what they're doing - it's a minor work of art, with a "Crustacea" section with oysters three ways, lobster, and 1/2 pint of prawns for very little money indeed. There are half a dozen starters, half a dozen mains, occasionally namechecking local suppliers and seasonal ingredients, and a "From our Josper charcoal oven" section with keenly-priced steaks from butcher Donald Russell, with chips and bearnaise included. So far, so good.

And whoever's heading up the kitchen brigade, too, should be very pleased with themselves. Without exception, the food we ate, given the prices they charged, could hardly be faulted - good ingredients, treated well, honestly presented. No superfluous trills or frills, no sprigs of parsley finding their way into places they don't belong, just good, no-nonsense, grub.

The problem, for the customer at least, is that progressing from the 'menu' stage to the 'eating' stage involves dealing with a front of house that, while often well-meaning, are clearly still struggling with the whole arse/elbow dichotomy, and which on more than one occasion threatened to derail the whole affair.

But let's start where it matters. Our plan, and I hope you'll agree it wasn't a particularly complex one, was to share 1/4 dozen oysters each as a starter, one portion 'natural' and one 'Rockefeller' (grilled), then I wanted a starter-sized portion of scallops as a main, my friend a half pint of prawns, and a portion of chips to share. Not a vast lunch, admittedly, but we were mindful of a huge dinner we had looming in the Gallivant that evening, and the seafood section of the menu did seem the most appealing.

The first thing we did, though, was order two glasses of prosecco. These were very nice, and only unusual insofar as they were one of the precious few items that appeared on time, and as expected. From here on, things got a bit more... tricky.

Oyster Rockefellers, here, and you may notice there are four of them. Maths was never my favourite subject in school but I still find myself regularly labouring under the misapprehension that a quarter of twelve is three, not four. Still, at least this was an error in our favour, and they were bloody lovely, just the right amount of herby salsa under a gentle baked parmesan crust.

We waited as long as was comfortable for my equivalent "au natural" portion to arrive, but there was still no sign even as we'd given up and shared the Rockefeller between us. As the plate was cleared, I mentioned the mystery of the missing bivalves to our waitress who, to her credit, looked genuinely surprised and offered to find out what had happened. Meantime, our next courses arrived, suspiciously sans chips.

But who needs chips, anyway, with food this good? The 1/2 pint of prawns were presented with a bowl of excellent lemon mayonnaise - aioli seems to be more usual these days but this made a very good case for the traditional British version - and a slab of light, focaccia-like white bread.

Rye Bay Scallops were super, too; I loved the fact they'd left the roe on, I loved the sweet, mildly alcoholic liquor, I loved the nuggets of salty ham, I loved the pile of bright-green wild garlic. I loved all of it. There are surely few better ways of spending £10 than this piping hot bowl of fresh, colourful springtime joy.

At some point, the raw oysters arrived, bumped up in number to a full dozen to apologise for the delay, which was a nice gesture but as my friend doesn't eat them turned my starter-as-was into a bit more of a bushtucker trial than I'd anticipated. Still, with a clever rotation of garnishes (mignionette on one, lemon on the next, tabasco, black pepper, combinations of all of the above) it wasn't too much of a hardship to finish them off. I'm good like that.

The bill arrived with the non-existent chips on. Well, of course it did, but by this point we were past caring, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. Nobody was rude or lazy, just a bit baffled, and very often attitude makes up in spades for the lack of, well, general competence. They were soon removed, albeit with no apology for them having been forgotten about then charged for in the first place, and I'm not sure if the 7.5% service charge is normal or just accurate self-appraisal, but it seemed fair all things considered. Ultimately, we left very happy, and you can't put a price on that. Well, you can - £25 a head - but you know what I mean.

7/10