The Sportsman

High quality cooking

More than 24 years on and still as popular as ever, The Sportsman is by far the most relaxed of all the Guide’s top-rated restaurants. ‘The food is probably the best I've eaten – on pretty much all of the 20 odd times I've been there,’ confided a supporter, who lists the ‘amazing’ staff and a wine list that ‘is unusually fairly priced for so fine a restaurant’ among its attributes. Add the appeal of a scrubbed, rustic interior designed to make people feel at ease, open fires, a dash of comfort and, on the night we spotted a McLaren in the car park, a sprinkling of glamour, and it’s easy to see how it can get booked up for months ahead. Not bad for a shabby old Kent pub tucked under a sea defence wall, two miles west of Whitstable. A famous take-us-as-we-are attitude puts the emphasis on exceptional hospitality and on turning out food of rare quality – courtesy of head chef Dan Flavell, who interprets co-owner Steve Harris’s ingredients-led, seasonally aware approach brilliantly. Everything is produced with great assurance, as can be appreciated from the five-course tasting menu – which includes snacks and plenty of choice at each stage. There’s no shortage of luxury ingredients – creamily poached oysters in the lightest, just-warm beurre blanc with pickled cucumber and salty, soft Avruga caviar, or exquisite native lobster with hollandaise and black truffle – but one sign of a good kitchen is what can be done with humbler raw materials. The Sportsman's emblematic answer is a slip sole grilled in seaweed butter – widely copied, yet you will never eat a better one elsewhere. Even a simple-looking plate of braised halibut fillet with a rich, intensely satisfying cep and lemon verbena sauce hides great technical skill and requires pinpoint judgement to get it as right as this. Meat dishes are handled as well as any: charred maple-cured pork (of fabulous flavour) is transformed into something very special by virtue of excellent ingredients – wholegrain mustard tartare, cabbage salad and gooseberries; needless to say, execution and delivery are faultless. This is not hearty, gutsy food, nor is it showy. It is the marriage of ingredients and balance that so often impresses, as well as the remarkable lightness of touch. Although the kitchen keeps abreast of the times, the food never seems to fall for the clichés that sustain others, preferring to maintain steady interest – as in a fabulous vegetarian dish of intensely flavoured roast beetroot with raspberries and raw crème fraîche. Desserts pay huge dividends by virtue of their simplicity and are no less appealing for having a conventional air about them – as in our faultless raspberry soufflé with raspberry ripple ice cream. This is cooking that leaves you wanting more and sends you home with a smile, especially when prices for both food and wine represent such good value.

The Sportsman might not look much from the outside but behind its whitewashed and weathered facade is a world-class establishment serving some of the best food in the country, in a wonderfully humble and unpretentious fashion. With a CV that includes spells as a history teacher and a financial adviser, its low-key chef-patron Stephen Harris came to cooking relatively late in life and is entirely self taught. He has spent the past two decades or so building a closer connection to his environment, refining his recipes for homemade products like air-dried hams, cured fish, butter and even sea salt, which he makes by boiling seawater. The Kent pub’s five-course tasting menu gives diners a choice of four dishes meaning that you can return regularly without repeating a meal – although it does make choosing on the day very difficult (a three-course midweek menu is also available). Dishes use ingredients from the immediate vicinity, exploring the pub’s unique salt marsh terroir and include mussel and bacon chowder and Harris’ legendary slip sole grilled in seaweed butter as well as Montgomery cheddar souffle with mustard sauce. Another key appeal of this understated venue is it remains a proper pub – not for nothing has The Sportsman picked up Gastropub of the Year on a number of occasions. One of the most charming things about it – and there are many – is that gastro tourists mingle with pint-nursing locals and day trippers, some of whom are oblivious to this seaside pub’s status as one of the very best places to eat in the UK.