DRAGON BAR 71 George Street, Hastings. No bookings. Meal for two: £50
and
THE GEORGE 98 High Street, Rye (01797 222 114). Meal for two: £95
Deep midwinter on the East Sussex coast, and I am searching for a restaurant that I can write about. It's a struggle. In Hastings I am taken to the Dragon, a dark snug of a place much loved by the locals, who make me feel terribly old. They wear shoes that come to a point. There are DJ decks on the bar, bruising chunks of modern art on the walls, and they serve platefuls of food so large they have their own gravitational pull.
I share a starter of local Rye scallops on the half shell, with the sort of cheesy, mustardy sauce that has you licking at the ridges. It makes finishing the mains even tougher. First up, a wondrous barrel of a pie filled with long-braised black beef, wild boar and venison with a puff-pastry crust the colour of the Dome of the Rock. It comes with a root-vegetable bubble and squeak and is the sort of food used to get you through winter. On the Russian Steppes. A cassoulet, however, is a crime against French peasants. They don't do desserts. I tell friends who live in Hastings that the Dragon scored two out of three and they nod. That's a good hit rate for the place, which achieves a lot from a tiny galley kitchen and does it with no attitude. It deserves support.
I travel back to Rye and find the town's closed. Nothing doing at the newish Tuscan place, or the gastropub run by those people down from London. If you hate metro-centricity, then lob your house bricks at me now, because this confirms my suspicions about the traumatic business of trying to eat out in England. Is Tuesday really so far from civilisation? And so I end up at the George, the old stager of a hotel in the centre of town, which I was trying to avoid because, well, it's an old stager.
Quickly I feel guilty. Venerable it may be; aged it ain't. The softly upholstered bar has that easy buzz of the best market-town inn, where people hole up against the night. The staff are cheery, and at the bottom of a list of bar snacks they offer their own pork scratchings. So now I love the George. I am that easy.
The food is, for the most part, smart and thoughtful without being self-conscious, the mains better than the starters, though they, too, have flashes of loveliness: more local scallops, seared, with tiny cubes of chorizo, for example. A potato and onion galette is a little greasy, but the slices of local Romney Marsh smoked lamb loin served with it are very good. The (unsmoked) lamb gets an even better showing in a main, where it arrives with slippery and salty things: a good butternut squash purée and a caponata of long-roasted aubergine.
Roasted pork comes, in what sounds like a delicious cultural non sequitur, with "Israeli couscous", pearls of a wheat-based pasta which is pleasingly bland so that it becomes a vehicle for a dressing of red onions and piquillo peppers. A big tranche of halibut arrives with its own body weight in puy lentils spiked with salsa verde.
Desserts have highs and lows. A chocolate marquise is just huge slabs of something dense and dark and unfinishable. A chocolate panna cotta has about it the texture of Angel Delight, says a companion, and they mean it admiringly. A donut-shaped rum baba has been drenched in syrup flavoured with mandarin. An observation: done like this, mandarin smells like unwashed human sweat. We reached this conclusion having not drunk more than a couple of glasses each from a list that offers passable things from Bordeaux at £25 a bottle.
The same menu is available in the hotel restaurant, where acres of crisp white linen stretch unto the horizon. I suspect we would not have enjoyed our meal so much in there. But we very much did in the bar. Certainly it's the answer to a pointed question: where the hell do you eat in Rye on a weekday in the middle of winter?
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
