Hantverk & Found, 18 King Street, Margate CT9 1DA (01843 280 454). Meal for two including drinks and service: £60-£80
A bright Sunday morning in late summer and along King Street in Margate the pavements are stacked with tattered fragments of my late parents’ lives. There are old suitcases, and the kind of wooden chairs I would have sat upon in a doctor’s waiting room when I was six and had earache. There are transfer-printed tea sets, and walnut sideboards with sliding glass doors that make me shudder.
They remind me of overheated afternoons in my grandmother’s council flat in Paddington, heavy with wordless recrimination and the tang of overstewed tea. The older generation are meant to be adored simply for having not died, but my grandmother was a nasty piece of work, manipulative and bitter. Here, now, is what could be the contents of her living room, repurposed, depending on your point of view, as retro furnishing, vintage, kitsch or just plain overpriced junk.
Excuse the jaundiced eye. Yes, there are objects in the cluttered junk shops along King Street that trouble me. But I also see glories from its kiss-me-quick seaside past: old neon lights and various bits of fairground gilding; pinball tables, beaten-out enamelled metal signage and faux ships’ figureheads in garish colours which turn out to be not chipped plaster, but aged polystyrene. In the process of moving forward to the new, the old Margate is being sold off.
I last reviewed here in 2005 when an unknown chef had put his name above the door of his ambitious restaurant and instituted a “no jeans” policy. The Turner Contemporary, a major art gallery, had announced it would be opening here, and the chef had attempted to get in early on the opportunity. But the Turner didn’t open until 2011, by which time he had long gone. Now, though, the opportunity, like the money, has properly arrived. Buildings are being bought up by people priced out of London who want to furnish their renovated Georgian villas with those garish offcuts from the crumbling promenade, for reasons of irony or bad taste, or both.
It was inevitable. Hardcore naysayers will sneer at gentrification of this sort. They will argue that the impact is patchy and, of course, they’re right; go three streets back from the front and the old, crumbling Margate with its endemic problems of social exclusion is still there. (The marvellous jazz singer, Liane Carroll, describes her forever up-and-coming home town of Hastings as still being “a big drug town with a small fishing problem”.) But good things come with gentrification, too, including a literary festival: the brilliantly named Margate Bookie, now in its second year, with a distinct community focus. This year it gave away 700 children’s books. If gentrification means books being given to kids who wouldn’t otherwise get them, only the professionally angry could sneer.
It also means the arrival of places such as Hantverk & Found, a tiny cupboard of a fish restaurant, half tiled in the sea green of a Victorian public convenience. Here, you are encouraged to sit elbow to elbow, or nose to armpit. There are 10 seats up front, plus a few in the garden, and a couple of people in the kitchen knocking out idiosyncratic fish dishes, most of which hit the mark. Hantverk is Swedish for homemade. “Found”, I’m told, references the taking of fish from the waters.
It’s a literal title, and also does a good job of framing the place and its quiet ambition. Yes, you can have rock oysters plainly served. But they also come dressed, with the crunch and kick of jalapeño and pickled cucumber, or with yuzu and wakame, which makes them taste even more of themselves. Plates of local crab, dressed and piled on a scallop shell, pass us by, as does the red and silver of tomatoes heaped with torn basil leaves and boquerones, looking like a pen-and-wash illustration from a cook book. That kitchen cares how these dishes look.
We have a generous serving of queenie scallops for £8, deep fried in a pleasingly golden panko crumb and served with a salty-sweet bowl of soy, eased by a good splash of mirin. That dipping sauce comes in handy with the dish of the meal, a salad of cool, slippery black rice noodles, piled with crab and chilli. If there is a general fault here, it is a light hand on the seasoning. A dribble of the dipping sauce poured across the noodles makes the whole plateful sing.
Croquettes of house-salted hake are warm balls of flaky fish that crumble apart obligingly, ready for a dredge through the saffron mayonnaise that stays the right side of soapy. The more complex dishes stumble slightly. Borlotti beans in a tomato broth with glistening puddles of basil oil is all the flavours you want on a summer’s day, and the giant clams lend a deep burst of surf and iodine and beach breeze to the liquor. But there’s no point pretending. The meat in those clams bounces and springs like a ball of postmen’s elastic bands. They slip down my gullet with all the grace of a teenager going off to tidy their room. The flavours in a stew of braised squid with the kick of harissa demand the bread it comes with. The squid itself should have stayed in there a little longer to soften up. The deep-fried knot of tentacles on the top is better.
But I forgive Hantverk & Found these small errors, mostly for the sunny, good natured take-us-as-you-find-us feel of the place. The meringue with raspberries and a dollop of thick whipped cream flavoured with rose water is not an exemplar of the art; it’s too crisp and solid all the way to the core. But it’s a surprisingly well-balanced dessert and when all three elements are taken together, the rose becomes a fragrance, rather than the nightmarish smell of my grandmother’s dressing table. Far better are long-roasted apricots used as the base for a crumble topping, alongside a scoop of strident cinnamon ice cream. It is one of those brilliantly nickable ideas.
It is also a reminder that autumn is not far away; that soon cold winds will blow once again along the Margate front. That is when maintaining a fledgling food business here will prove a serious challenge. Hantverk & Found deserves to face that challenge down.
Jay’s news bites
■ GB Pizza, on the front at Margate, started life as a street food operation. Now it has
a permanent home from which it knocks out extremely serviceable hand-made pizzas, with thin, crisp bases and fine, charred crusts, in a format that looks ripe for expansion. Orders – and payment – are taken at the counter. The very basic wines are on tap from a barrel and the bill stays under control (greatbritish pizza.com).
■ Whitstable, to the west of Margate, is to have its own
food festival,
on 15 October. José Pizarro will be staging
a Tapas Takeover at Samphire restaurant in the town, and there will be appearances from the likes of Angela Hartnett, Dan Doherty and, of course, Stephen Harris of the Sportsman at Seasalter (whitlit.co.uk).
■ Sad news. The brilliant earthy Mexican restaurant Santo Remedio in Shoreditch (reviewed here this year), has been forced to close for reasons beyond their control. We hope owners Edson and Natalie Diaz-Fuentes find
a new site soon.
Jay Rayner’s new book, The Ten (Food) Commandments, is out now (£6, Penguin). To order a copy for £5.10, go to bookshop.theguardian.com
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
