The Salt Room, 106 King’s Road, Brighton BN1 2FU (01273 929 488). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £80-£130
The train pulls into Brighton at dusk, to a sky the colour of charcoal and a cruel wind rushing up the hill from the sea. The warm glow of cheap noodle shops down Queen’s Road and into West Street gives way to the darkness of the front, where the traffic thunders by and the last smudge of daylight leaks away into the water. It is brutal down here in the depths of winter. The light from within the Salt Room makes it look less like an invitation than a refuge.
I had clocked the restaurant once before on a trip to Brighton, but its location engendered scepticism rather than hunger. It occupies a blocky ground-floor outcrop of the glowering red brick Hilton Metropole, overlooking the famous shingle beach. Such places are rarely rewarding. Dismiss this as snobbery if you like, but in my experience – and boy am I sodden with experience – snobbery is merely the accretion of hopeful expectations, which have remained stubbornly unmet. There are some great restaurants in hotels, but they don’t tend to be attached to chain hotels. These places are the overnight retreats of people who would rather be in their own beds; people who are tired of wondering if anybody ever uses a trouser press; of calculating the shameful mark-up on the contents of the mini bar; of comforting themselves with shut-eyed thoughts of that gorgeous new arrival in accounts.
But the menu at the Salt Room kept dragging me back in. It was not just the smart use of boxed-off areas, designed to draw my eye this way and that: over here for oysters and fruits de mer, over there for singed offerings from the Josper grill. It was the unlikely combination of a basic seaside brasserie proposition and something altogether more ambitious. Eventually, I let hope win out over experience.
I’m pleased I did, because the Salt Room is a restorative: of mood and hope, of faith and plain old appetite. Good things are sometimes found where you least expect them, and this restaurant is a very good thing indeed. Outside it’s all black-painted seaside balustrades; inside it’s bare brick and leather-backed bar stools, wood floors, downlighters and chairs that accommodate a sizeable arse. And extremely assured cooking.
It starts with the bread. If you’re going to charge £3 for bread, you’d better make sure it doesn’t feel like a mugging, and they do, dropping almost half a loaf on the table. Today’s crisp-crusted sourdough is flavoured with nori seaweed, crumbled darkly into the folds. It’s pokey enough by itself. Dredge it through the accompanying bowl of mayonnaise, flavoured with brown crab meat, and suddenly the sea shore is right there at your table. If that’s too much, try the whipped butter with the aniseed kick and sigh of tarragon.
Starters are detailed and clever. Seared scallops come with a plank of sweet, buttery carrot, and a disc of pig’s head, crisped on the surface, soft inside, with a bright acidulated edge that helps it sing of the farmyard. A smooth apple purée brings lubrication. A thick piece of salmon, skin crisped, arrives with slices of raw cauliflower and a quenelle of a mango chutney, sultry with freshly roasted spices. There’s a savoury crumb with a hot, spicy flounce.
Most pleasing of all is the fish soup. A bowl arrives containing a soft, long-cooked octopus tentacle, a piece of seared mackerel, a splodge of bright orange, garlicky rouille, another of coal-black squid ink and leaves of toasted seaweed. The hot fish soup, with a ripe tomato and shellfish base, is poured over the top to meet the ingredients. It becomes so very much more than itself. It’s an awful lot of excitement for £7.50.
Main courses are just as ambitious. Monkfish comes with seaweed dumplings, clams, pickled carrots and red wine; cod is paired with lentils, devilled butter, mussels and fennel. But there is also a blackboard offering whole fish for two. These cost £55, which is a lot of anybody’s money even for a turbot. For that wedge it has to be good. The sea bass, grilled over coals, is more than that. It is a serious size, tale and head hanging shamelessly over either end of the platter. The crisp, blistered skin is seasoned with lemon, salt and pepper and demands to be eaten by itself. The sweet, pearly flesh is bang on.
Cooking a fish of this size over flame and keeping it in one piece really isn’t easy. A word, too, for our waitress, who offers to fillet it, and does so with unflustered precision, slipping the backbone out as if it were an oiled blade from a sheath. Rightly, she offers to leave the head so we can pick at the seared and smoky cheeks. Included in the price is a heap of roasted mussels, with piggy lardons and a leaf fall of kale. In truth it would have fed three. The only thing to bitch about is the chips. They are thick cut and dreary, and just undercooked enough for the bowl to remain unmolested, without us being roused to send them back.
Happily, desserts include something called the Taste of the Pier at £18 for two. This is obviously an exercise in whimsy, which can sometimes be less entertaining than the kitchen might imagine. But this is also a masterclass in technique, which goes far beyond the two sticks of cloud-like candyfloss. There’s a cornet of Mr Whippy-style coconut ice cream. There are icing sugar-dusted misshapen beach pebbles of smooth black truffle, shattered pieces of honeycomb coated in green tea-flavoured white chocolate. Nougat comes spun through with sesame and peanut, and fudge, with the salty-sweet punch of miso. We leave the best till last: a still warm, sugar-dusted doughnut backfilled with a curd of yuzu, that gloriously aromatic Japanese citrus. It is the perfect size, small enough to leave us wistful rather than sickly.
We gave the Salt Room menu a serious and costly shakedown, but there are other ways to eat here, including the lunch and early evening menu at £17.50 for three courses. Or just order a whole fish for three. The wine list is broad and deep with lots of choice by carafe. The Salt Room is that ideal thing, down here on the coast in deepest winter: dinner as defence against the cold and the wind and the storm-tossed sea outside. I must return come summer.
Jay’s news bites
• For more fish soup action head a long way west to Burton Bradstock in Dorset and the Seaside Boarding House. The beautiful white-washed hotel has an equally lovely restaurant, with a menu overseen by Alastair Little. As well as the soup, the fish-heavy offerings include monkfish escabeche with a saffron potato salad, and turbot with shrimp butter (theseasideboardinghouse.com).
• From the ‘life coming full circle’ department: chef, author and raconteur Allegra McEvedy has taken back ownership of the Albertine, the west London wine bar her late mother opened in 1978. Booze will still be the focus, alongside a downstairs lunch menu and a more developed evening offering upstairs (albertinewinebar.co.uk).
• This weekend sees the start of the third annual Mutton Week in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, spearheaded by local butchers Salter & King alongside sheep farmer Jason Gathorne-Hardy. Specials will be on offer in the area and there will be mutton butchery demonstrations and talks (salterandking.co.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
