The Flint House, 13 Hanningtons Lane, Brighton BN1 1GS (01273 916333). All dishes £4-£14 (apart from shared steak at £42), desserts £8, wines from £23
Being on trend in the restaurant business isn’t difficult, if you’ve got a few miles on the clock: sniff the air to work out which direction the robata grill smoke is blowing from; flick through a few mags with a grizzled “I can do that” frown. It doesn’t matter that you made your name, say, knocking out a massive raviolo or ripping off the Tatin sisters. Why shouldn’t you now do some ersatz take on somewhere called Asia you don’t know much about outside of a sweaty mini break at the Park Hyatt Tokyo? If that’s what the Swarovski-encrusted iPhone crowd want right now, give it to them. Buy in a few trinkets wholesale from that department store in Nihonbashi, stack the fridge with Cristal and offer up a menu full of miso-smeared cod and dishes that punch you in the face repeatedly with gochujang. Yours for £100 a head.
Being up to date while remaining true to yourself takes more skill. Chef Ben McKellar and his partner Pamela have it. If you haven’t heard of them, it’s because you don’t live in Brighton, where they have run multiple restaurants for the past 21 years. Their places usually have the word “ginger” in the title. It’s Ben’s way of celebrating his once luscious head of russet hair.
I first ate his eminently trustworthy food at the Gingerman inside the mildly formal Drakes Hotel in 2005, and then again in 2008 at a laid-back pub called the Ginger Fox just outside Brighton. Back then, there was a touch of St John to his cooking. I still mutter wistfully about his toast fried in duck fat, laid with horseradish cream and pink folds of roast beef. He might put a mince and onion pie on the menu, but raise the humble to the extravagant, or put a cake of crisped pig’s head alongside slices of fillet. His dishes have always been on the plate what they promise on the menu.
And now here’s the shiny Flint House, in a new development within the city’s Lanes. It’s seemingly unlike any other McKellar outpost before, which may explain the absence of “Ginger” in the title. Upstairs is a dining room and cocktail bar looking out over the Brighton rooftops. Downstairs is dominated by a counter around a fully open kitchen for those who like a bit of nerdy cooking theatre. Thrill to the induction hob with its plancha fitting; perv over the Thermomix and the Pacojet, and the prepped ingredients waiting in their plastic pots for their moment.
It’s all polished surfaces and sharp angles and yes, of course, small plates because everything is right now. They do not take bookings, because this is meant to be a restlessly modern venture that you fall into and out of at speed. So far so modish. Don’t be distracted. Dig through the unstructured menu, its belt unloosened to the last notch. Take in the nods to Spain and Italy. The bit of the menu headed encouragingly “Fried/toast/snacks”, for example, includes ham croquettes with saffron mayo, which feels like a departure from his overtly British agenda. But you’ll still find the big fat McKellar thumbprint: it’s about solid dishes that don’t sacrifice substance for looks. The béchamel in those croquettes isn’t just flavoured with ham; it’s spun through with ribbons of the stuff, as if determined to make its point.
Rock oysters are dressed with an apple and cider-vinegar granita, which makes them brisker than they might already be. We watch a hunk of hispi cabbage being seared on the plancha, until the edges are browned and toffee-like. It comes with a thick, mustardy ravigote sauce below and an autumnal leaf fall of crisped golden onions above. Courgettes are browned and pelted with handfuls of pine nuts and a dollop of confit garlic. A slab of treacly bread is toasted and laid with Ortiz anchovies, the brand name a reassurance. There are rings of lightly pickled onion to send it on its way.
As with Ortiz, so with Hannan, the Northern Irish meat producer, who ages his beef in a room lined with the shimmering pink of Himalayan salt. I’m still to work out exactly what the salt does, but I know the beef is exceptionally good. Like some terrible brand fetishist, I relax when I see his name on a menu. A serious cut of that beef is the most expensive dish here at £42 (for sharing). There’s also his ox cheek, cured to a rosy red and given a ride through a sugar pit, to produce something on more than nodding terms with the very best maple-syrup-sweetened bacon. There’s a toasty onion purée beneath. It needs the heavy grating of nose-slapping horseradish to tip it away from cloying. And then there are rings of hugely flavoured lamb’s belly, from an animal with proper time on the hoof, crisped and perched on a pile of the freshest of peas and dressed with more anchovy.
For dessert there is muscovado sugar crème brûlée. Apparently, there are blackcurrants in there, too, but all I get are the sultry, caramel tones of the brown sugar. I am rarely convinced that there is much point trying to improve upon a classic vanilla crème brûlée, and this one doesn’t change my mind. Far better is a block of chocolate and pistachio parfaits, pushed together and sandwiched within a biscuit shell alongside a cherry cream. It’s both fun and clever. It’s lunchtime and, to the disgust of many reading this, I’m off the booze. Instead I have a glass of their own rhubarb soda, and feel almost virtuous, even though I surrendered my virtue years ago.
My job is to ramble through as much of a menu like this as I can, and I do put my back into it. But sometimes you need to step back from such an experience and work out what it’s for. Over the years the McKellars have run businesses built around the special occasion; restaurants where milestones are marked and devotion is proved. The Flint House is not one of those. It’s about a couple of satisfying dishes, rather than the works. It’s a restaurant that makes its point one dish at a time so that what could seem at first to be just a nice enough lunch or dinner, turns out to have been rather more than that. And every town really could do with a place like that.
News bites
A little more on McKellar’s thatched pub the Ginger Fox, just outside Hurstpierpoint, 15 minutes from Brighton. It may be chocolate box-pretty but the food is bang up to date. Starters might include a rabbit scotch egg with carrot and chipotle remoulade, followed by venison loin with braised celery and a wild mushroom jus. Sunday lunches, which come fully accessorised, are a highlight (thegingerfox.com).
Restaurateur Alan Yau, who launched an entire restaurant sector with Wagamama, before opening Hakkasan and Duck & Rice, has three new ventures in London next year. Two will be in Canary Wharf. Chyna will combine Cantonese and European cookery and boast a ‘water market’ from which customers can choose live seafood. Next to that will be a Japanese place built around counter dining. The third, at Westfield Shopping Centre, will be part of his Turkish street food brand, Yamabahce.
Steve Groves, who won Masterchef: The Professionals a decade ago, has another title. He has been named Craft Guilds National Chef of The Year. Groves, who heads the kitchen at Roux at Parliament Square, won with a menu including red mullet with shellfish mousse and bouillabaisse sauce, and suckling pig with Jerusalem artichokes.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
