YARR (Yet Another restaurant Recommendation)

Sunday found myself and my dining partner, Penjamin¹, (like I have different partners for different occurrences) in Camber Sands, a location not exactly overflowing with choice eateries. Oh, there's plenty of fish, chip and heart-attack places and a Pontins holiday camp that no doubt has a fine menu on offer.

There is however one good reason for anyone with taste buds higher than a bottom feeder to go to Camber to eat and that is The Place. I must confess we had been before, some time in the spring but I hadn't written about it here as I was still in a sulk with Blogger for swallowing my earlier posts. Anyway, now that I've grown up come to terms with that, I know feel inclined to write it up.

The Place has got some great reviews, from amongst others, Waitrose magazine, The Observer (several times), The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The New York Post, The Margate WI's Knitting for Fethishists, etc. You can see a whole load of them here (despite the fact that they use spaces in the URL!!! Who designed this website?!).

Generally, anywhere that hyped, I run a mile from². We did however have a personal recommendation this time, from my dining partners Uncle. So that's alright then.

The Place is in essence an updated motel with restaurant, and architecturally still displays some if its former ingloriousness in its outward appearance. Inside though the makeover has been somewhat more successful, if a little formulaic. Simple bleached wood? Tick. Whitewashed walls? Tick again. Contemporary artwork? Tick again again. Chrome bar work with halogen lighting and natural wood tones? Tick, tick, tick. Simple white tableware? Tick... you get the idea, preferably before I get hit for impersonating a clock.

So anyway: the food. Or at least it's philosophy. The Place hits all the right markers for current thinking on food; locally sourced, organic but not to the extreme, sustainable farming and fishing. A menu based on the best seasonal produce and sourced from small, local suppliers. It's how eating should be and a flag with which it is becoming aggressively marketed.

The menu (current one here) changes monthly and though we caught the end of the June menu, the current July menu doesn't look that different, at least from the parts of it I remember. Appetisers of bread and olives (£2) were very good. The selection of breads were in particular good, especially the sourdough, a particular high hobby horse of mine which I must talk about some time. My partner had the soup (£3.95), a pea and mint affair with suitably springy flavours whilst I had a goats cheese souffle with chilli jam on some sort of bruschetta (£5-ish).

We both went for vegetarian mains, of which there are usually two on offer. It is reassuring that the vegetarian options appear to be part of the whole menu and not just an afterthought. They certainly stand up to the rest of the menu and are part of the whole ethos of The Place.

Penjamin had the "poached organic egg on a potato rosti served with nutmeg spinach, hollandaise sauce and a summer leaf salad" (£9.25) whilst I had the "organic Sussex haloumi cheese, red onion, & tomato brochette with spicy cous cous & a summer leaf salad" (£10.75). You can probably see that this is one of those restaurants that wears the names of it's dishes on it's sleeve (or in this case, menu). No beating around the bush with some sort of off-hand description like "stuff on a plate", this is the real McCoy (not to imply that they serve frozen chips).

The egg dish was brought to the table at the perfect point in its cooking as it would have been an easy dish for it to go off the boil and start sliding towards cold clamminess. The haloumi was again well timed. A cheese that can go off to rubberiness once cooked was served with a crisp burnt edge to a soft chewy centre, a feature it held for the duration. The accompanying cous -cous could have coped on it's own almost but certainly held the brochette (a posh kebab) up to standard.

But the real treat (and if fact one of the factors that pushed us into going there) was the side dish of marsh samphire. We'd already spotted it on their seasonable menu on the web site and sure enough, it was still on. No surprise as the season runs from June through September. As you may already know of my thoughts on samphire, I won't wax on again about it here, suffice to say it was cooked well and in such an ample portion, we ended up taking half of it home, something the waitress was happy to sort out. Penjamin even went so far as to ask the kitchen where they obtained it from, which after some confusion about sourcing it from France, resulted in the almost answer of somewhere around the River Rother (don't try saying that too quickly). So, it can be found closer to home than Norfolk...

This was washed down with an Argentinean Libertad Pinot Bianco (£14.95) from the lower reaches of a short but complete wine list. I don't know why wine lists have upper reaches as I can never get that far up them.

We'd gone for a late sitting (2pm is the last for lunch, 9pm for dinner) and consequently didn't slowly rise from the table until almost 4pm, a most civilised time to be finishing lunch I feel as the gap to dinner is now small enough to not be scared of. A bill for some £65 or so including water, coffee and 10% service charge was quite within expectations and certainly good value for the quality of food and atmosphere, the only downside of which, besides the Frank Sinatra CD sticking, was the heat at times. Apparently, opening the windows turns the place into a wind tunnel and the air-conditioning maybe wasn't up to the job (if they had any - it certainly wasn't noticeable in auditory terms). That said, maybe we should have opted for eating on the covered terrace outside, something Penjamin wished for but that I chose unwisely to ignore.

Leaving the car in the car park, it's a short stroll across to the dunes of Camber Sands to walk off the pleasant effects of lunch and admire the kites flying and dogs ear-streaming across the sand.

1. For some reason, restaurant reviewers like to give their dining companions stupid names. I'm sure it's something to do with fiddling accounts and tax returns.

2. Figuratively speaking.