The Urchin, 15-17 Belfast Street, Hove BN3 3YS (01273 241 881). Small dishes £7-£10.50. Large dishes £10-£14. Dessert £4. Wines from £18
Once upon a time the Urchin was called the Bell and before that, the Belfast after its street address in Hove, which is definitely not Brighton, even if you can’t see the join. You only need look at the architecture to see the role it once played: it’s a block of a building on a corner site, surrounded by terraces of simple, flat-fronted houses. This pub was once the classic extension to the domestic; the living space outside the home in which everybody congregated. If you lived here and your dad went AWOL, it was probably worth looking in the Bell first.
These past three years the Urchin has been a seafood gastropub, selling shelves of craft beers and things that once swam. Some will find this infuriating. I’ve been doing this so-called job for almost two decades and in all that time the narrative has been a constant: how dare they take our pubs? The identity of “they” being unclear, but almost certainly including me. How dare they bring in interior designers and menus of edible food that didn’t arrive frozen in the back of a truck? How dare they sell beers with names that only people who are too young to remember Margaret Thatcher as prime minister would find funny? Young people. With their beards and rising hormone levels.
Smell my sarcasm. And yet I do get it. Restaurants, and eating out in general, have become part of a culture war. I can argue that the very people who criticise those of us who spend sizable sums on dinner will not think twice about spending the same dosh on tickets to a football game. That only emphasises the gulf. And don’t even think about arguing that old pubs have died because of economic imperatives or supply and demand. People like me, making those arguments, are still so far up ourselves we can see daylight through our open, greedy, sauce-slicked mouths. It’s about tribes (though yes, of course, the Venn diagram overlaps; you can both like eating out and buying tickets to Premiership matches). There is a tribe that will hate the idea of the Urchin.
I’m not a member of that tribe. Partly this is because I was never interested in pub culture or, to be more exact, pre-1990s pub culture. Rip out the sticky carpets, sand down the floorboards and scribble up a blackboard menu full of sexy buzz words like “’nduja” and “salsify” and I’m there, dribbling. But please don’t ask me to nurse a pint. It’s not part of my skill set, this whole pint-nursing business. Mine’s a rosé and I won’t apologise for it, even as that culture war rages around me. I’m also not part of the tribe, because a) I love seafood and b) the Urchin does its thing with gusto.
The cooking, like its decor, is rough-hewn and self-consciously so. Filament lightbulbs dangle from hefty ropes of the sort that boats tie up with. None of those ropes have ever seen a boat. The front room has high counters for eating at and in the back room, a few sea-green leather banquettes. There is a short paper menu, supplemented by a changing blackboard menu. The food walks a jagged line between standard British coastal seafood cookery – oysters, potted crab – and something with its eye fixed firmly on southeast Asia.
This can lead to what looks like repetition but might just be regarded as experimentation by the kitchen. The main menu offers salt-and-pepper squid, because it’s become a British classic. Very good it is, too: crisp, greaseless, punchy on the seasoning without being overwhelming. There are tentacles as there must always be. The blackboard offers squid karaage, the Japanese preparation usually involving chicken thigh which is first marinated in soy, garlic and mirin before being dredged in cornflour and deep fried. Chicken is easy to marinate; squid less so. It’s the wipe-clean kitchen surface of food. Everything slides off it. And yet somehow it works. The squid is darker, more savoury, more intense.
A similar duplication comes with the offer of both kung pao or Malaysian prawns. With both you get a serious portion of meaty crevettes in deep wells of thick sauce for £14. They are served in handsome, beaten copper-coloured bowls, with domed lids which double as receptacles for the emptied shells. I think it’s meant to be an either/or choice, rather than a “both please” situation. The kung pao prawns in a strident sweet-sour concoction are fine, but the Malaysian prawns, in a deep curry-spiced version with a ballast of soft nutty lentils at the bottom, are all swoon and ahh. When we have worked our way through the seafood bit of the dish, we take to dredging our perfectly crisp chips through the remaining sauce. Lo, we have done to chips with curry sauce what has already been done to the pub itself. We have upgraded it, and given it a glossy finish, which some might find equally irritating. Shup up. I’m eating.
For £8 there is a heap of clams in a forceful broth of tomato and chorizo, with the sweet, briny kick from the liquor the molluscs release as they open. Mussels the colour of tangerines come in a beer broth with chunks of bacon and strands of crisped onions. There are crab cakes spiced with fresh chilli which are heavy on the meat. A jar of potted crab is a little underseasoned, but still disappears quickly enough. The only misstep is the one dessert, a vanilla panna cotta with a blackberry compote, it has been made with so much gelatine, you could scoop it out and play squash with it. Our spoon bounces off the surface. Their beer selection, arranged on a set of shelves next to the bar, complete with brown labels for inspection, is a fine thing. The labels carry legends like “Wild Beer Epic Saison”, “Crate Citra Sour” and “Burning Sky” as if it’s a game of word dissociation. They also make their own beer, Larrikin, on site.
I do love a sub-culture, but it’s also worth knowing they have a well-priced wine list. They have an outside terrace, and you could come here and nurse that pint. Despite appearances it really is still a pub. But if you didn’t have the Malaysian prawns, with a side of chips, you’d be missing out. Just whisper the words “chips with curry sauce” to yourself.
News bites
The Old Passage is an inn on the banks of the River Severn specialising in seafood cookery. Go there for fritto misto or a classic fish soup, followed by lemon sole with brown butter and Jersey royals, or a whole lobster from their own seawater tank. The £65-a-head fruits de mer includes lobster, crab, oysters and a selection of prawns many and various (theoldpassage.com).
In the summer I wrote positively about Tozi in London’s Victoria, though I did note the hard acoustics. A couple of months before I had written about a company called Tile Acoustics which was installing noise-reducing panels in restaurants. Tozi has now employed Tile Acoustics to deal with their sound issues. I love it when two stories come together.
It’s a restaurant merry-go-round in Manchester. Following the news that chef Aiden Byrne had left 20 Stories, he’s now returning to the recently closed Manchester House, which was where he was when he was hired by 20 Stories. I know it’s confusing, but do try to keep up.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
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