Review: 27 Harbour Street, Broadstairs

Thanet is a lovely corner of Kent. Margate, Broadstairs and Ramsgate are all coastal towns with bags of character and varying degrees of nouveau-hip shops and eateries bubbling up. Stretch the boundary a little and the lovely medieval town of Sandwich makes a great quartet, all within about 20 minutes.

27 Harbour Street lies just on the edge of Broadstair’s little old harbourside and was a welcoming place to tumble into out of a frigid winter’s night. The welcome is friendly and the dark interior with old wood furnishing just added to the cosy. Good looking wine list, seemed very reasonable on the markups.

We got started with some wild mushroom macaroni fritti to snack on. These were proper good. Crispy breadcrumbed cubes filled with a lush macaroni cheese mix humming with wild mushroom flavour. Snacks devoured and wine poured, we ambled through another half dozen small plates (and as an aside: notably more generous small plates than those turned out in most other small plate restaurants).

There was a lovely salad of roasted pear, with nicely charred edges, on a bed of full-flavoured whipped goat cheese and scattered with nutty toasted pumpkin seeds. Then a dish of raw sea bass with proscuitto and a lively apple and chilli puree in the middle. The sea bass and apple worked well, with fragrant ponzu dressing, but I thought the proscuitto was a heavy-handed interloper, both with its chewy texture and heavy saltiness. Next up there were good char-grilled carrots with salsa verde, and a scrumptious piece of blackened hispi cabbage bathed in a truffly emulsion. Lots of cripy onions on top for crunch and black blobs of pickled walnut ketchup for tang. This was very good eating.

The larger plate that came last (okay, or we could call it “main”!) was a good piece of rump, medium-rare, with a really splendid beef fat bearnaise sauce. Mmmm… beef fat bearnaise. Very special. Roast roscoff onion accompanied it. And it came with our final small plate: a beautiful golden-brown brick of Pomme Anna potatoes, crunchy on the outside and lush within, served with the classic Spanish combo of a bravas tomato-chilli sauce and aioli.

We could definitely have finished there, but then we’d have missed out on sticky toffee pudding with a black stout and miso butterscotch sauce. The muddle of bitter-umami flavours in that sauce elevated STP one step above it’s usual childlike post-pub-meal indulgence. Very, very good.

You’d probably look at £35 each for a three course meal at 27 Harbour Street and that’s brilliant value for the sheer loveliness of the food here. The cooking is generous, full-flavoured and with plenty of little inventive hits. You really ought to find an evening to spend here if you’re off visiting the far east corners of Kent!