Review: Embers, Brighton

Cocktails by the fire

Embers is a cooked-on-wood restaurant in the Brighton Lanes. Most fun is sitting up at the counter, so you can watch the chefs do their thing with the flickering orange flames, the coals and ashes. Sizzling fat etc. The menu is small plate style and they’re really doing their utmost to bring you maximum char and full-on flavour with every dish. Boom. Although it’s interesting how often the gas-fired blowtorch comes out to finish off the effect!

Aubergine from the embers first, cooked like a nasu dengaku but without the sticky glaze. Nice charring, squidgy aubergine, and a big whack of powerfully good carrot kimchi on top. This was followed by a nicely pink lamb leg chop, topped with a wild garlic salsa verde and slippery bits of slow roast red pepper. Nice glossy gravy, although it felt a tad out of place on the smoky char-grilled meat. Next up, grilled calves liver, cooked to perfection, with a peppy chimichurri and a powerfully umami-salty crumb all over. Vroom. The grilled skate wing was a bit on the small side; a couple of forkfuls each once the meat was scraped off the bone. Big on flavour though, with a heavy char, and a peppercorn sauce that tasted way deeper and funkier than expected. Hits of caper too.

Ember aubergine

Ember aubergine

Final dish was “bonfire potatoes”, and maybe it’s a bit of a signature cos it was certainly dish of the day. Crispy, crunchy, flavour-packed jacket potato skins with a lush mashed potato loaded back into them, on top of burnt brisket ends muddled up with a sticky-sweet-hot sauce. Some crispy scraps on top for added crunch. Mmmm.

They suggested four dishes each, which is barking mad as we were comfortably full after five-between-two (then again, the size varies quite a bit). We had rock-solid cocktails and a decent glass of wine. But I will say that by the end of five dishes we were flavour overloaded and in need of a rest! It’s quite full on, and that’s from a couple who love big flavours. You’d spend maybe £40 each on food, and that’s probably spot on. I think I could be lured back, maybe…?

Bonfire potatoes

Bonfire potatoes

Review: Furna, Brighton

Furna

Furna

I wonder to what degree my enthusiasm for a menu is guided by the whole experience? There’s absolutely no doubt it has an effect: I don’t have professional tastebuds nor zen-like detachment, so how much I enjoyed the fish dish will be influenced by how much I’m enjoying the whole dining experience. But is the effect extreme enough to disqualify the entire review? If I rave about menu A but I’m decidedly “meh” about menu B, would you really be well advised to pick restaurant A over restaurant B? I hope so. Because after all, we’re all hoping for a good experience and although some luck comes into it, generally the best service and ambiance are as consistent as the best cooking.

Anyway, we had a great meal at the chef’s counter at Furna, and I’d recommend booking those seats if you can. Admittedly it was a quiet lunchtime, so we got to monopolise chef and the team with all our questions about the food and the wine and pretty much anything else. The rest of the dining room is dark tones, stylish and inviting. Short but solid wine list and some great cocktails to start.

Trout

Trout

First up were some jolly splendid snacks, including a scrumptious hash brown fried in pork fat with a curl of smoky coppa on top, and a chunk of braised octopus with the most perfect texture and a punchy, sticky XO glaze with a yeasty foamy hollandaise. Both of these were among those happy “line up a dozen of these, I’ll be in heaven” snacks. The little tearable brioche/milkbread loaf glazed in garlicky butter just got demolished by us, served with creamy cod roe as well as butter.

First starter was a single Jersey royal, skin blackened, on top of a cream sauce spiked with smoked eel and apple. The potato was topped with a generous dollop of pike roe, a beautiful golden roe with a slightly more delicate flavour than caviar and a more sturdy bite. Loved it. Fish was chalk stream trout, a rather salty piece of fish but with a real depth of flavour from the curing. The star of the dish was a beautiful sea buckthorn and habanero sauce, a new combo to me but the fragrant citrus and the fruity heat paired very well. The sauce and the crunchy tempura courgette flower on top went a good way to balancing the salty fish.

Lush lamb

Lush lamb

Main course was my favourite lamb dish from the last few we’ve had (dine out on tasting menus in spring and you basically get to find out how many ways there are of doing lamb!). The lamb was beautifully full-flavoured with extra oomph from its finish under flames, but the extras really made it: a cloudy dollop of whipped curds, a courgette-and-basil puree that absolutely hummed with basic fragrance, some tiny bone marrow cubes and well-charred asparagus and other greens. Oh, and a lollipop of crispy fried lamb sweetbread on the side, dipped in a lush cumin-y sauce. Yum.

We finished with a nice slice of lemon tart on a buckwheat pastry, given zest and pop by charred pieces of various citrus fruits (we even nibbled on Buddha’s finger!). Good petit fours too; I’ll take an Aperol spritz jelly over any number of fruit jellies in future, thank you!

We paid £85 for the menu and £55 for an enjoyable wine pairing, although this was lunch time and I think there’s an extra tenner to pay in the evenings. I thought this was great value for the quality of the menu and the overall experience. I’ll definitely suggest Furna if anyone asks for a good fine dining option in the middle of Brighton!

Great snacks

Great snacks

Review: Robata, Soho

Kimchi rice

Today we fancied an izakaya. There’s a good one called Flesh & Buns towards Covent Garden (review here) but we decided to try somewhere new and widen our options: Robata, named for the coal-fired grills used for cooking yakitori sticks.

The sticks we chose were: lamb belly, Iberico pork, king oyster mushroom, sweetcorn. The lamb belly was well flavoured, but inconsistently grilled with one of the skewered bitterly blackened towards the end. The pork was better, although by contrast perhaps not as charred as it could be. The mushroom was either an old specimen or not well trimmed, because there was some jolly leathery bits that took some solid mastication to get through. The sweetcorn was nicely charred and then coasted in wasabi-pea crumbs. Interesting idea, but I actually don’t think they added to the pleasure of a corn on the cob. Also, I get that the corn was cooked and grilled in advance, but it would still have been a better experience served warmer than room temperature.

Sweetcorn

Sweetcorn

We had karaage chicken as a snack. I liked the gochujang mayo it came with, but the batter on the chicken was deep brown and properly thick, like you’d get on a piece of cod from an adequate fish-n-chip shop, and the chicken inside was… not dry, okay, but hardly succulent. It was fine. The best dish was the side of kimchi rice topped with a fried egg, yummy.

This lot was about £32 each before drinks, but it was also a modest meal – we could have eaten more. I’ll be heading to Flesh & Buns when I want an izakaya, and will be giving Robata a miss.

Skewers

Skewers

Review: Apiary, Brighton

French toast

French toast

Apiary is a smart little bar that looks out of place in the middle of Western Road – it ought to be in a much hipper corner of Brighton. But it’s worth seeking out. We stopped off for drinks on Saturday evening and then breakfast on Sunday, and if I superimpose the two then I reckon I can recommend going there for lunch or dinner too!

It’s honey-themed, of course. They’ve got a long list of various modern expressions of mead, a cocktail list that features honey in many of them (but not all, they’re not, like, obsessive or anything!) and a menu where honey crops up in places too. My French toast breakfast was good, well presented fluffy chunks of toasty-edged brioche with plenty of fruit, fresh figs and crumbled pistachios with a drizzle of honey. The mead flight last night included an absolutely knock-out barrel-aged mead with flavours of smoky oak and dark maple syrup as well as a surprisingly elegant banana-infused mead that had a dry caramel-y taste and would have been a perfect switch-out for a dessert wine with a souffle. Maureen’s cocktail was a Salt Bee; salted mango vodka with fermented chilli honey and lime juice, an exceedingly moorish sip with a gentle warm kick.

The owners of Apiary are beekeepers themselves, so this is literally a hive-to-table restaurant! And being where it is, prices are sensible for Brighton. Short review as we haven’t had a full meal here, but they’re a friendly little place doing something unique and very deserving of a visit next time you’re in Brighton!

Mead flight!

Mead flight!

Review: Ekstedt at the Yard, Whitehall

Ekstedt kitchen

Ekstedt at the Yard is one of those restaurants that has gone all-in, put the gas and electric out to pasture, and claims to cook the entire menu on wood. This is why there is a mighty pizza oven just by the chef’s table, ensuring an extremely cosy evening no matter how many layers you try and strip off. We’re definitely at “peak wood” in restaurants, even though in an adjecent world there’s a lot of evidence gathering that wood-burning stoves are one of the remaining top pollutants in our towns and cities and should probably go the way of the petrol car. What that will mean for open-fire cooking in restaurants I have no idea. Presumably their industrial extractors already take out a lot of the emissions that would otherwise be puffed up a chimney?

Turbot and mussels

Turbot and mussels

Ekstedt is tucked away in the New Scotland Yard hotel, down in an atmospherically dark dining room. It can’t really help that, there are no windows to speak of. Sat at the chef’s table we get a good view into the working kitchen and they made it more of an experience by inviting us in to watch the first starter being cooked using a dramatic, sputtering, red hot dipper of beef fat. Forging oysters! Which were very lovely, the texture still raw inside, the flavour of the fat coating the sturdier outside, and dressed with a cream and herb oil.

The eight course menu had some delights and a couple of duffers, a lot of smoked flavours as you’d hope, but surprisingly no charring or scorching on anything. Perhaps they find it difficult to balance the finicky needs of “fine dining” with the robust cooking needed to char-grill meat or veggies?

Sweetbread

Sweetbread

Little canapes of beef tartare and smoked trout were good, the beef densely flavourful and paired with salsify and a hit of coal oil. Then came the oyster, very good, though the flavour of the cream and herb oil really powered over much of the subtlety of oyster-cooked-with-burning-beef-fat. The little wholemeal flatbread “taco” was a properly Nordic not, with a little fricasse of cauliflower and mushroom flavoured powerfully with juniper. Nice filling, but I found the flatbread a bit dry and worthy.

Very much loved the cuttlefish and pickled mushroom ragout, with noodle-y slivers of thin white cuttlefish laid over it. This was followed by a perfect piece of cloudy white turbot, served with fat, sweet, smokey mussels and a Jerusalem artichoke puree. A very nice fish dish, but another dish where it was hard to see how much the open-wood cooking was contributing. Next up was sweetbread and for me this was a failure. Under-cooked sweetbread is just a gooey, sticky mess of white protein with an unpleasant flavour. Oo-er. I’m sure its what they intended, and I liked the hay smoke flavours that pair very well with sweetbread, and the little crunches of toasted buckwheat seeds, but when four out of six diners leave the majority of a dish, and the other two ate it but didn’t like it at all…?

Cep souffle

Cep souffle

The main course of lamb was fine, with roast fungi, aubergine puree, and little lollipops of lamb belly terrine served off to one side. The lamb itself was neither the most delicate nor the most flavourful that I’ve had recently, and I still somehow felt that all the fire, iron and smoke going on just the other side of the service pass wasn’t really coming to anything on the plate. It was a nice bit of lamb.

Good puddings. Nice little strawberry palate cleanser. Then a truly excellent cep souffle, unabashedly mushroom-y and the wonderful aromatic cep only enhanced by the sweetness of the dish. Woodruff ice cream was a perfect pairing, the funky hay-like foraged flavour working well with the cep. Juicy blueberries gave a slightly acidic balance.

So the menu ended on a strong finish. And we were very well looked after all night by the team, the sommelier in particular spending a lot of time talking over the wines on the wine flight. And of course, this was a family celebration, so everyone had a great time and the food gave us plenty to talk about. But I’m left with an odd question. What’s the point of all the wood and iron and flames in the kitchen, if so much of that primeval pleasure gets polished away by the needs of fine dining?

Ekstedt’s tasting menu was £150 each when we ate at the chef’s table, and it was fine but isn’t going to be one of my best meals of 2025.

Cooking our oysters

Cooking our oysters