Review: Drunken Lobster, Ventnor

The Isle of Wight needs a bridge. How else am I to get over more regularly for good food? Looks to me that the Solent at its narrowest point is only a bit longer than the Isle of Skye bridge, so it shouldn’t be too hard. Loads more people live on and visit Wight than Skye, after all. And at more than £100 a throw for a return trip, the ferries are just minting it. Or seem to be. I’m sure it’s very expensive keeping a ferry fleet running. Better to just build a bridge, eh? Then it’ll be much easier for us to get over and have dinner at Drunken Lobster or some of the other great food spots popping up on the island.

Drunken Lobster is a bar with a menu of East Asian-inspired small plates and an omakase option of ten small plates ending up with a dessert. Okay, let’s just call it a tasting menu. That’s what we go with, and enjoy it with a couple of cocktails off of their signature menu. The best of these is a raspberry and chilli margarita, full of big fruity flavour and a nice warm hit of spice.

The menu starts with edamame, simple enough but doused in a sweetly nutty sesame sauce that demands sucking off the empty pods. Then there are two beautiful maki rolls, the seaweed gently coated in fine panko and fried but the rice inside still excellently soft and toothsome. One topped with a little smoked eel was lovely, but another topped with a very fine dice of mango, tuna and lime-y ceviche flavours was absolute perfection.

I loved the crisp squares of Lo Bak Go turnip cake, softly brassic on the inside and crispy brown outside. I also loved the filthy bao bun with a nugget of tempura-battered chicken and hot sauce inside. On the other end of the elegance spectrum was a beautiful little prawn Har Gau, the dumpling delicately translucent and full of flavoursome prawn. As a bonus, an unexpectedly generous dish of tempura skate pieces with a fluffy-creamy spring onion and seaweed dip, plenty of pepper on the tempura fish and all amazing. Chef is also a fisherman and goes out on a day boat from Ventnor harbour, ensuring a varied but insanely fresh catch for his menu! Can’t get that (at this price) in London!

Which explains the snow-white brilliance of the piece of steamed sea bass we had next. Simply steamed but I wouldn’t have had it any other way, the puddle of sake and chilli sauce it sat in giving plenty of warm, boozy flavour to the fish. Four slices of beautifully charred charsui Iberico pork rounded out the menu, balanced well by the little heap of courgette ribbons and char-grilled red peppers they sat upon. Very good, but I’d have loved even more of the superb local seafood if I’m honest! Mmm… not forgetting pudding, a lovely richly flavoured chocolate mousse, enriched with miso and then cut with a bit of saltiness from the caramelised half-pecans sitting on top and citrus from the slivers of candied orange peel. Honestly one of my favourite puds in a while.

And this is £55 each before drinks. That would have been good value for this quality of produce, of cooking and of invention even before the last couple of years of steep inflation. Now it’s a wonderful bargain. I hear that this little company (they have a second restaurant in Ventnor and a bar in Cowes) might have just scored a London opening, so I’ll be keeping my eye out and hoping they can carry the formula over the Solent!