Sportsman

Stephen Harris and his brother Phil opened the Sportsman in its current form in November 1999. A ramshackle pub on the Kent coast a couple of miles from Whitstable, the pub stands on its own in the shadow of a raised earthwork of flood defences for the beach on the other side of the earthwork. Initially, the pub struggled to attract the locals, who were used to microwaved dishes and were not taken by Stephen Harris’s much more ambitious cooking based on local ingredients. Stephen Harris, a former history teacher who was briefly in a punk band, is a self-taught chef. He avidly read the cookbooks of Nico Ladenis and Pierre Koffmann, dined in their restaurants and travelled in Europe to broaden his culinary education.

The philosophy of the kitchen has been to focus on extremely local produce, curing its own ham, churning its own butter and collecting salt from the beach. Many of the fruit and vegetables used here are grown in the pub allotment. Word gradually spread about the intriguing food, and finally Michelin awarded a star in 2008 that The Sportsman has held ever since. These days Dan Flavell is head chef, who has worked here since the opening, though Stephen Harris was around today and was supervising the kitchen. The tasting menu these days is £80, and there was a shorter midweek menu at £55. If you are travelling from London, the nearest train station is Faversham, followed by a 15-minute taxi journey to the Sportsman from the station.

The wine list had 58 labels and ranged in price from £22 to £295, with a median price of £40 and an average markup to retail price of 1.96 times, which is very low by UK standards. Sample references were Tinpot Hut Pinot Gris 2022 at £32.95 for a bottle that you can find in the high street for £15.60, Museum Real Reserva Tempranillo 2016 at £43.95 compared to its retail price of £30, and San Polo Brunello di Montalcino 2017 at £89.95 for a wine that will set you back £66 in the high street. For those with the means there was Rioja Contino Viña del Olivo 2016 at £99.95 compared to its retail price of £68.40, and Dom Pérignon 2012 at £295 for a wine whose current market value is £215.

We chose the tasting menu for the meal today.  Poached oysters came with pickled cucumbers and avruga caviar (which is actually a product made from herring and does not have fish roe), served in oyster shells. This was a nicely designed dish, the sourness of the vinegar from the pickling working well against the briny oyster and salinity of the avruga (15/20). A couple of further little canapes followed. A cheese biscuit had a little blob of tomato with black olive and had nice flavour. Smoked eel with apple puree on a bed of soda bread crumpet garnished with bronze fennel from the garden worked well, the acidity of the fruit balancing the richness of the eel. A final canape was short rib of beef with cheese, which had deep flavour, and was the best of the canapes (average 15/20). Bread was very good indeed: lovely herb focaccia and a nice crusty sourdough, with unusually good soda bread too. The butter, using the milk of local cows, was rich and creamy and felt very in tune with the local ingredient theme. 

Ham hock terrine with homemade piccalilli was simple but enjoyable, the terrine being fairly coarse in texture but having good flavour while the piccalilli was excellent. British people are used to this condiment coming from a jar, but here it was made from scratch, with chopped cauliflower, shallots, and I think courgette cooked with vinegar, mustard seeds, coriander seeds, mustard powder, cumin turmeric and a little flour before cooling. The end result had an excellent, zingy flavour that lifted the flavour of the ham hock terrine nicely (15/20). This was followed by brill with morels braised in vin jaune sauce. The quite meaty texture of the brill stood up well to the vin jaune sauce, and the earthy flavour of the morels was a pleasing contrast. There were also a few peas grown in the garden here, but for me the sauce was the star (15/20).

Suffolk chicken came with green asparagus and truffle cream sauce. The asparagus was a little overcooked to my taste and had limited flavour when compared to a really top asparagus from somewhere like Vaucluse in France. The chicken was carefully cooked and had very good flavour, but I was really surprised to find that the sauce was flavoured with truffle oil. The latter is almost always made using a chemical called 2,4 dithiapentine to provide the primary aroma. It is rare for a white truffle to be anywhere near a jar of truffle oil, but in the rare cases when it is then it hardly matters, as white truffles lose their flavour quickly once plucked from the ground. The short version is that I don’t think truffle oil has any place in a serious kitchen, and it doesn't seem to me to fit well with the local ingredient philosophy of the kitchen here (14/20). 

A little Old Winchester cheese was offered before a pre-dessert of wildflower panna cotta, which was harmless enough but rather lacking in flavour (13/20). Much better was a very nicely made raspberry souffle, evenly cooked and light and airy with good fruit flavour (16/20). Chocolate macarons as petit fours went well with the pleasant coffee from Monmouth Street, a good supplier.  

The cost for my meal was £165, but this was a group booking and included some wine. If you ordered the midweek lunch menu and shared a modest bottle of wine then you could eat for maybe £90 each. Service was very friendly. I have not been to The Sportsman for several years, and the cooking is less purist about locality than it once was. I was surprised to see farmed Chalk Stream trout (from Hampshire) on the menu, for example. Apparently, the signature slip sole dish is hard for them to source now, which is a shame. Still, the cooking remains good, and certainly worthy of its Michelin star. Also consider the price - £80 for a tasting menu, with a very cheap wine list too, and compare this to the price of a restaurant of a similar standard in London, where £80 might just about get you a main course with a vegetable side dish or two, not a complete menu. The Sportsman helped redefine British cuisine in its own quirky way, and it will be long cherished for that.

Further reviews: 20th Oct 2017 | 18th Aug 2015 | 12th Aug 2014 | 09th May 2012