Brighton’s best restaurants

Next week Brighton”s Food Festival takes place and I was asked to profile my fave restaurants and here they are:

Busby & Wild ( Kemptown, modern British)

Danny’s (Hove, Chinese)

English’s (traditional sea food, The Lanes)

Ginger Dog (gastro  pub, Kemptown)

The Salt Room (Metropole Hilton, sea food)

Sam’s (Kemptown, modern British)

64 Degrees (The Lanes, imaginative platter food)

Its quite an eclectic choice. Danny serves plentiful Chinese food for an all in £15 whilst the Plateau de Fruits de Mer  at the Salt Room costs three times that. English’s has the best ambience when eating alfresco next to a jazz quartet; the Salt Room the absence of atmosphere associated with a hotel; Ginger Dog part of the Ginger chain (Ginger Man, Ginger Pig) is gastro pub, good on cuisine short on comfort; Sam’s and Busby & Wild in Kemptown offer a cuisine well above average at sensible prices both of food and wine. 64 Degrees with its inventive platter dishes is an favourite of mine but best enjoyed for a quick lunch as it’s small and noisy and not that comfortable.

The one quality that each shares is excellent service. Your average Brighton waiter or waitress is young, helpful, polite, informally dressed. One of my beefs with the the so-called top London restaurants is you are doing them a favour by being there, not the other way round, and this is reflected in an arrogant service.

A weakness of us critics is that we do not revisit restaurants enough. I only visited Busby & Wild for the worst time last night and was impressed by the cuisine, service and price, less so by the decor and comfort. Except for the Ginger Dog, which I have only visited twice, I am regular at the others and the standard has not lapsed. It’s also interesting to hear the views of those who have visited these restaurants at my recommendation.

Brighton is known for many things bu