Little East Street is a funny old place, writes Nick Mosley. Despite being slap bang between the visitor-centric Lanes area and the footfall heavy seafront, its easy to see how it can be missed as it doesn’t look like much is happening down there.
Yet I’d heard on the Sussex food and drink grapevine that there was a gem of a restaurant to be found so on a sunny Friday afternoon I dropped by with a colleague for a spot of late lunch.
Med is run by Will Dennard and Jack Southan who’ve been knocking around Brighton with various street food concepts for a while now, however this is the first bricks and mortar restaurant of their own. For those with long memories of the local food scene, the property was once Momma Cherri’s Big House but has gone through various guises since then.
As the name might infer, I was genuinely expecting Mediterranean cuisine which probably led me to have a preconception they’d be serving up modern twists on classic Iberian and Greek tapas and bites. How wrong I was.
The menu has a selection of eight or nine small plates – priced from around £6-10 – and an equal number of more substantial dishes in the £9-16 price bracket. There is a nod to the aforementioned Mediterranean kitchen – padron peppers, Iberico ham – but scanning the offering led me to conclude that the inspiration was more Japan than Jerez.
Having vaguely got our heads around what to order we picked a few plates to share. And – as the dishes arrived on the table – my confusion began again… in a very good way, I hasten to add.
The first plate to land was smashed fresh burrata cheese with bbq nectarine over a fig leaf reduction scattered with mint and cracked black pepper. Take a moment to think what all those ingredients involve: the rich creaminess of the soft Italian-style cheese; the sweet acidity of the nectarine tempered by flame; the herbaceous edge of the fig leaf; the uplifting freshness of mint; the uplifting bite of spicy peppercorn. Impressive cooking without precociousness.
Next up fried chicken with seaweed caramel and pickled watermelon. Now I’m a sucker for Korean-style fried chicken and excuse the pun but there was much licking of fingers on both sides of the table. Wonderfully succulent chicken thigh wrapped in a crispy cornflour batter that knocks the socks off anything similar I’ve eaten in recent months and a steal at £12.
Being rarely lost for words, the crispy mackerel stuffed with ‘Nduja sausage on a bed of pickled cucumber, dill and yoghurt left this diner breathless. I know that many people find mackerel one of those Marmite fish – its too oily, or to flavoursome, or perhaps just has too many fiddly little bones, yada yada – but I love it. To be honest, if I rack my brain I don’t think I’ve ever had it deep-fried in a crumb before but I definitely enjoyed this new-found revelation of it being stuffed – literally to the gill – with spicy Italian sausage. Despite being rich and powerful in itself, the ‘Nduja made the perfect bedfellow to the fish with the curd and cucumber providing a refreshing cut through.
I was reliably informed by our friendly and knowledgeable server that items drop on and off the menu with the seasons so by the time you read this review the mackerel ship may have already sailed. That said, its good to see that seasonal and local ingredients are at the core of the menu despite the evident influence of wider world cuisines. I hasten to add that they are also good on dietaries too so don’t be afraid to ask.
Wine is clearly a passion – after all, what is good food without good wine? The blackboard has an ever rotating choice of low-intervention wines that have been tasted and hand-selected by the team. Pleasingly, there are plenty that you can order by the glass with house wines by the bottle starting at £26.
It takes a confident chef who truly knows his apples from his pears to combine such seemingly disparate culinary styles, flavours and ingredients in individual dishes. This isn’t the haute cuisine that you’ll find in the reverential restaurants of five star hotels; there are no theatrics here – it’s purely fascinatingly flavoursome food and accessibly priced to boot.
While often impressed, I’m rarely surprised by a restaurant’s offering but I left Med feeling like I’d been bashed with a brick – its an exemplary showcase of the creativity vision and cheffing talent that is coming out of Sussex kitchens.
Nick Mosley
Med, 2-3 Little East Street, Brighton BN1 1HT
01273 076 548 • www.medbrighton.co.uk
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