The Times
Giles Coren enjoyed himself at a new venue billed as “Brighton’s first seafood boil restaurant, a coastal USA thing where lobsters and crabs and prawns and clams are all cooked together and served ‘family style’ with an array of cutting tools, and guests set about them with gusto, wearing gloves and aprons”.
The seafood was fresh, fat, mostly local and perfectly cooked, while the whole experience was, Giles chortled, “fun. They gave us a mallet! So much more useful than a stupid cracker. Deep into your second bottle and smashing a huge crab with a sledgehammer like you’re putting in fence posts is about as much fun as you can have at the seaside with your clothes on. And the smashed-out white meat was terrific with the chilli sauce.”
His only quibble was the name – “Gothic” connoting “black”, “old”, “dusty”, “evil” and “possibly poisonous”: “I want seafood to be bright and pink and squeaky and daytime, as this all was. Not a lifeless, creaking, cobwebby thing of the night.”
Giles Coren - 2025-07-13
