The outstanding meal of a very good week of eating was at The Sportsman in Seasalter. Seasalter is a name on a map, representing, perhaps, the barest increase in the concentration of farmhouses above the expected random distribution. You get there by taking a train to Whitstable* then winding along a country road for seven miles. Roadside hedges give way to sea wall on your right and fields of sheep on your left for the last couple miles, the duet of grass and broken by beach shacks, which appear in clumps, like mushrooms. The Sportsman itself is a raw white house, cut out against the grey shore, up close, it exudes a genteel rusticity - rickety looking wicker on the patio, a smoker and a grill standing impishly by the front door, and huge windows from the kitchen facing the sea. Inside, old wood and perfect place settings, fat white candles and chalkboard menus, and an hospitable air worthy of the last homely house upon the road.

If I could fly across the Atlantic to eat there on a weekly basis, I would, and the reason I would do so, instead of simply hiring the staff, is that Stephen Harris and his siblings have created a restaurant with real terroir, using barely anything that doesn’t come from within a few miles of the pub. I mean this literally - itsits on a beach, and so the seafood comes from the waters around it, and they make their own salt from the seawater, which they sprinkle on butter which they make from cream from cows which graze just down the road (very good, but not quite as good as the butter at the Fat Duck). The food is simple and direct, occasionally original (a raw oyster with a thick slice of chorizo, fried until crisp), but so perfect you could burst into song. Rhubarb sorbet with pop rocks and burnt cream that’s rich and thick and eggy and textured. Turbot consomme and shellfish from a hundred yards away. Smoked pork and turbot and asparagus in vin jaune sauce. As we ate and admired the photographs on the walls (all shot within a few hundered yards of the pub), running our fingers across the scars in the old oak table, we felt a deep and serene sense of place, a oneness with the salt marsh, rough wind and monochrome horizon.

Please visit, if you can.

*A fishing village distinguished by pebbly beaches and a large number of shellfish, a main street with an old style sweet shop, a perfectly lovely used bookstore or two, a chippy that still fries with lard, and an increasing number of sometimes quite phenomenally bobo stores, which give away the fact that this is rapidly turning into the London version of the Hamptons.

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"Eating in London, 3 of 3" was written on 01 Jun 2009 and filed in General