St Clement's

Nick Hales spent sixteen years cooking in London, running the kitchen at L'Odéon, working alongside Bruno Loubet at the Four Seasons and later opening the private members' club Century, before a visit to St Leonards on Sea showed him day boats landing their catch on the shingle. He opened St Clement's on Mercatoria to build a menu around that catch, changing daily according to what has come ashore, and makes soda bread, puddings and ice cream on the premises rather than buying any of it in. The restaurant earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand and a place in the Good Food Guide, recognition that followed a menu built on unfussy technique rather than display. Local butchers, farms and non-intensive dairies supply the rest of the kitchen, keeping the wider menu as locally rooted as the fish itself.