The Sportsman

Stephen Harris, previously a financial consultant with no formal culinary training, took over The Sportsman in Seasalter with his brother Phil in November 1999. He taught himself to cook largely by eating dishes elsewhere and attempting to recreate them at home, building a menu around ingredients gathered close to the pub itself, including salt evaporated from local seawater, vegetables from the kitchen garden and oysters from Whitstable beds a few miles along the coast. The pub earned a Michelin star in 2008 and has kept it since, drawing visiting chefs from well beyond Kent while retaining the plain wooden tables and unfussy service of an ordinary village pub. Harris still cooks most services himself alongside a small kitchen team, and the dining room seats only a modest number of covers at a time.