The Sportsman sits on the edge of the Swale estuary at Seasalter, a mile outside Whitstable on a road that goes nowhere much beyond it. The building is a pub — has always been a pub — and looks like one: low-ceilinged, slightly battered by the coastal weather, a car park that fills every lunch and dinner with cars from London and beyond. Inside, it is warm and smells of bread that was baked this morning, butter that was made yesterday from cream that came from a farm a few miles away, and wood smoke from the fire that burns through the colder months.
Stephen Harris opened it in 1999. He was thirty-two years old and had no professional chef training. He had read Escoffier, worked briefly in kitchens, grown up in Kent, and had an idea about what a pub on this specific piece of coastline should be able to produce if someone took the surrounding landscape seriously enough. He has been proving that idea correct, in the same building, for twenty-five years.
"I never thought of it as a project or a career decision," he says. "I thought of it as: this place, this coast, this food. The food that comes from here. Salt from the marsh. Shellfish from the estuary. Lamb that grazes on the salt flats. Bread from grain grown a few miles inland. I wanted to see how complete a picture you could make from that radius."
The Completeness of the Picture
The picture at The Sportsman is more complete than almost anywhere else in British food. Harris makes the restaurant's butter — churning it from cream supplied by a single herd, seasoning it with sea salt harvested from the Seasalter marsh immediately outside the door — and has done so for nearly two decades. He cures his own bacon from a local pig. He bakes bread every morning. His tasting menu, which runs to ten or so courses and changes constantly with the season, draws almost entirely on ingredients sourced within walking or short driving distance.
The slip sole in seaweed butter — a dish that has appeared on the menu since almost the beginning — uses flatfish caught in the waters immediately adjacent to the restaurant. The oysters are Whitstable natives. The lamb is from a farm whose animals he can see from the dining room window on a clear day.
"This is not a philosophy I adopted," Harris says. "It is the only way this place makes sense. If I started buying ingredients from Rungis I would be making a restaurant that could be anywhere. What I am trying to make is a restaurant that could only be here."
The Twenty-Five Years
The milestone prompts reflection, though Harris is characteristically understated about it. The Michelin star came in 2008 and has been held without interruption. The restaurant has been named the best in Britain, the best gastropub in the world, a pilgrimage destination by food writers from six continents. None of this has changed what happens in the kitchen on a Tuesday morning, which is: Harris arrives, checks what came in overnight from the fishmonger and the farms, decides what the day's menu will be, and starts cooking.
"The attention has been kind and sometimes bewildering," he says. "I have never quite understood it, because what I do here is very simple. I cook the food that this place produces. I try to do it with as much skill and honesty as I can. The rest of it — the lists, the stars, the critics — is the world's response to that. I am grateful for it but I can't let it change the thing itself."
The team at The Sportsman has remained remarkably stable by the standards of an industry that loses people constantly. Several members of the kitchen and front of house have been there for more than a decade. Harris attributes this partly to the nature of the work — cooking food rooted in a specific place creates a kind of meaning that more anonymous kitchens don't — and partly to the fact that the restaurant's philosophy requires time to understand properly.
"You can't learn this food in six months and take it somewhere else," he says. "The knowledge is in the place. The longer you're here, the more you understand it."
The Sportsman is open for lunch and dinner Thursday through Sunday. The tasting menu is £120 per person.