Hastings and St Leonards . Restaurants in England . Uncategorized

BAYTE, St Leonards: review

On April 16, 2026 by The Plate Licked Clean

Someone very precious to me has an annual ritual she holds dear. On her late father’s birthday, she books a table at a restaurant he would have enjoyed, opens a bottle of his favourite wine, and celebrates a life done too soon.

It’s not mournful or maudlin. It’s a time for memories which comfort and console, for laughter and stories of a varied and eventful life.

He was at various times a skydiving enthusiast, a computer technician, an English teacher to Italian businessmen in The Dolomites, a keen conservationist, and a parachute instructor. Many knew him as a talented travel and nature photographer, his painted portrait having more than a smack of 1970s George Harrison about it. A long, full moustache, a face framed with long hair, eyes twinkling with mischief and a keen intelligence.

He enjoyed time in the kitchen, and could knock up a mean shepherd’s pie. His special panacea when his daughters were ill, though? A cup of Heinz tomato soup with a spoonful of baked beans and a dollop of HP.

I never met him, which is my loss. And last year, she remembered him at Bayte, because it felt like the right place to raise a glass- and several impeccable Negronis- to a life well lived.

He loved the spirit of Italian cooking and he’d have loved chef Jacob Rosen’s menu, she tells me. So we shared a succession of good things, from taut, tart pickles and fat briny olives to a fillet of bream in a sprightly canarone (lemon-lime hybrid) dressing, and a striking peppercorn sauce with a steak with a deep demure blush. There were lightly crushed new potatoes awash with butter and black pepper; and if that doesn’t speak to you on some visceral level you should probably take a quiet moment to consider your life choices.

And now, a year on and here again- this time for a business lunch- it strikes me afresh that Bayte is a quietly charming place to spend a couple of hours.

It’s in the quiet buzz of the open kitchen in Saturday lunchtime full flow. It’s in the light pouring in through that atrium, and in the service which is the best kind, charming but light on its feet, despite the place being at capacity.

It’s in the signs of Bayte’s former life, too: what once was an antiques market, here on Kings Road, now has an air of being thrown together elegantly into something natural and unforced, whether it’s the parquet floor and the pale pink of the lime-washed walls, the shelves dotted with vintage glassware and ceramics, or the plants in terracotta pots.

I suppose there’s little room to hide with this kind of cooking, where a single bum note could throw off the whole plate. Happily, Bayte has the knack of reassuring you from the off. Later, there will be tiramisu, a tiramisu which is everything you want a tiramisu to be every time you order tiramisu, hoping against hope it won’t prove to be yet another drab tiramisu-shaped letdown.

Today brings a succession of good things. Their Instagram will soon tease an Easter Sunday treat of braised Apennine Mountains lamb with a rich, lemon-spiked sauce of egg and Parmesan, but in the meantime here comes brittle-crusted foccaccia, every bit as good as I remember, and a salad of raw artichokes sliced carpaccio-thin and scattered with pine nuts, mint leaves and more Parmesan. Unfussy but effective.

Sicilian panelle- long, delicately crisp chickpea flour fritters- arrive piping hot and finished with only sage and grated Pecorino, before lightly toasted fingers of fig and walnut bread, draped with the salty punch of anchovies atop little slabs of butter. Simple, but hugely effective: the sort of thing which has you kicking yourself for not thinking of it.

This is cooking which is confident in its lack of flounce. A tranche of chalk stream trout is deftly done, its precision a treat: this is a beautifully judged piece of cooking, the flesh plump and vivid even as the taut, crisp skin crackles like, well, crackling. The plate is dotted with tangily aromatic kumquats and Alexanders , or ‘horse parsley’. Does finding out, later, that it was introduced to Britain by the Romans feel more like a wink than a coincidence? Perhaps.

You’d hope for memorable pasta: you’d be right. Two conversation-interrupting dishes: silky, delicately flavoured pumpkin ravioli teamed with braised radicchio is a subtle dance of sweet and bitter.

A subtle lemon butter-sauced taglioni is a big dollop of comfort speckled with salted fish roe. Both have you tipping your hat to their pasta-making skills.

The brief here is to ‘trust the produce’ and not mess around with it too much. That’s not a surprise, given co-owner Ruby Boglione’s parents founded Petersham Nurseries in Richmond, so a strong emphasis on vegetables and seasonality is at the heart of what happens here. You’ll see the same nearby in sister restaurant Coquina above Hastings Contemporary.

It’s tempting to describe Bayte by saying they put nice things together, nicely. That wouldn’t really do it justice. There’s a love of simplicity here, sure: a disdain for overelaboration, for doing things sustainability and responsibly. But more than that: It’s somewhere with character and that indefinable something which plays on your mind between visits. It’s just that kind of place.

I returned to Bayte as a guest of the restaurant and Coast Collective, and did not see a bill.

https://www.bayte.co.uk/

To book, click here

45-46 Kings Rd, St Leonards, Saint Leonards-on-sea TN37 6DY

Opening times change with the seasons, but at time of writing:

Monday – 10am – 4pm / 6pm – 10pm (Pasta night)
Thursday: 10am – 4pm / 6pm – 10pm
Friday: 10am–4pm / 6pm–11pm
Saturday: 12pm–4pm / 6pm–11pm
Sunday: 12pm–5pm