Orchard Road, The Sea Dog, Hastings: review
On March 31, 2024 by The Plate Licked Clean‘Please allow me to introduce myself/I’m a man of wealth and taste…’ preens Mick Jagger as the Orchard Road table fills with bowls and bamboo steamers.
Well, he’s half right, I think as I congratulate myself on coming here for the third time in as many weeks. Clearly, I’m in need of some restraint: but even on a menu busy with some very good things indeed, it’s the Singaporean cereal prawns which have been irresistible each time.
Plump, sweet, and cooked as close to perfectly as I’ve ever known. Prawns as they should be, but so rarely are: but it’s the crisp, finely grained batter which hooks you. The bed of toasted scraps, too: don’t waste them. Little bursts of stealth heat lurk among the salty-sweet, golden crumb, anchored with the aromatic citrus of fried curry leaves. You’ll want to clean the bowl.
‘Welcome To Hastings’ reads The Seadog’s mural as you cross from the train station towards the outskirts of the shopping precinct. Orchard Road, though, takes its cues from a very different direction. Named after Singapore’s upmarket retail district, this pub kitchen residency is where chef Rob Hills pays homage to his late mother and the stories of her south-east Asian childhood she raised him on.
After she died, he started to travel widely in the area. Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia: Rob made it his mission to explore hawker centres and kopitiams to find and learn those dishes he grew up hearing about. To bring south east Asia to south east England.
Instantly, that chimes with me: you’d have to have a swinging brick for a heart to be unmoved by that. And perhaps, when you grow up eating very differently to your peers, and hearing stories of distant kitchens, it resonates even more powerfully. When your everyday is two-fingers-thick wedges of tortilla and the scaldingly hot croquetas you are too impatient to let cool, or when Saturdays mean huge pots of lentejas with their fat, fudgy cloves of garlic, perhaps your feel for food as identity is heightened. Perhaps.
In early 2024, after a period of supper clubs and private chef dinners, Orchard Road found a home here at The Seadog, where Welsh and English rugby shirts hang alongside the Irish tricolour, there’s a dog bowl on floor and guest beers are chalked up on the board near a fridge full of cans from Wiper and True, Cloudwater, Gravity Well and local CIC The Hastings Project.
The menu changes often, but there are ever-presents. Those cereal prawns, for one, which come via the inexpensive Chinese zi char (‘cook-fry’) fast food menus of Singaporean kopitiams. Dredged through egg and cornflour, fried in butter, and cooked with curry leaves and a homemade chilli crisp before being added to a blitzed cereal mix (in Singapore, a powdered instant cereal drink is used but it proved impossible to find here: after rounds of taste testing, cornflakes won) with milk powder, salt and sugar, they are nothing short of remarkable.
For days after my first visit, they play on my mind in every good way. Perhaps it’ll be a risk to reorder them- what if they’re not quite as good this time?
I prepare myself for disappointment. It never comes. Of course it doesn’t. What a thing this is. Less than eight pounds’ worth of sheer joy: bewilderingly good, and an immediate contender for one of those ‘Best of 2024’ lists I’ll probably never end up doing, even though it’s the kind of dish you think of as you trudge back to the car on those long dark evenings.
Another menu fixture: rendang, with some meat retaining their bite while others slump into the sauce. It’s memorable stuff, densely flavoured and thick with beef chuck, slow-cooked, so that some has started to slump into the rich sauce. It’s the kind of cooking which isn’t showy- Orchard Road’s affordable inspiration hasn’t been forgotten- but teamed with a spicy, funky sambal, it will make you wonder why so many examples disappoint by comparison.
The gua bao, made here daily, impress: the mushroom version darkly sticky and meaty, the fried chicken riffing on the popularity of these buns across south east Asia in a wilfully eclectic combination. Try a poky slaw with Szechuan spicing, Taiwanese-style fried chicken, and a Malaysian-accented sauce, and tell me any of that could ever be a bad idea.
It’s a menu which hits hard. Everywhere you look, there’s something to love. Rolled chicken thighs, irreproachably tender, are wrapped in pandan leaves and served with an insistent smoky-sweet chilli sauce. Gyoza, their delicate little wrappers taut against their filling of subtly-seasoned pork and Chinese cabbage, come with a punchy soy and black vinegar dip. Make room for hulking cauliflower ‘wings’, whether sticky Malaysian or smoky-sweet Korean barbecue. Have both.
I’d happily drink a bowl of this gravy through a straw, let alone go to town with the accompanying roti canai. And if they are less extravagantly flaky and layered than the very best you’ll find, they make good company for the headily hot and tangy sauce.
Sweet potato panang curry divides opinion.
‘This is superb’, Becky says between mouthfuls. ‘It’s everything I want right now’. Sure, it’s excellent- strikingly aromatic, hot and sour- but that stubborn, hardwired carnivore in me wonders if it would be even better with bits of animal in it. Duck? Maybe.
For balance, she disagrees- she thinks it’s brilliant as is, and it’s hard to argue with a woman who has had the spankingly good sense to choose to have lunch with me. Either way, this is remarkable stuff: and the most enjoyable curry I’ve had this year to date.
Rob Hills’ cooking is some of the most impressive and memorable south east Asian food I have ever tasted in the UK. To find it in a town centre pub would seem unlikely: yet this project is inspired by that most profound of bonds, and it shows. It’s unmistakable: it is shot through with memories and love and no small amount of skill. What Orchard Road does is irresistible: visits to Hastings continue to intrigue and impress. Now, would it be wrong to double up on those prawns next time?
Orchard Road at The Seadog, 32 Station Rd, Hastings TN34 1NJ
Mon-Sat 12-9pm
Sun 12-7pm
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