Wavey Bar, The Courtyard, Hastings: review

Wavey Bar sits opposite Hastings’ True Crime Museum on Hastings seafront. That would be a gift to any writer if it turned out to be a disappointment, an easy but snarky segue into a hatchet job. Happily, this review will be anything but: Wavey Bar is the kind of place which gets under your skin in every good way possible.

Open since 1st of May last year, and nestled within Hastings’ White Rock Baths, Wavey Bar sits under the promenade with a clutch of neighbours. Brewing Brothers, Patty Guy, Bok Shop: just down from the Pier, the sweep of sand and its clutch of boldly-striped beach huts, all are hidden from street level in The Courtyard.

Becky lives nearby and has recommended I come here: she has heard nothing but good things. I’m first in for lunch: chef has just walked with today’s fish, landed just minutes away on Hastings beach.

There’s some seating outside for warmer times- now covered, since our visits- but today is bright and brisk. A chalkboard menu, this tiny room- think ‘your living room’ and then subtract a few square metres- includes a kitchen with just three induction hobs and a tiny grill. It’s an ambitious move, to promise a menu of such interest from such limited space.

The owners, hospitality veterans, moved to Hastings some two and a half years ago. Chef Kacper has eighteen years’ worth of London kitchen experience, and Misha handles everything else a new business needs: service, picking the wine list, baking, marketing, and much more I’m sure.

‘Local and seasonal ingredients’ and ‘finest available produce’ are well-worn tropes. For some it’s mere lip service, but Wavey Bar has its eyes firmly on its surroundings. It’s there in not just what they forage (wild garlic, mushrooms, sea herbs and more), but grass-fed meat from the next street’s butcher Beak & Tail, or oyster mushrooms from Basil’s Fungi Farm and vegetables from Stonelynk Organics, all within a radius of under five miles. Local brewers are represented by Three Legs (Bexhill On Sea), Beak (Lewes) and The Hastings Project, a Community Interest Company raising funds for local charity and community projects.

‘Small plates, big flavours.’ Not so small, though: ‘Two and you’ll be full, for lunch’, Misha warns, and there’s something disarming about the lack of upselling. That menu changes frequently, and leans heavily on vegetables, with meat dishes limited and fish a constant. Local catches mean options will vary: but on recent menus you’d have found a stew of monkfish and winter vegetables with wild garlic; and cuttlefish curried with cauliflower, or dressed with citrus, fennel, chervil and cashews; wild sea bass with citrus butter; or sprats in mustard and fennel sauce.

A Polish vodka ‘Negrosky’ (£9) starts lunch off nicely: then, a coarsely-textured Italian sausage (£12.50), with red onions cooked into jammy sweetness and a dollop of mash so implausibly smooth it could sell you a timeshare in Fallujah or even persuade you to start enjoying the work of Stephen Mulhern.

Served off the bone, pork knuckle (£15) is a sultry slump of flesh bubbling away in earthenware and its own juices, bolstered by the nutty, nubbly sweetness of Jerusalem artichokes. Both are just the thing for one of those bracing January days on the English coast.

I leave a little smitten: there’s that indefinable ‘something’ about Wavey Bar. Becky is soon insisting we go back. Well, who am I to argue? She’d win, anyway. She knows how to distract me.

A sole meat dish delivers the rugged, muscular chew of a ruddy bavette (£20), full of that iron-rich heft, dotted with dainty little silverskin onions with a slick of cooking juices. It is a punchy plate of good things, even better when we are brought sourdough, offered out of simple hospitality, as a sop for that rich, salty liquor. Besides, it’s a lovely touch in these days of £4-plus-for-three-slices.

Gurnard (£14) is beautifully done, a deftly pitched plate gently insistent with fennel and dill. We snaffle the last portion, so the menu changes mid-service: the words are wiped from the board, and flounder with cauliflower coleslaw tempts in its place. (But not its plaice. Yes, one for the Dad Joke fans there.)

Best of all- and quite possibly the most enjoyable thing I’ve eaten this year so far- is gurnard crudo (£13.50) Tart bursts of blood orange citrus flecked with the snap of toasted almonds, perked up with sweet chilli sauce and anchored by mushroom vinegar. The cure on the fish is impeccable, delicate yet meaty, making for a superb plate of food. ‘This is fantastic…I could eat this every day’, says Becky. and that’s quite something from a mistress of understatement. Crudo is a signature here, they tell me, and something only really possible because they can guarantee fish so fresh it virtually dances through the door. It plays on my mind for weeks.

Don’t be surprised if you find yourself sharing a knowing smile with Misha and Kacper: a smile not of arrogance, but justified confidence in what they do here. It’s there in the grin flashing across chef Kacper’s face when you tell him how good his food is, or the people you meet while you’re here: people who just get it.

It’s the kind of place which has you stalking their Instagram and lusting after daily specials. Kluski Śląskie – dimpled Silesian potato dumplings (and I love a dimpled dumpling as much as the next man) in a pumpkin sauce, with wild garlic and Greek yoghurt, or in a lion’s mane mushroom sauce; or a plat du jour skate wing napped with leek and caper butter. Clever combinations, uncluttered by fuss, with flavour and texture to the fore. They make it look easy.

There is something utterly seductive about a menu which delivers what it promises, in a quirky space, while drawing on the best of its immediate area. The inventiveness of what Kacper and Misha do means high definition flavours leaping off the plate and setting up happy home in your hippocampus. Wavey Bar is a fascinating proposition, and a restaurant Hastings can be proud of.

The Courtyard, White Rock, Hastings TN34 1JL

Wed to Sat 12 to 9; Sun 12 to 6

Wavey Bar Instagram