Winifred’s Restaurant and Bar, The Courtyard at Source Park, Hastings: review

On March 30, 2025 by The Plate Licked Clean

I wasn’t expecting to be writing about Winifred’s. Not so soon after the popup I enjoyed on its debut weekend last November, anyway: but here we are already, in its new permanent home in White Rock, thanks to the current round of Hastings’ restaurant musical chairs.

Wavey Bar, which hosted that Winifred’s popup, has moved (and rebranded as Albo Bistro) up the road to St Leonard’s, seconds from Heist Market and The Boatyard. The space next door was Patty Guy (from MasterChef winner 2018 Kenny Tutt), but that has moved opposite to pose a double threat by consolidating the burger and Ugly Cluckling fried chicken menus.

In that empty space you will soon find Shiosai Sushi from Andrew Wong which debuted as a popup in Wavey Bar last year. (Very good it was, too.) Throw in the deli counter and pizza by the slice from Italian Corner and you’ve got a clutch of new choices joining Brewing Brothers in this always-interesting space tucked below the seafront.

Got that? Good. Things move quickly around here.

Winifred’s sums itself up as ‘A tiny restaurant in Hastings celebrating British produce.’ It’s just Ben Cumberpatch in the kitchen, with the same sparse equipment, two induction hobs and a small eye-level grill.

‘Tiny’ is right. I’d throw in ‘hearty’ and ‘evocative’ too. You can sit up at the bar and chat as Ben goes about his work, and there is covered seating outside, but this may be the smallest restaurant I know. (Cardiff’s Don Don Yatai might argue the toss, but if you turn up at either in cat-swinging mood you will be disappointed.)

Dishes which impressed first time out have been tweaked- bread is now toasted, and the Marmite butter is yeastier, bigger, bolder.

There’s a classic bacon-wrapped terrine loaded with nuggets of goat, prune and pistachio, a robust mixture with a punchy brown sauce. Its tamarind and dates are an obvious nod to HP and its origins in Ben’s Nottingham birthplace.

‘It was brown sauce or salad cream when I was growing up, that was your lot’, he laughs and it’s Winifred’s to the core: cooking shot through with fond nostalgia for family memories.

A plate of lightly cured stone bass wouldn’t have felt out of place coming from Wavey Bar: Kacper’s gurnard crudo was one of the most impressive I ate last year. The flesh, given a simple cure, is a lovely thing, but the dressing is inspired.

An unapologetically potent smoked chilli oil is rounded out and tempered by cod roe whipped to a silky, creamy finish. It’s the sort of clever combination Ben makes look easy.

There’s one dish I’m looking forward to above all, though.

How was Winifreds? Did you have the dream potato? a local chef messages me a few days later. Of course I did: it was the popup showstopper, and has played on my mind since last November- can it repeat the trick?

If anything, I think it has improved. That cream sauce seems to have more legs, more body, and takes an already beautiful plate of food into the must-order category. This already feels like the dish people will talk about, one Ben will never be able to take off the menu.

Crisped and golden at the edges, faultlessly tender throughout. Drenched in cream and spiked with those tangy little pickled mussels, this feels like an immediate local classic. An essential. A big sigh of carby contentment with your choices, with life. Linger over it. Feel good about yourself, knowing you have ordered well.

Another hefty serving: a dish impossible in this kitchen, but given a helping hand by a neighbour. Rolled hogget breast has had a twenty-four hour brine, then a long slow braise into impeccable tenderness, being sliced into thick rounds and meeting the fierce heat of The Italian Corner’s pizza oven.

It comes on top of a hot mess of pearl barley rich with the meat’s braising stock and a welter of courgettes, onions, garlic and white wine, before being finished with a parsley, English rapeseed oil and wild garlic salsa verde. That white onion purée, brightened with a touch of crème fraiche, sets the seal on a treat of a dish.

Ben talks of another dessert on today- black treacle malt loaf, Pevensey blue cheese, whipped brown butter and chutney- as taking him back to his grandma’s house on a Sunday, eating Cathedral City cheddar and cake.

The memory pull works both ways, though, so B wants brown bread ice cream: she can vividly recall the chunks of slightly caramelised bread in her mother’s version, the recipe from a neighbour who introduced the family to a vegetarian phase- but it’s that dessert which lingers from decades ago.

To me, it’s ‘just’ a very good bowl of ice cream, thick and rich and subtly nutty. For B, the decades fall away to her childhood home. Powerful stuff, this nostalgia.

Winifred’s does lovely things with a disarming lack of formality and an easy charm. It is yet another example of what Hastings does well: character, informality, creativity.

Winifred’s opening and the imminent Shiosai follow hard on Lury’s intriguing British-Sri Lankan tasting menus. Throw in Coquina in St Leonards- and with Bayte and Petersham Nurseries pedigree behind it, you shouldn’t bet against it- and it is clear that eating out in this area is in rude health.

I suppose the real question is, how does this short stretch of the East Sussex coast keep getting it so right?

The Courtyard, White Rock, Hastings TN34 1PF

https://www.winifredsrestaurant.co.uk/

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