Brighton Cuisine

About Brighton Cuisine

By the ULTIMATE Brighton Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Brighton’s food is as vibrant, eccentric and progressive as the city itself. Rather than one traditional dish, it is known for its pioneering vegetarian and vegan restaurants, fresh fish from the Channel and its seaside sweets, all built on Sussex produce and the sparkling wines of the Downs. This is our guide.

Brighton’s food

Brighton’s food scene is as vibrant and progressive as the city. It has no single national dish; instead it is known for meat-free cooking long before it was fashionable, for fish landed on its own coast and for the nostalgic sweets of the British seaside, with the farms, dairies and vineyards of Sussex as its larder.

Plant-based pioneers

Brighton is often called the spiritual home of vegetarian and vegan dining in Britain. Food for Friends, in the Lanes, has served vegetarian food since 1981, and Terre à Terre, on East Street, turns vegetables into inventive, generous sharing plates that win over the most devoted meat-eater. Infinity Foods, the North Laine wholefood co-operative, has its own café. In the Lanes and along the seafront you will find plant-based everything, from sushi and falafel to sausage rolls.

No single dish, but a whole attitude: green, salty, sweet and a little eccentric.

From the sea

Fish is the city’s oldest tradition. Fish and chips is best eaten from the box on the pebbles, keeping one eye on the gulls. For something grander, English’s, on East Street where the Lanes meet the sea, is the classic oyster house; Riddle & Finns has tables in the Lanes and on the beach; and The Salt Room faces the sea on the King’s Road.

Seaside sweets

Brighton rock is the city’s most famous sweet: a hard stick of sugar, often peppermint, with the name of the town running all the way through it. On the pier and along the front you will find it beside fudge and candyfloss.

Sussex pond pudding

The county’s own pudding: a suet crust wrapped round butter, sugar and a whole lemon and steamed for hours, so that when you cut it open a sweet, buttery, lemony “pond” of syrup runs out over the plate.

Sussex cheese and wine

Look out for Brighton Blue, a mellow, semi-soft cow’s milk blue from the High Weald Dairy, and for the goat’s and sheep’s milk cheeses of Golden Cross, made in Sussex since 1989: Golden Cross itself and the creamy, square Flower Marie. To drink, English sparkling wine from the chalk of the South Downs: Ridgeview, near Ditchling, and Rathfinny, near Alfriston, both open their estates to visitors.

Where to taste it

For vegetarian cooking, Terre à Terre and Food for Friends; for seafood, English’s, Riddle & Finns and The Salt Room; and for beef and a Sunday roast cooked over live fire, Kindling on East Street. For the wine, take the train out to the Downs and visit Ridgeview or Rathfinny. All are in this guide.

Our advice: have fish and chips on the beach, one vegetarian dinner in the Lanes, and bring a stick of rock home.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with Brighton Cuisine before you go.