This year marks the 10th year since opening of The Seahorse. To us it seems like yesterday!
We’re proud that the restaurant has won many awards and remained in the UK’s top 100 in the National Restaurant Awards. Through our travels in Europe we have experienced many great meals in some wonderful restaurants and it’s these experiences that have shaped The Seahorse, in its look and feel. We like to think simply about what we do. Our dining room is a place to gather to enjoy food and conversation, nothing more, and I think it’s this approach that our guests enjoy.
Win a Meal for 4 at The Seahorse
A warm welcome and some good food is what most people are looking for when they go out. It was always a dream of ours to create an institution in Dartmouth, a neighbourhood restaurant that locals loved; many of our guests have become friends and we look forward to their visits to the restaurant. We like noise and
chatter, it’s a great sound when the restaurant is in full swing and we have enjoyed seeing families of several generations dining together and being introduced to the grandchildren of patrons whose children grow and marry.
seahorse dining dartmouth
Guest chef nights were pretty much invented at The Seahorse when my great friend Mark Hix, Mat and I did a few nights in the early days and since then our guests have enjoyed dinners and lunches cooked by many of our friends - Nathan Outlaw, Angela Hartnett, Neil Borthwick, Nieves Barragan, Jose Pizarro, Michael Caines, Henry Harris and of course, Dario Ceccini the world’s most famous butcher from Tuscany. I recall our very first guest lunch when we were honoured to have Joyce Molyneaux join us, we cooked one of her menus and the room was full of guests that had dined with her at the Carved Angel. I took a moment from the kitchen and walked into the room. I can recall filling with emotion as I heard the noise levels and went back to the kitchen and said to Mat, “It sounds like a good restaurant out there, I think it works.”
Since opening, the restaurant has grown with Joe’s Bar and the recent opening of our private dining room “The Cantina”, both of which have been a fantastic success. Whilst small, the buzz of Joe’s Bar is like a little bar you’d stumble upon in the streets of Venice or Barcelona. It can’t be beaten on busy nights and on Fridays we serve cicchetti for customers to enjoy with their wines and spirits. We recognise you have both to innovate and keep traditions so we have our ‘bring your own wines’ on a Wednesday night, steak nights on a Thursday (so we could cook some meat over our beloved charcoal fire!) and perhaps the biggest success is our ‘locals menu’ which is available lunch and dinner until 7pm. It’s been £20 for ten years and we are going to keep it this way; it’s part of us, we want to be a community restaurant accessible not just on high days and holidays.
The 10 year celebrations will go on all year; we have 10 guest events with some wonderful chefs joining us. There will be two celebration Sunday lunches as well and we’ll be cooking our first ever Seahorse menus which include the now legendary scallops dish which is still on the menu today. You can find more information on dates & these events through our newsletter which you can sign up to on our website. We’re refitting our kitchen and closing the dining room from March 5th to 19th. The refit will allow us to expand the menu and the way we cook, so expect more seafood cooked over fire and on the plancha and more fresh pastas. There will be so much more for our guests to enjoy whilst still retaining our local seafood which is at the heart of what we do.
Running a restaurant is not easy as it requires daily dedication and focus, especially when working in such close quarters and on a public stage but we have managed to create quite a family and we have seen some lovely people pass through. Perhaps one of our proudest achievements has been to see Jake, our young apprentice when we opened, take over the role of head chef and then see the younger chefs like Matt Redclift who joined us at 18 from college following in his footsteps. I guide the menu with Jake and wait tables on Saturday nights with our brilliant front of house team who run just about everything that happens outside of the kitchen. We aim for warm hospitality and service throughout the team; it’s easy to find yourself with one too many on board in Joe’s Bar after chatting to any one of them in the bar!
We are looking forward to another great year in Dartmouth. We are immensely proud to be part of this wonderful town - also the birthplace of Rockfish, our sister restaurant, which still serves the same great seafood but in a different way. It fills the gap between the good old traditional chippy and the places like The Seahorse; it’s seafood for everyone.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has supported us over the last 10 years, customers to us are the most important element of any restaurant. Without them, nothing can happen and we look forward to welcoming everyone to the Seahorse in this wonderful 10th year.
First published in By The Dart magazine March 2018
