The Hampton in Brighton has been causing a stir in the seaside city for a while – but it wasn’t always that way.
Manager Evie told me that the pub was once a “proper old boozer” with a “really bad rep”.
It was getting “one star, two star reviews”, she said. However, earlier this year it earned the title of Brighton’s best pub, according to Timeout.
So what changed? I went to find out. Set a few streets back from the seafront, The Hampton appears like any other well-furnished pub in the stylish city.
Smart black paint, punctuated with red accents and gold lettering; it looks good, but it doesn’t do justice to what I found inside.
Real wooden floors, quirky furniture and an eclectic mix of artisan beers makes for an appetising combination.
Like many of the pubs in Brighton, expect to pay London prices for your beer. I opted for a 4.5 percent real ale for £4.90 – as far as I could see it was the only pint on offer for less than a fiver.
Pint prices aside, there’s really not much to moan about when it comes to The Hampton. I sunk my beer in a well-kept garden, complete with funky artwork before ordering something to eat. That’s when the experience really came alive.
Normally, a curry on the way home from the pub goes down a treat. But at The Hampton, there’s an Indian chef waiting upstairs to satisfy your hankering for a hit of spice after a couple of pints.
The chef in question is Sabu Joseph, 50, from Kerala in the south of India. He told me that he wanted to bring the taste of his home state to punters at The Hampton – something he’s been doing since 2018.
Sabu, who moved to the UK in 2008 via Dubai, told me his culinary exploits are nothing out of the ordinary: He said: “It’s nothing special for me, but I’m trying to make it have good flavour. Whatever the food is… it has to be what I used to eat with my mum or what I used to eat in my local village. That’s what I want to recreate here, that’s what I’m doing here.”
Whether or not Sabu thinks his cooking is out of the ordinary is one thing. But as a curry house connoisseur with a penchant for the pub, I can say quite safely that what he served up was one of the best curries I’ve ever had, let alone the best curry I’ve ever had in a pub.
Evie knows that her chef is the key to The Hampton’s revival. The output from his upstairs kitchen, an independent business in its own right called Easy Tiger, sees punters come in from far and wide.
“It’s authentic street food… something you wouldn’t expect to see in a pub”, she said. “A lot of people actually think we’re a restaurant… because our food, people are obsessed with it, people will travel for our food.
“People get here and they’re like ‘oh, there’s a really nice pub but it’s got banging food’.”
The pub has even got its own Indian twist on the traditional Sunday pub lunch.
Evie explained: “We also, instead of doing a roast dinner which every pub does in Brighton… we have the Tiger Pit. So it’s a barbecue on the roof, and he [Sabu] has a select menu, a reduced regular menu, and then he buys a whole salmon or a sea bream and he’ll cook it up there. So it’s even better on Sundays.”