Broadstairs’ brand of new-wave retro

Despite its horseshoe shape, Broadstairs’s Viking Bay isn’t quite San Sebastián’s La Concha. The waves are greyer and colder, and unlike in the Spanish city the 1910 funicular isn’t running any more. Instead, the fortress-like Bleak House – where Charles Dickens spent his summers – peers over a bay of blue and yellow beach huts rising up the chalk cliffs, towards the topiarised gardens and pavilions on the clifftop promenade.

But with a gilda pintxo and a chilled Albariño at Bar Ingo, a tiny corner restaurant a few streets back from the seafront, we could just about be in the Basque country. Behind the steamed-up windows, all 20 seats are taken, and Tomas Eriksson and his talented 21-year-old son Rio are behind the bar – working together like they have been since Rio was 13. While not slavishly Basque or even Spanish, the restaurant is inspired by their shared love of San Sebastián’s culture of low-key hospitality and quality comfort food.

Usually, after the first salty skewer, we’ll order jamon croquettes and unctuous mushrooms with egg yolk and truffle, a decadent take on Spanish mushrooms a la plancha. Mains might involve thin-sliced bavette steak with chimichurri and schnitzel with curry mayo, usually accompanied by generous patatas bravas and followed by a salted chocolate mousse with olive oil. Grace Wilson, Rio’s girlfriend who serves the tables, can just about guess by now. It’s become a happy place, up there with the Sportsman as one of my favourite places to eat in Kent.

Bar Ingo is part of a new wave of tiny, family-run restaurants in Broadstairs that are combining intimacy with big ideas – and bringing new edge to a town that’s tended to draw less hype than nearby Margate, and less broadsheet-facing PR than Whitstable and Deal. Partly, that’s because so much of Broadstairs is stubbornly change-resistant: the pastel pink Morelli’s, which has been slinging gelato sundaes since 1932; the tiny, indie-leaning Palace Cinema on Harbour Street, which doubled as a puppet theatre in the 1920s; the Lillyputt Minigolf course that serves tea cakes amid the Pleasantville topiary and white clapboard windmills.

And yet. “The idea that Broadstairs is a place to retire to is unfair,” says Eriksson, who opened Bar Ingo after running two popular Margate restaurants, New Street Bistro and the much larger Waverley House, which ultimately struggled financially. “It’s 100% having a moment, with a younger crowd, and there’s a real village feel that you don’t get in Margate. Opening here has been such a pleasant surprise.”

As a Margate resident myself, I’ve increasingly found myself heading this way for folk nights at the flint-stone Tartar Frigate pub by the harbour, or drinks at the more IPA-centric Sonder, whose owner Mitch Swift also runs the fabulous Bottleneck wine shop a few doors down. In the summer, we cycle here for iced lattes by the beach at the LA-ish Funicular on Viking Bay and post-dog walk açaí bowls and flat whites at the Namaka beach hut on the quieter Stone Bay, to the north.

But mainly, we come here to eat. And while this is also a town of timeworn classics such as the Kebbells Seafood restaurant or tapas and sherry joint Albariño, newer places are changing things up. At Fifteen Square Metres, in the pink-walled space formerly occupied by the Michelin-starred Stark, the quietly ambitious small plates are cooked by Tony Rodd, a former MasterChef finalist who wears John Lennon glasses and has a Dalí-esque handlebar moustache.

He and his wife Becky – headscarf, tattoos, similarly chatty – spent five years running the larger Copper & Ink in Blackheath, and there’s a tangible sense that they’re letting loose and having fun with their six tables and dinky open kitchen. Tony takes inspiration from all over. The latest gluten-free seasonal menu features tender-moreish chicken karaage and Jamaican ginger cake, but also veers Indian in dishes like curried scallops with scallop roe masala, and roasted pumpkin with spinach bhaji.

“In Blackheath, it felt like the high street was getting quieter,” says Tony of their 2024 move to Thanet (the area includes Margate and Ramsgate), initially to help open the Pomus restaurant in Margate. “Here, it feels like there’s hope and excitement.” On Broadstairs itself, where the couple live, Becky adds: “It is a bit older than Margate, but it’s cooler than people think, with very few chains and a really supportive local community.”

At the other end of Oscar Road, Aster is a new vegan restaurant with just eight seats and two nightly sittings, run by Ramsgate-born chef Luke Crittenden, whose brother Ben used to run Stark. Formerly Polpetto’s head chef, Luke’s last venture was running Foxglove, an unlikely love letter to veganism and foraged ingredients in Barmouth, on Wales’s Cardigan Bay. Here, he serves intricately plated and delicious five-course set menus plus snacks, featuring foams, shavings and esoteric ingredients: Quaver-like nettle puffs or tiny balls of tonburi, “land caviar” made from cypress seeds.

Crittenden serves as he cooks in the tiny space, with its superhero illustrations that will be familiar to Stark diners (Ben owns the lease here, and helped Luke with the fit-out). He says he wants the restaurant to feel like you’re going round to his for dinner – and on our first visit, we hear large chunks of his life story and end up with his 11-year-old rescue chihuahua Sparky sprawled on my partner’s lap, giving come-hither side eye. “I struggle not to say what I think,” says Crittenden. “I just come out with what people call ‘Luke-isms.’”

Even more established Broadstairs haunts are generating new ideas. At Twenty Seven Harbour Street, a classic small plates restaurant on the steepest, prettiest street in town, the kitchen is now helmed by Ben Wood, formerly head chef at Soho’s Michelin-starred Barrafina. The next-door space, owned by the same team, is now the Txoko Bar – continuing the local San Sebastián love-in with its pintxos-like pork belly and scallop skewers, as well as Venetian-style sirloin and celeriac cicchetti open sandwiches.

Third-wave coffee shops now outnumber tea houses – Forts, Giant Coffee and the Staple Stores bakery have branches around Thanet – though the likes of Havisham and Cratchit at Bleak House still fly the bunting for shameless Broadstairs Dickensiana. One of the local originals, Smiths, opened Smiths Townhouse in a listed brick building this autumn, with six dark-walled mod-Georgian rooms above a coffee shop that does serious breakfasts and New York-style bagels. They’ve added a reformer Pilates studio, with another wellness space earmarked for breathwork sessions. “A bit woo-woo, maybe,” says co-owner Emma Smith, who grew up in nearby Ramsgate, as she shows me around. “But then this is the new Broadstairs.”

Really, though, the new Broadstairs is about the stuff that’s always been good: little independent ventures in timeworn spaces, doing things well. At Bar Ingo, the San Sebastián references are less important than the basics. “We want everyone to feel welcome when they walk in,” says Eriksson. “And we want them to walk away happy, warm – and full.”