People of Lewes: What the hell is wrong with you? You seem completely incapable of supporting decent independent restaurants, which makes it hard on us posh buggers who swoop in once a year for Glyndeboure and expect London food at Country prices. Over the years, we have seen quite a few quite excellent restaurants come and go in Lewes, one a victim of COVID, but the rest seemingly because everyone else eats at Bills, which now occupies as much space as the average out-of-town Tesco.

Out last visit was a particular nadir, when we ended up walking out of the Rights of Man due to an overall crapness of service, menu and venue, and ended up in Britain’s second worst Cote (For details of the worst, see my review here).

So it was a delight to find a new restaurant (which we had visited in a previous incarnation as a coffee shop) out on the fringes of town.

It all started so well. A trendy blackboard, and small but lively kitchen and an outdoor space to eat in. It was a lovely night, so we really felt we were in for something special.

Service was extremely friendly. And that is the only nice thing I am going to say about the service for the rest of the review, unfortunately. This is a restaurant that doesn’t really know what it is. We were told the “concept” was small plates, and that we should order 3 to 5 which is a surprisingly wide band, and that the food would come when it came: No matter that the menu nicely laid out starters and mains (just under another name), the kitchen would just do whatever the hell it wanted.

To ensure that we didn’t suffer too much from that, and to try to get into the true tapas style, we started by just ordering a drink and some snacks, in this case some olives and almonds, and the Bandarilla. Not huge for 6 quid, but actually very tasty, and some indication that whoever was in the kitchen really knew how to cook.

This is where a should have been 5 star meal went sharply downhill. The restaurant, at a stretch, could hold 30-35 covers, with about 10 of those outside, and was being served by 2 members of staff. And yet, it must have taken 20 minutes to attract someone’s attention to get the next round of drinks and food ordered. Somewhat ironically, 2 minutes after we had managed to get the attention of one waitress, another turned up. The bus theory of waitressing in action…

We waited.

And we waited

And we waited.

Finally, I managed to attract a member of staff who scurried back in, came out and apologised that she had forgotten to serve our drinks, but the food was on the way.

2 drinks appeared, and still no food.

We waited some more.

The other waitress appeared. We asked her what was going on.

More scurrying.

“Oh, sorry, there has been a problem with the gas in the kitchen, and they are just plating your meal now”. I was too polite to call bullshit at this point, but I am completely sure that if the kitchen had an issue, the chef would have sent someone out to the 20 diners sitting around to mention it. Clearly our order had been lost, which was a logistical achievement in its own right given how tiny the place is, but to give us a stupid excuse for it was beyond the pale.

We had another drink. At this point, tipsiness and hunger were becoming a real issue. As was cold, potentially, as evening was drawing in closer to night, so long had we been waiting.

And then some food finally arrived. As did the realisation that this was not a small plates restaurant at all: It was a tiny plates restaurant.

So, under the leaf, is the tiniest piece of aubergine it is possible to slice – The leaf should give you an idea of how small it was. It was utterly delicious, but at £13 it actually felt like a bit of a rip off. Similarly, the mackerel (the thing that looks like it has pats of butter on it), was lovely, but almost a real main course price for something smaller than most starters (albeit that it did have some with Kimchi, so I might be being a little harsh). And the carrots felt a little toppy for a small bowl (even for “heritage” carrots).

Tempers were fraying a bit at this point. We were the best part of 2 hours into the meal, and had only eaten what would pass for a starter in most restaurants. Night had fallen along with our mood, so we moved inside for the lamb. Again, it was extremely tasty, and whatever was layered inside the potato was to die for: Whoever was sitting behind the kitchen lights knows their stuff. But it was not at all overly generous (three very small bits of lamb) for the price. So we had little choice but to enjoy the excellent cheese board.

Something happened on this night that I have never seen before. Mrs Nigel went home and ate a large piece of bread because she was so hungry. She could have spent £7(!) on two pretty small pieces of sourdough in the restaurant, but we had really had it by this time. I mean, who manages to spend almost 90 quid on food for two people and has to go home for a large snack?

Drinks-wise, the wine was enjoyable (albeit served in those damnable 125ml glasses), with the Cuvee M a real standout (as it should be at £64 a bottle). The house red was Portuguese, which makes a change, but nothing particularly to write home about. We ended up paying for very little of it in the end, as the staff clearly realised they had massively dropped the ball.

It’s much easier to write a review of a bad meal than a good one, as there are only so many ways you can keep saying how much you enjoyed a meal and how good the service was, but I’d love all of my reviews to be like that, because Mrs Nigel and I have to sit through the bad ones. And this was a bad one.

There is only one really good thing about Dill, and that is the food. And not even the quantity, just the quality. I am sick to the back teeth of so-called small plates restaurants. I have only been to one that really gets it, and understands exactly how to give the right sized portions at the right price, at the right speed and, dare I say it, in the right order, which is The Fig in Rye. Go to even the meanest cafe in Northern Spain, and they seem to get it instinctively, but here in the UK, we have just bolloxed it up completely.

Everything else was wrong. The service, while friendly, was chaotic. Portions were too small, and too expensive for the portion size. The speed that food arrived at was miserable, even when our order finally resurfaced. Wine, while good, had little in the way of a decent selection at a reasonable by-the-glass price. Even the tables and chairs outside were too wobbly to use without extensive modification.

All of that said, we really want to go back. Hopefully either Gordon Ramsey will spend a week here, or we just had an amazingly bad, but unlucky, experience. It is so hard to find good food in Lewes, and we really want Dill to still be there next year when we are back in town. But I fear for it: Lewes is not a foodie place, and while this place was turning people away, it was not full, seemingly because they could not reconcile the number of people in the restaurant with the bookings (I saw someone going round later asking people what their names were, to see if they had ticked them off or not). It seems there is an amazing chef in the house, just not a restaurateur.

However, people of Lewes, please ignore everything I have written apart from the nice bits about the food. Pack this place out (and maybe post a few things on TripAdvisor about portion size), and I’ll let you know which days I’m back next year so you can leave me a space. I fear I may have to book under another name, but if that’s the price I have to pay to keep a small corner of gastronomy alive in Lewes, I’ll take that one for the team…

Conclusion

Overall Rating: 3/5

• Food: 5/5
• Drinks: 4/5
• Service: 2/5
• Ambiance: 3.5/5
• Value for money: 3/5
• Would we go back? Yes (but maybe only once)

Dill: http://www.dilllewes.co.uk/