ROCKSALT:VOYEZ/CES OISEAUX BLANCS/ET CES MAISONS ROUILLÉES

My favourite time of all to visit the seaside is when the promenades are quiet, the skies are grey and rain-flecked and the kiss-me-quick hat shops are shuttered. An English seaside town in the low season has an elegiac quality which appeals so much that I sometimes think I must have some Finnish in my lineage.

Why is it I got the impression that Folkestone is always in an off-season? Maybe it was the seafront – reached using the water-powered Leas Lift - sparsely populated with a few kite flyers, the pebble beach bereft of bathers save for a man looking like he was about to swim the Channel and a few families braving the breeze on a small sandy beach (windbreakers for goalposts).

They’re making an effort here though. The Folkestone Triennial runs until September and there is a little artistic barrio with coffee shops and the like in the centre. As in many of these Kent coastal towns though much of the centre is a bit chavtastic – people worship regularly at the temple of St.Primark – and the good townsfolk have not so much been touched with the ugly stick as beaten firmly around the bonce with it. I fitted in perfectly, of course.

Luckily, they’d picked some of the younger, better-looking and more clued-up examples from the populace to staff chef Mark Sargeant’s first restaurant, Rocksalt and although I had heard about early problems with the service I couldn't quibble: they were terrific and pretty much on the ball during my visit.

Rocksalt itself does look a tad incongruous alongside the small wooden shacks selling whelks and crabsticks and with the newly opened Fish and Chip café Smokehouse a lobster net’s cast away from the mothership this is beginning to look like a sort of proto-Padstein. Sarge-ville if you will.

That said once you’re in the restaurant you could actually be anywhere - probably London. There’s a big floor-to-ceiling window that runs the length of the dining room so you can see the sea and everything but the décor is more along smart/urban lines, corporate even.

I had (wrongly) assumed that Rocksalt was all about fish, especially given its location but there seemed to be plenty of meat dishes on the menu and a board of different steaks was duly paraded around the room for diners to admire. To be honest I would have been more interested in seeing the fish.

Shame, too, that apart from Early Bird they couldn't have used some Kent breweries for their selection of beers, nice though the Meantime ones are. I probably would have stuck to them too as the wine list was a bit snooze-inducing.

Some small snacks to go with my beer were ok but a bit inconsequential. A decent tarama, some radishes which lacked pepperiness came with an anchovy dip, some mealy broad beans with salt. Best of the lot were a bowl of slightly gritty cockles served with a little jug of vinegar which whisked me straight back to seaside holidays of yore when all edibles had to come with a fine layer of sand (some weird by-law I think).

Red Herring was a Smoked Mackerel dyed with Beetroot. Served warm it was good: moist and meaty and not too smoky but a poached or soft-boiled egg may have made it more of a dish; much as I admired the Iberian-like simplicity.

My main course was a special of Dover Sole at £20 (the other was Monkfish) which was simply grilled and simply great, as Dover Sole often is although a bit more inventiveness with the sides wouldn't have gone amiss. I wasn’t looking for an El Bulli experience but serving it with Asparagus and boiled spuds was a sign of a rather unambitious kitchen.

For pudding Kentish Gypsy Tart was very good indeed with a light mousse-like caramel filling and crumbly pastry - even the waitress was surprised at how quickly I demolished it (others less so).

Decent coffee was served with some fudge and some Rocksalt Rock. Which was nice.

So the service was excellent and the food good, so why was I less moved by this place than say Eddie Gilbert’s up the coast in Ramsgate or even The Sportsman on the North Kent Coast?

Well, those places have a sense of location and context which adds to the experience. When you visit them you're certainly not in London whereas at Rocksalt I kept having to look out of the window to remind myself where I was. They also feel like one-offs where Rocksalt feels like a nascent chain.

Then I realised that Rocksalt doesn't just exist for the benefit of whiny Londoners made weary of Burgers, Bahn Mi and Burritos (that’ll be me) but also for local people who want a decent place to eat. As if to emphasise that point as I was leaving I overheard a local couple outside who were looking at the menu.

“Looks good doesn’t it?”

“It does - shall we go in?”

“Why not”.

EDDIE GILBERT'S: FINE FOOD, FIRST FLOOR, FISHMONGER, FANNIT

Whatever you think of blogs, blogging and bloggers it's a fact that once a post is put out there in the blogosphere it will be there forever, permanently etched in silicon long after the author has forgotten about it. This is constantly brought home to Dos Hermanos by the large number comments that we still get on old posts - our Masters Super Fish is still doing good biz after several years. To be honest a lot of the comments are either spam or from odd bods who fail to note the date of the post and berate us unjustly. Sometimes though they’re useful. Very useful.

Take last weekend. I had been racking my brains looking for somewhere suitable to eat lunch in London when a comment from Richard Eastcliff had popped up on our post about Age & Sons.

I’d previously thought of Ramsgate as an unlikely destination for a decent meal until I’d visited Age & Sons in June last year and had a very good time. Mr Eastcliff recommended another place that had opened in October and was just a short hop from A&S called Eddie Gilbert's. After a brief but intense period of internet activity I had a booking and a train ticket. The high speed line from St Pancras I previously talked about is now up and running and I was in Ramsgate quicker than you could say “Planet Thanet”. Making my way down to the centre of town taking care to avoid the tough-looking women with East Kent facelifts, I noted the increasing number of skips and scaffolding which indicated I wasn’t the only Londoner using the new line.

Eddie Gilbert’s (the restaurant) is above a fishmonger of the same name. It's a small, bright room with a few nautical knick-knacks and prints of fish dotted around but the interest for me lay completely within the menu. On one page there's plenty of options to satisfy your Fish & Chip needs, but the other side is an a la carte of more ambitious dishes. I fancied some Fish and Chips but it seemed a shame to have made the journey and not test out the kitchen's cooking chips, sorry, chops and anyway I liked the look of, ooh, all the dishes.

Native Oysters weren’t on the menu but fresh tasting Rocks of good quality and that had been opened properly, worked as a nice little apéritif for the rest of the meal – even better with a bottle of the Kentish Pale Ale from an interesting list of beers.

Eel Soldiers and Duck Egg is a deceptively simple dish but to get it spot-on requires technique and timing: the egg must have soft, soft yolk and a solid albumen and the fingers of Eel must be deep-fried in oil that is hot enough, then drained and served immediately. The kitchen aced it. They even managed to fashion an aesthetically pleasing crack in the eggshell. Damn they’re good, was all I could think as I crunched through crisp coating into the deeply smoky eel flesh inside.

Another starter of Brown Shrimp Croquettes brought more Panko-covered loveliness (obviously the word crispy was a siren-call to this land-lubber). This time the creamy Brown Shrimp filling was paired with a sharp tatare-as-vinaigrette and some crisp stalks of parsley. It was rich and satisfying yet still had a lightness to it that put me in mind of the Kipper Croquettes at the much feted Harwood Arms in Fulham.

You could argue that the leaves of rocket were one garnish too many but I didn’t think so and the obvious attention to detail with which the whole dish had been assembled told me that there was someone in the kitchen (Craig Mather according to the website) who actually cared about what was sent out. I had that all too rare feeling of the kitchen cooking for me, not just another cover.

I had to laugh when my main course arrived. To get a dish such as mine, which showed such generosity of spirit, such gusto was, after living for so long under the yoke of the St John School of Metropolitan Minimalism, a liberating and refreshing change. I was a bit worried to be honest. That Turbot – was it cooked ok? The sauce looked pretty rich as well – would it be de trop?

All, reasonable questions. All dispelled by my first bite of the Turbot, which was spot on: firm flesh, delicate taste. The curried sauce spoke of the old school but in a good way. It showed the lightness of touch evident in my earlier dishes. The fat Mussels were delicious and made perfect sense in the context of the dish. Underneath the generously proportioned fillet was a nest of salty samphire adding bite and greenery. Crushed - on the verge of mashed - potatoes had lapped up some of the sauce but I had to reach for the bread basket to complete the job. A great plateful of food at a ridiculously low price. I’ve seen the future and one day all dishes will be like this - more is definitely more. Sorry Fergus.

Oh, I forgot the chips. I had to try the chips. Sorry, I just had to. Cooked in Beef dripping they were predictably fantastic and made me rethink my position vis-à-vis the best cooking medium for them. Yes, they were that good.

I get a lot of online haranguing for choosing Ice Cream as my pudding of choice but the simple fact is I’m usually so stuffed by the time I get to this stage of a meal it’s all I can manage. In any case a) you can tell a lot about a place by its Ice Cream b) I like it – so there. Chocolate Ice Cream had been made with some of the bottled Stout made for Eddie Gilbert’s. To be honest I can’t remember if I detected the bitter notes from the ale but it was good and I got a brandy basket which made me very happy.

Friendly staff who went about their business with the minimum of fuss completed the package. And what a package it is. Not surprising then that that on a Saturday lunchtime the place was buzzing (with critics, bloggers and normal people) and that there were no tables to be had for the evening service. So now there’s at least two good reasons to visit Ramsgate. More please.

AGE & SONS: OH I DO LIKE TO BE BESIDE THE SEASIDE (AGAIN)

Spending many of our formative years in Rotherham, Dos Hermanos didn’t get to see the sea very often. There was the annual holiday to the Isle of Wight and occasionally a day trip to Skeggy or Filey but for the rest of the time the nearest we got to a large boy of water was the Don, an evil smelling and massively polluted river. When we did make it to the seaside it would inevitably be overcast and raining, a scenario which remains firmly etched into my psyche. Many, many, years on, nothing much has changed and on each and every visit to the seaside the weather, without fail, has been rotten.

Which, funnily enough was the weather forecast for my first ever visit the other day to Age & Sons in Ramsgate. As HS was busy writing his second book I went with fellow gastro-fiend and Chelsea fan Scott who likes his food and his booze as much as me which promised for much merriment.

Ramsgate is a bit chav central. Ok, I didn’t see much of it beyond a brief walk down from the station but it does have the air of a seaside town which has seen better days. There were some fine looking villas overlooking the sea which unfortunately had not been cared for and were strewn with drying laundry. There was a forlorn bandstand where bizarrely the music was provided, not by a band but by what looked like a big ghetto blaster. Even stranger, there was an old couple sitting in deckchairs watching it.

Having said all that there is something about an English Seaside town gone to seed that I quite like. A kind of wistfulness. If you like those qualities too I’d advise you get down there PDQ because at the end of the year there will be a high speed train service from London and all that decaying grandeur is sure to be gentrified to within an inch of it’s crumbling mortar.

Which is where Age & Sons come in. This café cum bar cum restaurant in an old warehouse might just be the shape of things to come. It’s a one stop shop for all your middle class foodie needs. Relaxing brunch in light airy space with like-minded people with kids and state of the art pushchairs. Check. Restaurant featuring British, seasonal and local ingredients. Check. Funky bar with fab cocktails . Check. Despite (or maybe because of) the abundance of bourgeois clichés I liked it a lot.

We were in the light and airy restaurant, where a slightly older crowd (that’ll be me then) were kicking back and enjoying a Saturday lunch. The menu is well-priced – none of the individual dishes were over £15 – and has enough inventive little touches to keep it interesting whatever you order.

I was a little surprised by the Bread which was a bit doughy and uncooked at the centre. I’ll put it down to a mistake and the fact that they do at least make it in house when many places can’t be bothered means I’ll give them a couple of brownie points.

My Fennel Risotto needed a little adjustment in the seasoning department but once that was corrected was really rather lovely with lots of aniseed notes from the baby fennel and its seeds. And it was good to actually taste rice that hadn’t been cooked to a pulp.

Most people are pretty accustomed to Fish Roe but less common are Milts which are the er, male equivalent. Very tasty they are too with a very light texture, like a sort of fishy sweetbread. The cucumber did make the salad a little watery but at a fiver only the most curmudgeonly would complain.

For a restaurant so close to the sea the menu is surprisingly meaty. The fish dishes we did try had some of the freshest specimens you could hope for. My Sea Bass’s skin had wilted a bit but the flesh underneath was super-fresh. There was a little taste of Spring/Summer with a mixture of Broad Beans , Peas and Asparagus bound together with a light sauce. The only odd note was the inclusion of some small pieces of what I think were Grapefruit.

John Dory was a good fresh hunk of the fish, again very well cooked. The Puy lentils were a little mushy and there was a bit too much sauce but with the brown shrimp and braised celery made for a fine dish.

After a suitable break and another bottle of Martin Codax Albarino we decided to supersize and see what A&S could do with their meat dishes. A shared plate of Lamb Shoulder was a big portion of Larry which had been slowly cooked to a melting, fatty, unctuousness. There was some good mash underneath which had soaked up the lamby jus. Some excellent Carrots (that actually tasted of that root were placed here and there and the whole topped off with a zingy gremolata that cut through the other components.

A selection of Ice Creams (mmm…Salted Butter) and some Chocolate Cake may have been a couple of courses too many but they were great and we polished it all off, no probs.

I can’t tell you exactly when we left Age & Sons but I think we waddled out with a very contented smile on our faces. And why not ? Good cooking with exemplary ingredients at very reasonable prices is a rare bird these days. Combine that with pleasant service and surroundings and you have a gaff that makes a lot of London eateries look very silly indeed.

And guess what ? In spite of the forecast it was lovely and sunny all day. I can see a bit of brain rewiring might be in order.