I love me a fancy restaurant, and the last time I visited Brighton (way back in April), I decided to book a table at Graze, a place I’d heard some pretty good things about! Their lunch time tasting menu is actually really reasonable for a restaurant of their quality, so I was really excited to visit – and I wasn’t disappointed at all!

Before we even began on our starters, we were brought some delicious soup shots, and some bread with different kinds of butter (you guys know how much I love bread and butter!). This was a really nice touch, because the different flavoured butters really added a different dimension to this restaurant table staple. My favourite was the one flavoured with a hint of lemon.

Now, the menu above isn’t actually the one we picked from, as they had changed the starters and puddings and forgotten to swap the new menu in (we were the first customers of the day!). So, for my starter, I had pigeon salad, which was very nice indeed.

The salad and the peas were delicious, and the meat was smoky and gamey without being overpowering – and cooked to perfection!

The Mr. had a gorgeous wild garlic risotto, and loved every scrap of it – it was really tasty, and inspired me to try a similar dish when I got some wild garlic in my Riverford veg box (although it didn’t come out as bright green as this did!).

My main was the gorgeous braised pork belly, and it was velvety and delicious on its bed of celariac puree – I never thought of preparing celariac like this, but it was so smooth and creamy I might have to give it a try!

Totally unexpectedly, before our pudding we were treated to a palette cleanser!

For pudding, I had a really light and refreshing pineapple dish with Malibu ice-cream – the pineapple was cut so finely that it actually gave it a really interesting texture, much different to the usual chunky cut pineapple I usually eat.

The Mr. had a selection of ice creams and sorbets, which were all delicious, especially the ice cream – which I suspect was cardamom, but we never actually found out…

I was really surprised to be offered so many tasty and thoughtful extras with such a reasonably priced set menu, and I wasn’t disappointed by a single course. I came away feeling satisfied, but not full, and as though I had had a really excellent meal – sadly, not something you can say after every restaurant visit, especially not at this price…

Graze is currently taking bookings for their Christmas parties, and it looks as though the cheaper lunch tasting menu has been replaced with a more expensive dinner tasting menu, but you can also try their new British menu, or pop in for a Sunday roast!

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