Beside myself with glee, beside the sea
Keith Miller enjoys a coastal caper (complete with proper chips) at this friendly beachfront bar-bistro
Thanks to a combination of factors – tight deadlines, idiosyncratic postpandemic opening hours, quixotic weather – today’s dispatch follows more closely on the heels of the event it purports to describe than I’m usually comfortable with. But sometimes needs must. I didn’t even have time to work in the 100-word digression about limestone with which I like to delight readers when I find myself in surroundings like these (but DM me for more details). In fact I’d have got cracking on the Sandbanks to Studland ferry directly after lunch, if my thumbs weren’t too big to type accurately on my phone. So emotion hasn’t had time to be forgotten in the first place, much less recollected in tranquillity. I don’t know whether the oysters we had were all right, for instance – though they tasted more than all right. But I suppose I shall know by tomorrow, so I can always get my next of kin to call the office and set the record straight before the presses start rolling.
We like to write about seaside restaurants in summertime, for obvious reasons – never more so than this year, given there’s a stronger-thanusual chance you might be in, say, Bournemouth at the end of August, rather than anywhere further afield. And in doing so, we have to make allowances – not just for the challenges of opening and staying open after Covid, but also for what might be termed the conventions of the genre. Urban Reef sounds like a Nineties tribute band, but it’s an absolutely canonical beachfront bar-bistro: a takeaway and deli on the ground floor; a lovely, lofty glass-fronted, wood-lined space above, with a sort of minstrels’ gallery above that; a pretty terrace decked with brightly enamelled metal furniture out in front (this was closed on our visit because of the wind). It’s ever so slightly scruffy – the sea air has taken the shine off some of the surfaces – but it’s certainly got style.
We sat down and perused our singleuse menus. Outside, kite surfers scudded, and occasionally flew, past; teenage seagulls huddled morosely on the railings. There were a fair few people on the beach – not the sort of numbers that made this stretch of coast so notorious during the June heatwave, but enough to strike a faint, defiant spark of gaiety. Around us, families capered and laughed. The restaurant had done a witty thing of hanging a series of fish-emblazoned shower curtains between the banquettes at the back of the room, but that was about as visible as the safety measures got; the space felt relaxed and informal – expansive, permissive, luminous. Staff moved around, quietly competent in their canonical beach-bar-bistro schmatta (cut-off denim shorts, branded Tshirts, sneakers). Sounds of the 1970s, rather than the 1990s, rotated on the stereo at a companionable volume. Time passed happily.
We had oysters, as discussed; d; tender and greaseless calamari with a “Thaistyle” salad that I thought wasn’t sn’t profoundly Thai-style but my daughter disagreed, though it did feature rice vermicelli alongside the shredded veg; haddock and “proper chips”; a whole crab of prodigious size, which arrived with the usual paraphernalia but proved reluctant to yield to the crackers (“Pneumatic drill ll to table nine!”); a chocolate fondant; coffee and a modest intake of booze. With Rishi Sunak’s discount, it all came in at £50 for three.
Alongside the usual insistence on locally sourced ingredients, which is an almost manically big thing in this part of the world, UR’s lunch menu takes a mainstream, family-friendly line-up and sprinkles it with a number of unmistakable little touches of class. The crab came with a salad that featured fregola, fennel and charred orange, along with the usual suspects; the calamari were dusted with a little fivespice. The proper chips were properly good. The wine list wasn’t just strong on localism, but looked unusually thoughtful and imaginative for this price point.
We passed on the “cheeseboard for one”, knowing we had some of the very same varieties waiting in the fridge at home. ( Dorset is good for cheese – though the signature cheeseaccompanying biscuit here, a high-baked mini-roll called a Dorset knob, is currently hard to find due to high seasonal demand. “They run out every year,” said the woman in the village shop, with a roll of the eyes.) After a white-knuckle, end-of-a-Bond-film interlude as the minutes of our twohour parking slot ebbed away and the advertised 20-minute wait for the chocolate fondant expanded to, in the end, 27 minutes, we were off, barrelling through the leafy streets of Bournemouth in pursuit of the ferry and the Isle of Purbeck, our home from home for the week. And here we are.
I would put Urban Reef in the “vaut la visite” category – if you were staying somewhere else, you’d probably find somewhere to eat there. You couldn’t quite call it fine dining (though dinner is more statementy than lunch, featuring bouillabaisse and fruits de mer and suchlike); and it doesn’t have the radical primitive charms of a seaside shack. But we liked its food, and we loved its sense of personality (there’s a small chain of other urbanistically named hosp hospitality outfits owned by the same guy elsewhere in town). And in this mos most uncertain summer, to have the su sublime expanse of Boscombe beach b before us, without running the risk of being blown into it, was a real treat – like being allowed back into the cinema again.