Words by Nancy Duckels
You’ll probably know Wolfox as a name associated with coffee, and with good reason – Wolfox have a number of beloved coffee shops across Brighton and Hove and a fabulous reputation for their excellent coffee and roasting. But this is not all that Wolfox does! Allow us to introduce you to the Wolfox Chapters restaurant. The concept behind Wolfox Chapters is simple: they serve their famous coffee and brunch food in the day, before serving a high-end dinner in the evening. All main ingredients for the dishes are sourced from small and mainly local producers, and the fruit and vegetables are typically organically grown by either Wolfox or local farms. Wolfox Chapters is where it all really comes together – from fresh bread from their own bakery to the refinement of their excellent customer service. We’d heard that Wolfox Chapters has an exciting new menu and were pleased to sit down in their beautiful restaurant on New Road and take a look. The menu is fantastic – thoughtfully composed and carefully curated, it’s a lovely tour of land and sea. It’s broken into small plates for starters, large plates for mains, a small selection of sides and some rather marvellous sounding desserts. We started with some small plates – the crab, breadcrumbed balls of local crab and charred sweetcorn, served with a sweet chilli aioli. The crab was sweet and plentiful, the sweetcorn little gems of freshness. These balls were brilliant. The next small plate was the deep fried enoki mushroom. This was a beautiful dish, the shape of the enoki mushroom deep fried resembled some sort of beautiful coral. The batter was light and crispy, the mushroom underneath beautifully cooked. The accompanying miso mayo was a very tasty thing and really delicious with that crispy batter. Our server recommended the duck wonton small plate so we obliged. No regrets here – parcels of moist, aromatic duck in a crispy wonton pastry, sat atop a delicious hoisin orange sauce with mounds of delicate spring onion. A particular shout-out to the sublime orange sauce, the perfect partner to the duck. Now to level up to the large plates. The aubergine came highly recommended and rightly so – this was aubergine with miso butter, first roasted and then chargrilled so the butter formed a delicious crispy topping. It sat atop a generous bed of labneh (strained yoghurt, not dissimilar to cream cheese) with lambs lettuce and sprinkled with pomegranate and crispy mint leaves glazed with maple syrup (a nice touch.) This was a beautiful blend of slightly salty aubergine with the light, refreshing yoghurt and dainty greenery. Our other large plate was the caramel pork. This is such a customer favourite that it had to be included on the new menu. Again, easy to see why! This was beautifully caramelised, tender cubes of pork belly accompanied with pak choi, broccoli and a ginger soy sauce. Deceptively simple but bursting with flavour. The grand finale of the evening was the desserts, of course. We chose the truffles, which were dainty little balls of chocolate truffle goodness flavoured with strawberry, orange and coffee, consecutively. Little pieces of heaven. And we also had to try the chocolate fondant – a lovely chocolate sponge with perfectly melting Belgian chocolate inside, a shortbread crumb and delicate pistachio gelato. The pistachio ice cream married perfectly with the rich Belgian chocolate. The food was incredible and the service was splendid. Need we say more?
