The Lanes Brighton

"We made a last-minute stop at this cute brunch spot tucked off the main street, and it did not disappoint.

The service was so friendly, and the food came out quickly. I started with the matcha lime tonic, then we shared the eggs benedict and the veggie English breakfast... both were incredible!

Every component was perfectly cooked and full of flavor. Honestly, one of the best brunches I’ve ever had. Would 10000% recommend!"

Madison Shepherd

"Great Sunday menu. Super friendly staff even in a busy time. We were 3 people and we didn’t have any special requirements but they checked allergies with us. Food was served quickly and it was delicious. It is on the pricier side but the quality is there, and the portions are filling nonetheless. We spent around £80 for 3 people for 3 drinks, 3 plates and 2 slices of cake. The hot drink selection is very nice and tasty!"

Pauline Ocente

"14th September
£100 total

What’s in a name? The short answer is quite a lot. For reasons of happy personal circumstance it’s a question very much front of mind at the moment; I’ve been picking my way through the thorny thicket of negative onomastic association recently (a particular moniker forever reminding me of a particular Monica, for example) and contemplating the plausibility of nominative determinism (is a child with the name of an old lady destined to act like an old lady from birth?).

So yes Bill, perhaps a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but that doesn’t mean that when Mich suggested dinner at Lost in the Lanes I was able to easily set aside my initial impression we’d be eating in a coffee shop. Because that’s what it sounds like it is. Even when I went online and looked at the menu and found evidence of proper cooking in the imaginative small plates there (see: salmon pastrami with gooseberry, samphire and peas), there was something inside me bracing itself for one of those ham and cheese toasties out of a plastic wrap.

But I was quickly able to shed my slightly bizarre associative complex when we got there. Because it doesn’t look like a coffee shop - even though, mind-bendingly, it also is one - to the point I’m now wondering how I’d feel having a morning pastry in there. It looks modern and chic, with lots of open space, dried flowers and single bulbs on long wires hanging from wooden beams on the ceiling, a cut-out in the wall through to the kitchen - that kind of thing. And in the flesh the menu helped too, because there were about a million things on there I wanted to eat.

We eschewed the large plates entirely, as much to save room for variety as any other reason, and before long there was no room for elbows on our little circular marble tabletop; in a bout of FOMO I kept calling the waitress back to add things to our order and rather than describe them all individually my overall reflection was this: sometimes sampling lots of little things can reflect worse on the standard of cooking than if we’d just gone olives-bread-starter-main. Comparison is, of course, the thief of joy, but when Mich and I are eating smorgasbords it’s absolutely in our nature to rank each dish against one another, and unavoidably there are those that don’t quite hit the spot as well as others. Negativity bias then perhaps leaves a feeling of lesser satisfaction than if the one big main had been served with the same quality as the average across a range of tasting plates.

And there really was a range of quality in what we ate, I thought. The toursi tasted like the pickling process had sucked all the life and flavour out of the veg (and having figs in there was just weird), whereas the feta cigars and that first bite of bombette were perfect. There was a fair bit of middle-of-the-road stuff too. But then speaking of negativity bias, I ordered a cheesecake when I don’t usually order dessert, and… it just wasn’t one. It was a sort of chocolate mousse (with no mention of chocolate on the menu) layered on top of a bit of cream cheese, which I tried to scrape off and salvage, and no base. I left with that annoying feeling of unsatiated, unsatisfied fullness, and lost amongst that was any memory of the stuff Lost in the Lanes had done really well."

Joseph Hughes