Restaurateur Lee Coad and his team have built a reputation not only for simply delicious seafood but as stalwarts of their local Margate community too
On an early summer’s day in Kent, little beats tucking into the freshest food, knowing it comes straight from the sea that's just round the corner from you. ‘Our menu is not so much seasonal as daily’ laughs Lee Coad, the man behind Angela’s and Dory’s seafood restaurants, both of which are within a stone's throw of Margate’s sands, sea and wide, wide skies. ‘What we serve really will depend on what our local fisherman’s brought in off the boat that morning– if what we’ve got is three turbots and a sea bass, that’s what we’ve got, and we make it work. If the weather’s been rough and the boats haven't been out, there may be a lot of smoked fish on the menu!’ On the day I’m looking at that menu, though, the catch has clearly been good – I’m torn between scallops with Jerusalem artichoke and hake with celeriac and onion gravy. No indecision with pudding, however: it’ll be junket with honeycomb for me.
The straightforwardly presented menu is matched by Lee’s own approach. ‘I just wanted a little restaurant, by the sea, serving good, simple food,’ he says. The response from locals and beyond, though, suggests that he and his co-partners – wife Charlotte Forsdike and chef Rob Cooper, formerly of The Goods Shed in Canterbury – have come up with something truly special in this corner of the town. There’s official recognition for their approach to sustainability from both the Waitrose Good Food and Michelin guides, and rave reviews from food critics such as the Queen Consort’s son, Tom Parker Bowles, who declared Angela’s ‘the best seafood I’ve ever eaten.’ All very well and good – but it certainly isn’t these sorts of accolades that get Lee out of bed in the mornings. ‘It’s the people we end up talking to, the spidery web that seems to link us, our customers and our suppliers – all brought together by good food: that’s what I really enjoy.’
Having lived in Hong Kong, where Lee enjoyed a thriving career as an art director on the Financial Times, he and Charlotte returned to home turf in Kent once they’d had children – twins, a boy and a girl, now aged 12. ‘Hong Kong was too expensive, we wanted to be nearer to family once the children came along and Westgate-on-Sea seemed an ideal base’
As part of his job, Lee had flown all over the world, eating and drinking in some of the finest places – but, once home, he felt ‘a huge disconnect’ between that life and his new one on the Kent coast. ‘Charlotte and I had always said if we lived somewhere as a family, we really wanted to be part of our local community. Rob had been a mate for years – we used to party in Canterbury together way back – we knew how good his food is, so the idea of a starting a seafood restaurant, a stone’s throw from the sea at Margate and with Rob in the kitchen, seemed like a good idea.’
It was in 2017 that the trio took over a 26-cover café called Angela’s: ‘Yes, we were going to do something very different, but the name was already familiar in the community, so we thought “why change it?”.’ Dory’s – a seafood bar and wine shop specialising in organic and biodynamic wines, including Westwell of Charing’s sparkling Pelegrim - came along two years later: ‘A customer told me he had a space overlooking the main sands and suggested I might be interested. The moment I saw the view, I was sold,’ says Lee.
An emphasis on repurposing what’s already around, rather than going for the new just for the sake it, runs through every aspect of the business, from the retaining of the ‘Angela’s’ name to a determination to eliminate waste plastic as far as possible from its own section of the food chain. And when plastic can’t be eliminated, it’ll be used imaginatively - hence the counter tops at Angela’s, made from pressed recycled plastic. ‘I do get irritated when people talk about having a sustainable business, though, as if it’s ever possible for anything to be totally sustainable,’ says Lee. ‘There’s always something that’s produced at some cost or another to the planet. What we can all do – and what we certainly try to do here - is to be thoughtful about what we use and how we use it, what we keep and what we throw out. We’ve reused second-hand furniture where we can, and if we have to use plastic it’s recycled. The same goes for the rooms above the restaurant, which we’ve recently opened for guests.' It's all thoughtfully done, with lamps made from the mushroom-like material mycelium, re-dyed waste wool rugs, cork floors, handmade wallpaper by local print maker Natascha Maksimovic, and bio-plastic furniture.
But it’s of course the food where a hyper-local provenance is key – fish is ethically sourced, vegetables wherever possible are organic and pesticide-free and with the team always looking for ways to produce for themselves what they can’t find elsewhere. Last year, for instance, they planted 20,000 onions working alongside Jack Scott, a young, small-scale grower based in Thanet, and Emma and James Loder-Symonds, farmers in Nonnington. ‘We heard about Jack through his Dad, who I was chatting to outside the shop, and Emma and James are customers – that’s what I mean about all these spider-webby connections.’
For Lee and his team, then, engagement with the Margate community goes far beyond simply serving delicious food to the neighbourhood. Angela’s and Dory’s have long partnered with Windmill Community Gardens, where, vegetable food waste is turned into compost, enabling those who use the gardens to grow more vegetables for the restaurants – all satisfyingly cyclical. And now a new project is underway, thanks to support from world-renowned artist - and Dory’s regular - Tracey Emin. ‘In Tracey’s new TKE Studios buildings, we’ll be turning part of what was originally an Edwardian morgue into a hospitality-training café for the long-term unemployed. The plan is not only to give people experience of cooking and working in a functioning space that will be open to the public, but, through our contacts, to give trainees experience of all sorts of aspects of food production, from commercial sea-fishing to dairy farming - how many traineeships can offer that? It should be really exciting, and if it persuades one person to make a go of food as a career, it’ll have been worth it.’
Lee’s seaside life
‘If you come to Margate, don’t miss the chance to swim in the tidal pool at Walpole Bay – there’s nothing else like it’
‘In addition to Turner Contemporary, great galleries here include Cole Freedman and Quench – I’ll always see something interesting here’
‘Dive on the Harbour arm does the best tacos and quesadillas – great with a cold beer on a summer’s day’
