Palmito is a tiny, semi-orderly explosion of flavour on the Brighton/Hove border, and reserving one of its 20 seats is already a battle, so nobody living nearby will thank me for visiting. It sits on the site of a former takeaway, now va-va-voomed with pink paint and fairy lights, but there’s still only enough room to swing a small shrew without sweeping its whisker through someone’s Colombian rocoto chilli salsa.
This is a sort-of Latin American restaurant – or at least the cocktails and the soundtrack are. Pineapple and jalapeño mezcalitas were on the menu when we went, alongside cachaça cristalina and velvet falernum caipirinhas, but then the pre-dinner snacks included lentil papad with plum chutney, which is decidedly Indian, albeit with a condiment redolent of my gran’s linen cupboard, which brimmed with homemade preserves.
You are on a journey at Palmito. The menu is a vast scroll of text, allowing the place’s founder, Diego from Ecuador, to range through all his favourite dishes from Latin America, southern Europe and south Asia, plus anywhere else that happens to float his boat. Heritage tomato, beetroot and feta za’atar salad sits alongside nectarines with pistachio tahini, along with a scattering of fritters, spreads and relishes that wouldn’t look out of place in a 1970s Cranks cookbook, only for the pudding list to feature a spin on a home-counties eton mess.
Palmito’s USP, I feel, is this jumbled yet delicious poetry, an intoxicating bombardment of 24 different small plates: on the day we went, the choice included “grilled spiced chicken thigh with turtle bean and chorizo menestra and spring greens” and “grilled oyster mushrooms anticucho with cannellini hummus and kohlrabi salad”. That nectarine, for example, came in fat slices, grilled and served with green pistachio tahini on charred endive and a pomegranate dressing, and was sweet and bitter and burnt and fruity all at once.
Many dishes are vegan, so this is definitely a place to take someone who is tired of the meat-free options available elsewhere: roast harissa cauliflower with black pepper grapes or crisp celeriac masala with stuffed padrón peppers and tamarind chutney, say, should tick that box. Meat eaters, meanwhile, will find happiness in longhorn beef steak anticucho for a shockingly reasonable £15 that comes flanked by grilled potatoes and doused with Peruvian aji panca pepper paste and coriander sauce.
It wasn’t all plain sailing. We’d ordered parippu moong lentil coconut dal with roast butternut squash and a flatbread, and the bread arrived 27 minutes after the dal. Together, they’d have been showstopping; separately, they were still magnificent: beautiful, silky dal with chunks of sweet squash, and pillowy bread doused with good olive oil.
Does Palmito need to offer quite so many things? Probably not – they could get away with cutting the menu by two-thirds, and make it less erratic and with fewer pivots, but that wouldn’t be anywhere near as big, bold and frothy. They’d definitely serve more people, and faster, but where’s the fun in that? Palmito’s vibe is thoughtful and designed to pack as much of a punch on the plate as possible. And, right now, when your server asks, “Any questions?” the absolute honest answer is, “Yes, I have about 15, actually, but I’ve decided to ask you just to surprise me.”
I drank a booze-free sangria made with red grape and orange kombucha and Three Spirit Livener and attempted, poorly, not to listen in on the rather close next-door tables. All I will say about that is: “No, it’s not a hot flush – it is warm in Palmito when the door is shut”, and “Yes, your neighbour’s daughter is in the wrong for making her evening-only wedding guests use a pay bar.” Lack of privacy will always be an issue in such compact and bijou places, but it’s clearly not hindering the footfall here, because people kept coming to the door to eye up whether we were on mains or dessert, and hoping to take our table.
As our plates arrived, never predictable or half-hearted, there was a sense that each hand-dived scallop and plate of Keralan chicken had been made simply how the chef fancied it that night; that this particular concoction may well never be repeated. Palmito is ever-changing, and leans heavily on what it can get hold of, so those plums I mentioned earlier popped up in various sauces as well as in the eton mess. If you were plum-phobic, though, that night there was also a boozy, grilled banana with rum baba and banana creme.
It was a little Latin America with a dash each of Lyon and Leighton Buzzard, and I wouldn’t have changed a thing. I’d love to go back, but somehow I sense Palmito will now be even busier.
Palmito 16 Western Road, Hove, East Sussex, 01273 777588. Open Tues-Fri 5-11pm, Sat noon-11pm. From about £30 a head, plus drinks and service.
The third episode in the new series of Grace Dent’s Comfort Eating podcast goes live on Tuesday 10 October. Listen to it here. Her new book of the same name is published by Guardian Faber for £20; to order a copy for £16, visit guardianbookshop.com
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