Harbour Street Tapas - Tapping In

Harbour Street Tapas brings a small plate of Galicia to Whitstable, writes Marijke Hall

A quick glance at Tim Wilson’s career as a chef and you know he’s seen the lot. You suspect he’s probably had a lot of fun, too.

Running the kitchens of some of London’s most exclusive members clubs, with Groucho, Annabel’s and

George Club among them, as well as celebrity haunt The Ivy, he’s probably got more tales to tell than your average showbiz journo. Not that he’s giving anything away of course. In fact he’s pretty indifferent about it all.
It’s when talk turns to his own place, Harbour Street Tapas, his eyes light up and he offers to grab some wine (we can’t, it’s too early). Opening in July last year - the week of the Oyster Festival madness, just to make things a bit harder for himself - the tapas has seamlessly slotted into Whitstable’s dining scene, becoming a place the locals, in particular, love.
It’s a far cry from the Groucho Club, where he worked up until last year, or its Ibiza pop-up restaurant which he ran in previous summers. It’s an even further cry from the private yacht he worked on for a year, sailing from the South of France to Istanbul and onto the Maldives and Madagascar during his career in exclusive chefing.

But for Wilson, this is where it’s at.

He admits when he goes out to eat he’s not really one for formal dining so a tapas bar is right up his (Harbour) street.

“One of my favourite restaurants in London is Barrafina,” he says. “You can’t book, you just go in there, it’s quite chaotic, you share food, there’s no set starter, main or dessert, it’s just a really informal way of eating.

“Having spent so long in private members clubs where it’s quite formal, it’s nice to do something a bit egalitarian.

“It’s where I want to be when I eat out. It’s not fussy, you can just chill out.

“You don’t have to dress up, well you can if you want, but it’s just really casual.”

The team at Harbour Street Tapas have a saying: ‘it’s not a restaurant, it’s a tapas bar’.

“Then when things go horribly wrong in service we just say ‘it’s not a restaurant’,” he laughs.

Wilson, who lives in Canterbury with wife Emma and daughters Georgia, five, and Sasha, three, runs the tapas with business partner Lee Murray, who has a Spanish deli at the painfully cool Goods Shed by Canterbury West station..

“On my way back from London every Friday night I used to stop there and get some food and wine and we always spoke about doing something down here,” explains Wilson.

“He said he’d found this site and would I help him open it. We run it together.

“In the old days as executive chef I used to just stand on the pass but now I’m doing the cooking again.

“That’s what I love about this. I didn’t really do much cooking in London.

“This is mine and Lee’s baby.

“We’ve put a lot into it. I can always tell when I go into a restaurant and the owners are involved in it. You can tell the personality.

“A lot of restaurants you go in and there’s no energy but because we’re here all the time I think it’s got that.

“It’s a new thing for me, my career’s gone in a completely different direction and I love it.”

He admits running a restaurant is hard but says he has an amazing team to help it run smoothly.

“When we opened I had no chefs in the kitchen, it was just me. It was a baptism of fire. Emma worked here sometimes at the start and Lee’s wife still works here.

“It’s very much a family business. In the early days, my girls would come in and help me pop broad beans - I’d get them helping out.”

One of the things he loves about having his own place is meeting his suppliers, and it’s not exactly a bad location to get hold of his ingredients, is it?
“In London, you never got the chance to meet the producers. Now I can go out to the farms and see them.
“Today we had a local fisherman who dropped off a load of lobsters.
“He popped his head round the door one day and said ‘I’ve got a boat, do you fancy some lobsters’ and he pulled them out this morning and brought them in.

“That said, we do import some Iberico meat and other products from Spain but things like meat, fish, veg, we try to use as much locally as possible.”

The menu is mouth-watering and a seafood lover’s fantasy, offering fried squid, Galician octopus carpaccio, salmon and grilled tiger prawns.

The meat section boasts Iberico ribs, grilled chorizo, Salchichon sausage and chicken thighs among its dishes and then there’s a selection of your typical tapas favourites.

Served informally, shared between groups (and of course washed down with specially selected wine and beer – the Estrella Galicia rocks), the tapas bar is a little slice of Spanish heaven tucked away in Harbour Street. But while the restaurant may have settled in well, what about Wilson?

Does he miss the glitzy scene of London’s elite? It appears not too much.
The 42-year-old, who grew up in Dorset before moving to London, says he likes the eclectic mix of Whitstable, with its locals rubbing shoulders with the DfLs. He is, after all, a DfL himself, although having lived in Canterbury for quite a few years now, he’s happily entrenched in the Kentish way of life.

“We get mainly locals in here really. Especially on a Wednesday night, we have a full restaurant. “Most people live within 200 metres of here so it’s a great atmosphere as everyone is talking to each other from different tables.

“It’s almost a neighbourhood restaurant in that respect which is what we wanted really.”

He deliberates that if the opportunity came up, he could be tempted to open another place, but it would need to be the right site and unlikely to be in Canterbury, where he thinks it is harder for independent restaurants.

Wilson believes Kent’s food scene, however, is only going to get bigger and has great potential.

“Obviously you’ve got The Sportsman which is the standard bearer for Kent and we’re all sort of inspired by what Steve (Harris) is doing there.”

But for now, he’s quite content. And to think it could have all been so different.
Before getting into the industry, training at London’s La Pont De La Tour and the succession of head and executive chefs jobs, he got a degree in history of modern art.

“I actually went for a job in Bonhams’ exotic rug section,” he laughs.

“The first question in the interview was ‘what do you know about exotic rugs?’”

In a nutshell, nothing, and the rest is history.