The Seafood Platter at Harry’s: A Taste of Camber Sands
The seafood platter East Sussex diners ask for by name arrives tiered and glistening with crab, oysters and a scatter of ice. A lemon is cut cleanly in half, and for a second everyone just looks at it before anyone picks up a fork.
We built this dish to be shared. It’s one of the most requested plates on the menu at Harry’s, and one of the most photographed too, which tells you something about how it looks before you even ask how it tastes.
The tiered seafood tower
The platter sits on a stand of two or three levels, each one carrying something different. It’s less a single dish and more a small occasion, the kind of thing you order when you’ve decided this lunch is going to run long.
At the base: ice, chilled hard, holding everything at the right temperature through a leisurely meal. Above that, the seafood itself, arranged rather than piled. Nothing crowds anything else.
We’ve always thought a good seafood tower should slow a table down, not speed it up. Pull a chair up to the window, order a bottle of something crisp, and let the platter do the talking for the next hour or so.
What’s included
Ask any regular what they expect from our crab and oysters Sussex platter, and they’ll list the same things, because we keep it consistent. It typically features:
Fresh crab, picked and presented
Oysters, served on ice
A lemon, halved
Accompanying sauces on the side
Simple, on paper. But simple only works when everything on the plate is genuinely good; there’s nowhere for anything ordinary to hide on a platter this stripped back. That’s the honesty of the cooking here: no sauce doing the work that fresh seafood should be doing itself.
The sauces sit alongside rather than over the top, so you can dress each mouthful exactly as you like it. Some guests go heavy on the lemon. Others barely touch it and let the crab speak for itself. Either way works.
Where the seafood comes from
Camber sits where it sits for a reason. We’re a short drive from Rye and its harbour, and closer still to the Sussex coastline that’s been feeding kitchens like ours for generations. Sourcing well isn’t a marketing line here; it’s the only way a dish this exposed actually holds up.
Matthew, who leads the kitchen, built his approach around classic French brasserie cooking and a career spent in some of London’s most respected kitchens before coming to Camber. His menus change regularly “with whatever can be sourced at its best,” and a tiered seafood platter restaurant guests keep coming back to only works if that sourcing philosophy holds every single time.
How to order it for a table
The platter is built to share, so it works best when there’s more than one of you at the table. A few practical notes if you’re planning to order it:
Book ahead. The platter is popular, particularly at weekends, so book ahead via Book a Table.
Weekend lunch note. At Saturday and Sunday lunch, we ask every guest to order a main course, so you'll know if you’re planning to build a table around sharing plates like this one.
Pair it with something from the à la carte. Many tables treat the platter as a starting point rather than the whole meal.
Bringing a dog? They’re welcome in the Sitting Room and at the Bar during lunch, though not in the main dining room or in the evening.
Curious what else is on offer alongside it? The full Menus page has the current dinner, weekend lunch, and dessert options, updated as the seasons and the catch change.
Pairing it with wine
A seafood platter this fresh deserves something equally uncomplicated in the glass. We tend to steer guests toward a crisp, mineral-white that doesn't clash with the sweetness of good crab or the brine of a fresh oyster.
Our wine offering runs alongside the food menu rather than sitting apart from it, so you’ll find the current selection on the same Menus page. Ask a member of our team on the day, too; they’ll know what’s opened well that week and what’s pairing nicely with the platter specifically.
Not everyone wants wine with theirs, and that’s fine. A cold beer or something from the Bar works just as well if that’s more your pace.
Book a seafood evening
Whether it’s a birthday, an anniversary, or simply a good excuse to linger by the window with the dunes just visible outside, the platter suits an evening built around slowness.
If you’re planning something a little larger, a birthday dinner for a small group, or a celebration that calls for its own space, take a look at Private Dining, where the sharing-plates format the platter belongs to really comes into its own.
For everything else, a table by the window and a booking is really all you need, and we’ll do the rest.
