Meet the Restaurants Brighton Team: Local Food and Drink Experts in Brighton and Hove
Who Runs Restaurants Brighton? A Local, Family Owned Team of Food and Drink Experts
Restaurants Brighton is a local, independent and family owned food and drink guide to Brighton, Hove and Sussex, founded in September 2012 by husband and wife Nick Harvey and Ivanka Majic. Our team of six lives and works among the city’s neighbourhoods, from Hanover and Kemptown to Hove, Portslade and across Sussex, and between us we bring decades of experience in hospitality, marketing, food photography and food styling, journalism, television and user experience. We visit, photograph and write about the venues we feature ourselves, work with more than 120 local businesses, and run the BRAVO Brighton Restaurant Awards, the city’s public vote for its favourite places to eat and drink. This is what we believe in.
Nick Harvey is the founder of Restaurants Brighton and one of the city’s most experienced hospitality professionals. His career began at 16 in a Nottingham hotel and took him from silver service waiter and night manager to hotel general manager in the French Alps, overseas tour operations manager and Sales and Marketing Manager at Drakes Hotel, winner of the very first BAHBA award for best newcomer. With almost four decades in hospitality, tourism and marketing, Nick now spends his days visiting, photographing and writing about Brighton’s restaurants, and founded the BRAVO Awards to give the public a vote for their favourites.
Nick is a sales and marketing expert by day, a biker by night and a ski enthusiast for as many weeks as he can get away with. Nick is also part of the Restaurants Brighton food photography team and deals with our press enquiries.
Nick’s favourite places to eat and drink in Brighton and Hove
Living in Hanover, Nick is surrounded by some of Brighton’s best loved community pubs, and you will often find him at The Howard, The Haus on the Hill or The Dover Castle, all within a short stroll of his front door. He is a regular at the Hanover Beer Festival too, a highlight of the neighbourhood’s year.
For food, his all time favourite is Unithai in Hove, where he always orders 6C from the menu, a tangy, creamy seafood noodle soup he has never been able to resist. He has been a huge fan of The Coal Shed since the earliest days of Restaurants Brighton, and he and Ivanka love its seasonal lunch and pre theatre set menu, where a Caesar salad and a steak cooked over the fire have been firm favourites. The service, he says, is exemplary.
His new favourite lunch spot is Kernel Canteen, where the Glow Bowl with shawarma spiced chicken is hard to beat, served with turmeric rice, hummus and red shatta, Lebanese slaw, carrot and sweet potato with red pepper sauce, and a tomato and cucumber salad with sumac dressing.
Read Nick’s full story and his views on Brighton’s food scene in our interview with Nick Harvey.
IVANKA
Ivanka serves as Restaurants Brighton‘s technical backbone and a source of emotional support. If there’s a problem with a piece of technology or you’re feeling a bit blue, she’s the one to speak to. When she isn’t helping us she can be found doing user research and design for the likes of Wellcome, Labour, or a government department. She is an active campaigner for climate change and likes to make sure that Restaurants Brighton is a sustainable business by all definitions of the word. Ivanka is also currently working with the University of Brighton to implement a restaurants sustainability toolkit and leads on our Women in Hospitality events plus backs the Brighton and Hove Living Wage Campaign. Get in touch with Ivanka about all things sustainable as she would love to hear from you and see you at one of our hospitality events and sustainability workshops.
Emma
Emma’s role at Restaurants Brighton is the Content Manager, she is responsible for making sure the website content is up-to-date and that our social media schedule is planned. Emma also account manages a number of our partners working closely with their venues, updating their pages, creating ideas for the Restaurants Brighton food directory and booking in content for them. Emma is also a Brighton food photographer so you might see her with a camera visiting restaurants in Brighton on our instagram reels or blogs!
Jude
Jude is Restaurants Brighton’s Content Producer. With a background in television producing, she will be focusing in on the visuals and storytelling from our partners, getting creative in our marvellous city – showcasing the best of the Brighton restaurant scene both front and back of house.
Jude also account manages a selection of our partners, collaborating with them to ensure all their latest activity and news is updated on the RB site.
Nico
At Restaurants Brighton, Nico thrives as a dedicated Client Manager. Her expertise lies in organising impactful photoshoots and curating engaging
restaurants Brighton blog topics for our partner venues. With a keen eye for detail and our quick links creator, she ensures client needs are seamlessly met, and their Brighton food and drink events and Restaurants Brighton Special offers take centre stage on our hospitality articles, posts and interviews. Her adept coordination and effective communication skills contribute significantly to Restaurants Brighton’s dynamic digital presence.
Torsten
Torsten first joined Restaurants Brighton in 2020 to write about the incredible food and drink in the city and beyond. He now serves as Partnership Ambassador, networking his way around Brighton and Hove restaurants, making parties a work-related bonus and interviewing some of the finest chefs in Brighton.
Outside of Restaurants Brighton he writes about creativity and technology for live entertainment, about LGBTQ+ lives, and destinations for Condé Nast Traveller. Here is one of Torsten’s favourite reviews at Brightons The Salt Shed. If you are interested in becoming a Restaurants Brighton partner then please get in touch with Torsten.
Torsten’s favourite places to eat and drink in Brighton and Hove
Kemptown has Torsten’s heart and, in the upper echelons of the neighbourhood, The Bell Tower is the definition of a gastropub, with its monthly changing small-plates menu that defies what a local should taste like. In Brighton Marina, Malmaison’s bar, with daily happy hours and views of the boats from its expansive terraces, shines on a sunny day.
In the unassuming Bell Tower Industrial Estate, Loud Shirt Brewing opens its taproom for taster sessions on Friday evenings and throughout Saturday afternoon and evening, where wonders such as pickle beer and a range of others keep things interesting.
Further into Kemptown, Kemptown Klub is the place where, at the end of the evening, everyone knows your name, while The Vine House allows at-bar dining (a particular favourite).
Dim sum is up there with Torsten’s all-time favourite things to eat, and China Garden on Preston Street does the tradition proud. The prawn har gow dumplings are to die for.
Our friends
Keeping our website looking super-duper are Tom and Hayley. They are based in Lancaster and Gloucestershire, they don’t need to be local to do their jobs and we like them. Most of the photos you see on our website are taken by Nick, the talented Jo Hunt photographer whose world travel photographs and beautiful food shots make for some enviable lifestyle ogling or Ellen who also takes beautiful photos.
Su at designers-i designed our branding and came up with the identity for the BRAVOs and, more recently the Sustainability Toolkit.
Brittany writes reviews and also helps us out with lots of other things in her capacity as Virtual Assistant and overall super-woman of socials.
Quite a few people help us by eating out and eating in and writing about their experience. At the moment, our lovely regular food writers are Lucy, Carys, Elle, Taryn, Charlotte, Nammie and Emma. We love this article where our reviewer Jodie talks about her families experiences with foraging in Sussex. Please get in touch if you would like to join our team.
Many people have helped us create Restaurants Brighton with their enthusiasm, writing skills, photography skills and willingness to eat great food and tell everyone about it.
A massive thank you to all of you. ❤️
Q
&
A
Restaurants Brighton is run by husband and wife Nick Harvey and Ivanka Majic, who founded the guide in September 2012. Nick brings almost four decades of experience in hospitality, tourism and marketing, and Ivanka is an expert in user experience and leads our Sustainability Toolkit with the University of Brighton. They are joined by a local team of food and drink specialists – Jude, Emma, Nico and Torsten.
Yes. Restaurants Brighton is a local, independent and family owned business, built from scratch and entirely self funded, with no investors or backers. We have never taken money from larger corporations, and we are free to champion the venues we believe in, with a particular focus on the independent businesses that give Brighton and Hove its character. We also cover micro chains, and some larger corporate chains, but only a handful.
Restaurants Brighton is based in Hanover in Brighton, where Nick and Ivanka live and work. The wider team lives across the city and county, from Kemptown to Hove, Portslade and Sussex, so between us we know the neighbourhoods we write about first hand, and you will often see us cycling between venues on our Bromptons, camera in hand. We all therefore work remotely, meet together weekly and we meet all the restaurant business owners every week.
Yes, we visit all the restaurants, pubs and cafes we feature. Our content is written and photographed by the Restaurants Brighton team of Nick, Ivanka, Emma, Jude, Nico and Torsten, whose backgrounds span hospitality, food photography, food styling, journalism, television and user experience. We also work with regular local contributors and professional photographers, including Ellen Richardson, Harvey and Justyna, all of whom live and eat in brighton and Sussex.
Restaurants Brighton has been covering Brighton, Hove and Sussex since September 2012, giving us almost fifteen years of specialist experience of the local food and drink scene. The Restaurants Brighton founder Nick Harvey has worked in hospitality since he was 16, and since 2017 we have also run the BRAVO Brighton Restaurant Awards, the city’s public vote for its favourite places to eat and drink.
We feature venues based on local knowledge, first hand visits and what our readers are looking for, from new openings and neighbourhood favourites to the best Sunday roasts and set menus. We pay particular attention to independent businesses, and the BRAVO Awards add the public’s own voice, with more than 71,000 votes cast in 2026. The Restaurants Brighton editorial policy gives you further information.
Some venues partner with us and make a contribution towards marketing costs, and in return we promote them across our website, newsletter and social channels. We also write about many non partner venues, pop ups, food and drink events and festivals, and entry to the BRAVO Awards is free for every venue. How partnerships work is set out clearly in our Editorial Policy.
We cover Brighton, Hove and Sussex, including neighbourhoods such as the Lanes, North Laine, Kemptown, Hanover, Preston Park and Brighton Marina, along with towns and villages including Lewes, Worthing, Shoreham, Eastbourne, Alfriston and Hurstpierpoint. We have no plans to cover other cities, because deep local knowledge is what makes our guide worth trusting.
