This year marks a huge milestone for Fourth & Church as they celebrate ten years at the heart of Brighton’s food and drink scene. What began as a neighbourhood spot with a passion for flavour and wine has grown into an award-winning Brighton restaurant and destination for wine lovers across the city and beyond. Known for its inventive menus, extraordinary sherry collection, and team that makes everyone feel welcome, Fourth & Church has built a loyal following over the last decade. To mark the occasion, we sat down with Sam Pryor to talk about their BRAVO wins, what makes their food and wine so special, and what’s next for the restaurant as they enter their second decade.
Your lunch offering has been voted the best in Brighton and Hove at the 2025 BRAVOS. What’s the experience like for someone dining with you at lunchtime?
We really pride ourselves on our set lunch menu. It changes regularly taking advantage of seasonal produce, we revisit and improve previous dishes and use it as a platform to develop new dishes with exciting flavours. Our guests might be popping out for a quick lunch on a break or be regulars enjoying a longer lunch exploring our extensive drinks list.
Everyone gets the same friendly welcome and knowledgeable unpretentious service.
What do you personally like most about the BRAVO Awards?
It is a great way to engage with customers bringing them in to what we do, we always get great feedback.
It is an important focus for the team and we are always inspired by the energy and enthusiasm of the Restaurants Brighton team.
What’s your best-selling lunch dish right now, and why do you think it’s such a favourite?
Pan Roasted Hake, Purple Sprouting Broccoli, Confit Tomatoes, Vadouvan Veloute.
It really speaks of late summer and the beginning of autumn, making use of some lovely seasonal vegetables from local farms. Hake is a delicious fish and marries really well with the deep umami flavours from the Vadouvan spice mix, which has been on the menu in one guise or another since the beginning and is the foundation to many of our most popular dishes through the years. It’s made in house by slowly caramelizing onions, garlic, shallots and spices and slowly drying them over two days.
Your wine list is consistently recognised as one of the best. What makes your selection so special?
Our focus is on niche wines; we champion winemakers who care deeply about their vines, their land and the wine they produce, but more importantly wines we love to drink.
We have over 25 wines available by the glass, and most of the time many more! As a hybrid bar and restaurant / wine shop with an ecommerce site, we stand out from the crowd. We have over 800 wines available to drink in by the bottle from our bursting shelves, on top of our award winning wine list.
Our passionate and expert team are always on hand to advise guests, whatever their taste or budget or how adventurous they might be feeling!
Our ethos is to never judge or use language that alienates our customers to ensure that everyone who walks through our doors drinks something wonderful.
Small growers, specialist spirits and vermouths form the backbone of our aperitif, cocktail and wine lists. We offer a daily changing selection of wine by the glass, weekly changing lists and blackboard specials of odd bottles, rarities or whatever the weather dictates. This allows us to take advantage of what is on offer from the myriad of merchants and producers we work with.
Do you have a few favourite wines on your shelves that you’d recommend to someone visiting for the first time?
Our focus has always been Sherry, it’s the region that inspired the business and we love the wines, they pair so fantastically with food. As we have probably the largest selection of Sherry on the South Coast and co-owner and sherry educator Paul is completely obsessed, you would be missing out if you didn’t try one of our many sherries available by the glass or to take away!
Following a team trip to Jerez in February, a current favourite is the always fabulous Innocente Fino Sherry from Valdespino.
This single-vineyard Fino sherry from the historic Pago Macharnudo vineyard in Jerez is made from 100% Palomino grapes and has a minimum aging period of eight years. Straw-yellow color, savory aromas of bread dough, almonds, and olives, and a refreshing, bone-dry, saline palate with a long, complex finish. This never fails to deliver.
Garnacha from Gredos in Spain is also a real area of interest for us right now; elegant, aromatic single-vineyard wines from wild, high-altitude sites. A landscape that we have been lucky enough to visit a few times, meeting farmers and small winemaking teams. These people are investing their time and lives in the mountains and are who we enjoy working with most.
From the Garnacha whisperer himself, one of our favourite winemakers Daniel Ramos has made an utter gem in his Kapi Rose 2019.
Ripe strawberry, peach, woody herbs, orange zest with notes of meat and an earthy long finish. A rose with a difference!
You host a range of events — can you tell us more about your wine tastings and other special evenings?
Our legendary events have developed and improved over the ten years that we have been running them.
We aim to give maximum value and enjoyment over a range of price points with different food and drink styles to both welcome those new to the wine world and encourage those that have enjoyed the classics for years to try something new! The focus is always how we share our passion for rarer grape varietals or lesser known regions with our lovely guests.
We host smaller, more intimate Brighton Wine Tastings around our bar or in our newly designed Private Dining Room up to larger tasting events where the whole restaurant is closed for a ticketed event.
Previous events have focused on a particular wine style (Manzanilla, Grower Champagne, deep dives into Riesling), country (Georgia Amber wines, back roads of Spain, the mountains, islands and volcanos of Italy) or even winemaker (Raier Schnaitman, Luis Pato) all expertly paired with exquisite little dishes and a lot of wine chat!
We spend a lot of time working with our wonderful network of suppliers, many of whom we now consider friends who help us to host tastings, masterclasses and events.
We hold small amounts of reserve wines, special bottles or wines that we have on small allocations that we have cellared for a while before we release which we often pull out as special treats on our events!
Our events are never stuffy but hit that sweet spot of being fun yet informative (but we can always go super wine geek, no need to ask twice!)
How do you go about choosing the wines for your list and for your tastings?
After ten years of trading, we have cultivated a reputation for our excellence on food and wine pairings. We are super passionate about how flavours work together and how a wine can lift and change an aspect of a dish to truly make your senses dance!
We always try to champion categories that have points of interest, USP’s or that we just simply love. Strong points are Riesling, Sherry, Jura and back roads of Spain.
We change wine lists up to twice a week depending on what people are drinking, the weather and what we have on our menu.
Decisions on what we might list also depends on whether we are taking part in any initiatives, such as English Wine Week, 31 Days of German Wine or International Sherry Week.
We try to ensure that we have a balance of price points, grape varietals, countries and styles to suit all budgets and tastes so that everyone feels welcomed and can find something they love, and hopefully a new favourite!
What do you think makes your overall approach — from food to wine — stand out from other restaurants and wine bars in Brighton?
Our cooking is based on building flavours and umami through building blocks such as spice mixes. We also enjoy fermenting and culturing foods with mackerel xo and beetroot kvas on the menu at the moment. It is an excellent way of preserving the season’s bounty. We keep our preserved citrus and misos for many years and watch the flavours develop.
Continue to push and develop our food and drink offerings gaining inspiration from the Levant, southern Europe and changing tastes. We have recently been working on our Lo and No offerings.
Today we are an award winning restaurant and a destination for wine lovers (largest sherry collection in South Coast, specialising in Jura and Savoie as well as the back roads of Spain and Italy).
Maintaining such a high standard year after year is no small task. How do you consistently deliver great menus and excellent service?
It’s all about developing our team.
We do this on a daily basis with menu tastings with the kitchen and front of house discussing the dishes, wine pairings and how we conduct our service.
We also have wine tastings on a weekly basis with suppliers and specialists, exploring our own portfolio and new wines and how these can be shared with our customers. We organise team trips for example to Jerez, English vineyards, Italy, Germany or Spain or maybe just a trade tasting or restaurant trip to London.
Keeping people motivated and inspired is very important and part of developing a culture where people are excited to bring excellent food and wine to our guests.
Looking ahead, what exciting plans do you have for the next six months — whether new wines, menus, or events?
We are currently busy planning for International Sherry Week 2025, which here at Fourth and Church lasts all of November! Paul is currently busy ‘researching’ in Jerez, Spain discovering hidden gems and in preparing for this month of fun. There will be a daily changing specials board, curated sherry flights, dinner with pairings and lots and lots of sherry chat!
In line with our ethos of always pushing and evolving, we are currently in the middle of a re-design of our Private Dining Room; an intimate, self-contained setting that’s perfect for small gatherings and will be the perfect space for some phenomenal tastings as well as some pretty unforgettable Christmas celebrations this year! Contact anna@fourthandchurch.co.uk
for details.
With our 10 year anniversary of trading coming up we have been busily planning some special surprises.
To celebrate this amazing milestone we have been working on some spectacular wine lists and menus: look out for some classic signature dishes making a reappearance, favourite wines being pulled out of the (extensive) cellar and special events to thank all of those guests, customers and suppliers that have supported us to make Fourth and Church the fantastic place it is today.
Sign up to our newsletter and follow us on socials to be the first to hear.
