When choosing where to eat in Rye, you’ll be spoilt for choice for takeaway options for the most delicious picnics, homemade scotch eggs, the freshest local catches from the Rye Fish Market and candy-striped bags full of traditional sweets. Here are the places not to miss.
For next-level homemade picnics Rye Deli on Market Street should be your first port of call. Its range of delicious fresh quiches, pies, pates, sandwiches, salads, and cakes is so extensive that they’ve moved around the corner to a bigger premises. Here you’ll find every conceivable glaze, condiment, chutney, and jelly, and the quite brilliantly named “homage to fromage,” a room dedicated to over 50 carefully selected cheeses, with many locally made picks, plus huge truckles to peruse for a real treat.
For more takeaway treats, pop into the lovely 1720-built Mermaid St. Café, you won’t miss its quaint whitewashed clapboard exteriors and aquamarine shutters. Pick from fresh homemade crab baps with a smidge of lemon mayo, the pan-fried Rye Bay scallop and crispy bacon bap, piping hot pasties, sausage rolls with chili jam and epic scotch eggs. There’s also an ice cream window serving everything from Panna Cotta and raspberry to maple and pecan to cappuccino or rum and raisin.
For the freshest sourdough loaves and tempting pastries, there’s a whole counter of treats of indulgent cakes to take away from The White House (the almond croissants are to die for…). Add a couple of steaming flat whites to your order, pick up the weekend papers from the nearby newsagent and retreat to bed. Bliss.
For an evening spent with a glass of wine in hand, cooking up a feast in your kitchen, Rye is full of places to buy delicious fresh fish and meat. Down on Simmonds Quay overlooking Rock Channel, you’ll find the Rye Fish Market, which has a huge selection of local fish caught daily from their boats along the Sussex coastline. They’ll fillet and prepare your fish any way that you like and are on hand for cooking tips. Think monkfish, red mullet, local gurnard, bream, hake, and clams. They also cook their own lobster, crabs, and whelks.
The Rye Fish Market deli sells oysters, dressed crabs, herrings in dill, rollmops, and cockles and if you’re popping into their recently opened Seafood Bar, you can tuck into the likes of mackerel fillet on grilled sourdough with rhubarb chutney and chilli salted tiger prawns. For the very best harbour-fresh fish and piping-hot chips in town, Marino’s Fish Bar is a firm favourite. Take your order straight to the sea to tuck in while watching the tide roll away.
For any extra cooking bits, you might need Jempsons Superstore which stands right in the centre of Rye and is a modern store with a traditional feel. It’s been serving the community since 1935 and although it’s now in partnership with Morrissons, it retains a sense of identity and character. There’s a great mix of local and well-known products, a deli counter and all the staples you might need, plus things like charcoal if you’re thinking of firing up the BBQ. It’s open until 10pm Monday to Saturday but closed on Sundays.
Is it a trip to the British coast without dipping into a traditional sweet shop for a gloriously pleasing candy-striped paper bag of sugary delights? Britcher and Rivers Sweet Shop, is one of the oldest around, where you can pick up all your long-forgotten favourites (weighed out from the jars, of course). Rye Candy is great fun for children, there’s a life-size boat in the middle of the shop laden with choices.
If it’s chocolate you’re looking for to sate your sweet tooth, you’re in luck. Rye Chocolates makes incredible single-origin artisan chocolate and say they have “a flavour for every person and every occasion.” They produce 500 to 600 bars a day and are even stocked in the British Library. When you check into your Camber Holiday Cottage, you’ll find your own welcome bar of Rye Chocolate with a beautiful branded label.
For a small town, Rye makes a lot of good chocolate, as there’s also the infamous Knoops, for the most delicious hot chocolate around. They’ve also just started selling ice-cream, try the towering soft serve with sweet sticky honeycomb drizzled in Knoops chocolate sauce.
For tipples, Rye Fine Wines on Cinque Ports Street has a fantastic choice of bottles and super-friendly service to help you find what you’re looking for. They offer free delivery within five miles of Rye, for mixed cases of six or more. For beer to take away try the quirky Rye Waterworks micro-brewery. Housed in an old water pump house, they sell eight local ales, two keg beers and twelve local ciders.
If it’s a wellness fix, you have in mind, Rye Health Store has a full range of organic health foods from cacao to natural teas to honey. And for the freshest fruit and vegetables, Tibbs Farm has been running a pick your own for 40 years, from sweet, plump dribble down your chin strawberries to tart gooseberries (they grow seven different varieties).
Across the growing season you can pick everything from apricots, raspberries, tayberries, blackcurrants, tummelberries and boysenberries. Look out for the free guided farm walks they put on from time to time, and their seasonal delights, from pumpkins at Halloween, Christmas trees and a brilliant cafe selling jams made from their fruit.
When it comes to takeaway treats, dogs are very well catered for in Rye, head for Paws n Claws with their own natural deli selection of pizzles, rabbit sticks, jars of liver sausages and their own homemade organic kibble, so four-legged friends won’t miss out on any picnic fun.
