The Crab & Lobster

This ‘little gem’ of a 17th-century pub, run as a restaurant-with-rooms on the harbour, overlooks Pagham Harbour Local Nature Reserve with its black-tailed godwits, little egrets and spoonbills. Proprietors Sam and Janet Bakose also own The Halfway Bridge, Lodsworth (see entry). Cottage-style bedrooms with soft pastel walls and fresh flowers also have some structural idiosyncrasies. A spacious deluxe room with ‘plenty of storage and a view over the salt marsh’ has ‘a floor-to-ceiling beam in the middle’, great for pole dancing but it could make ‘night-time visits to the loo a painful proposition’, while a room under the eaves is a bit short on head room. A stalwart reader, on his third visit, reaffirms his advice to choose Room 1. ‘Fish predominates’ on a varied menu with plenty of other choices. This year, ‘squid tempura and chicken croquette, curried cod loin, baked crab and duck were all very good’; a haddock fishcake was heavy on potato. Breakfast brings porridge and ‘perfect scrambled egg’ but sadly, for one reader, no Frosted Flakes to bring out the tiger in him (‘I’d have liked some cereal’). (Peter Anderson, and others)