There are surprisingly few places to eat outside in Chichester. In any other European country such wide and carless streets would be lined with elegant eateries and peopled by elegant eaters until the early hours of the morning...

Chichester’s only existing street-side café shoves its plastic chairs and ugly customers out onto the pavement only as a way of alleviating the squalor within.

There are more places to sit out and drink. Several of the pubs do have ‘gardens’ but, with the possible exception of The Chichester, none of them is particularly pleasant. Until this situation is rectified, the best place in Chichester to eat or drink in the open is probably Sadlers Restaurant and Bar Ltd, 42 East Street (opposite McDonalds).

It was lucky for us then that Rapture chose to visit Sadlers on one of the hottest days of the year....

Our waitress was honest enough to suggest it would be too stuffy to eat downstairs, and put us instead at a comfortable table in ‘Chichester’s serenest patio garden’. Her disingenuousness was characteristic of the staff there; they were timid and obliging throughout, blond, English, female, and indistinguishable from one another. Not so the owner, Thierry, a lively and good-natured Frenchman who manages to maintain a decent stock of locals without intimidating the newcomer.

The menu is adequate but not large; several dishes were off, but we were informed of this as we sat down rather than as we attempted to order. There was an uncommonly good selection of fresh seafood (five of the seven specials) but only one vegetarian main course (Oven Roasted Mushrooms).

Knowing that seafood was something of a speciality I had cunningly brought a Spanish person with which to test it....

In Spain they throw away the kind of fish we eat here, and eat fish all the time. She had Grilled Langoustines and Oven Baked Sea Bass (endearingly chalked up as ‘Oven Backed’), the first of which was good, she thought, for an English restaurant but didn’t impress her much, and the second of which was excellent. I had Scallops with Bacon and a very good Sirloin Steak. For dessert we had Lemon Tart and a selection of sorbets, both of which exceeded our expectations. The meal was well paced and the portions were generous. The food was all of it good at the price, and some of it excellent.

One good test of a restaurant is how long you stay there, and it is in this that Sadlers excels....

If not quite ‘the serenest’, the patio garden is certainly one of the pleasantest places in Chichester. No one we saw eating there left in under two and a half hours, and we stayed three.

Rough prices are £4-7 for a starter, £9-14 for a main course, and £4-5 for dessert. The wine list was again adequate without being extensive, with house wines at £11 and not much above £15. We had a Cabernet Sauvignon for £10.95, which was fair at the price. For £25-30 a head you can eat and drink comfortably, and with a little care you could probably get it down to around £20 each (no more than you would pay in Ask, a few doors down).