Meet Nick Harvey from Restaurants Brighton

Hi Nick! Can you tell us a bit about who you are and what you do?

Hi! My name is Nick and I’m the Founder of Restaurants Brighton and the BRAVO awards. My day to day focus revolves around working with our small and finely tuned team to shout about our fantastic local hospitality scene. I am continually looking for online marketing opportunities and I am the person who sits for hours at a time looking at SEO rankings, search volumes and how we can be better. Currently I am also investing time in a sustainability toolkit for hospitality. This is a project we are working on with academics from the University of Brighton and is a project which my wife and business partner Ivanka is leading on. It is such an exciting project because wouldn’t it be great to build a local knowledge hub as a sustainability toolkit which can be used locally and even nationally to help us do our bit to help the planet. 

You used to run The Brighton Business Curry Club, and have a background in restaurant marketing and website development – how did this experience all come together to create Restaurants Brighton?

The Brighton Business Curry Club combined event management experience from 7 years working for a UK tour operator abroad and using my degree in marketing all those years ago. The Curry Club was a wonderful event which ran for about 6 years and it offered a fun approach to networking at a monthly event. Networking is such an important part of relationship building with fellow businesses and it creates an important referral system. If I had to start it all again then networking would be a key part of my sales and marketing plan!

Restaurants Brighton presented itself in 2011 as there was a huge gap in the market when I started the business. We actually set the website up for search engines that year, had a year off to go travelling, then when we came home the website had started moving up the search engine rankings which was perfect. I remember winning my first client all those years ago which was Raz Hazelat’s - then brand new - Coal Shed! Now we work with over 100 hundred great restaurants, bars, pubs and cafes across Brighton, Hove and Sussex as well as a number of suppliers. Marketing has changed massively since those early days and it's extremely important to innovate as technology changes. When it comes to technology, we are very lucky to have our Ivanka, who has an incredible background in technology and user experience so we can deliver the best possible online platforms for our consumers and the partners we work with.

The foundations for Restaurants Brighton were created because I understood Brighton and Hove very well. Having worked with both the Drakes Hotel and Stanmer House as start up launch products I had the networks across the city in place and was able to combine it with my own skill base which was evolving all the time. For example, with Restaurants Brighton we soon realised that food photography was a key skill needed for the business, so I embarked on a photography course to become a food photographer which meant we could look as good as possible online. In those early days, very few venues had the volume of professional photographs needed for online marketing and it was a challenge we had to solve.

Can you give us an insider’s sneak peek at any of the up-and-coming restaurants we should be looking out for in Brighton?

There are always new hospitality businesses launching in Brighton and this makes everything so exciting when it comes to shouting about new places to eat. Our new restaurants in Brighton page summarises all the latest openings in the city and it remains one of the most popular pages on our site because people always want to try something new!

Just opened in Brighton, Hove or Sussex includes Deco at Saltdean Lido, Apiary at Norfolk Square and White Horses in Rottingdean. Ones to watch out for later this year include Pearly Cow on the seafront and the exciting relocation of the Coal Shed restaurant. We are also excited about Oeuf Cafe opening up their second venue behind Hove station!  

You work on a few projects around Restaurants Brighton – your Tip Jar newsletter, Restaurants Brighton Jobs – and you’re now working on a sustainability toolkit with the University of Brighton. How important is collaboration to all of this?

Collaboration and partnerships are hugely important to everything we do. We see the hospitality scene in Brighton is part of an ecosystem of interdependent venues and suppliers, businesses and organisations in a city that depends on this community to thrive. Hospitality is where we work, where we celebrate and commiserate and where we eat and drink. Without it, in all its wonderful diversity, Brighton would be a very different place. We need many successful venues for everyone to thrive.

Projects like Tip Jar - our monthly hospitality newsletter which knits the Brighton and Sussex hospitality industry together - and Restaurants Brighton Jobs (our free hospitality recruitment website) - are a great way for us to support the industry we all rely on. Tip Jar features information about the industry, who has won awards, we champion Sussex suppliers, there are interviews with inspirational hospitality folk, industry discounts, hospitality events, jobs and much more. If you work in the industry or are a supplier to the industry - or are curious - you can sign up here. Please do spread the word where you can and please use this free service.

As I have already mentioned, the sustainability toolkit is a project partnership with the University of Brighton to create a dynamic and evolving Sustainability Toolkit. By Earth Day 2025, we aim to demonstrate the tangible impact of this accessible, free, and evolving resource. The toolkit empowers restaurant owners to assess and enhance their environmental and social sustainability practices in collaboration with suppliers and staff. Benefits include improved efficiencies, reduced costs, and enhanced brand reputation.

Collaboration is everything on the sustainability toolkit and we are extremely grateful to the businesses who have shown support and shared their sustainability case studies to date. If you want more information about the project you can get in touch with Ivanka here.

We are also very grateful to partners and supporters like Visit Brighton, Brighton and Hove Food Partnership, Brilliant Brighton, Brighton Chamber and numerous others who help us share the word on all the work we do. 

We’d of course be remiss not to ask you about the BRAVO Awards. You’ve been running this celebration of Brighton food and drink since 2017. How did it start, and what’s the biggest thing you’ve learned over eight years of BRAVO Awards?

Since the creation of Restaurants Brighton, our restaurant partners have always encouraged the creation of a fair, publicly voted set of awards and so in 2017 I had a Eureka moment in the shower and came up with the concept for the BRAVOS - Brighton Restaurant Awards Vote Online (do you see what I did there!?). Since then we have seen the awards grow to what it is today, which is the largest celebration of food and drink in our city. This year we have had close to 70,000 votes and 680+ venues have participated in the awards. We deliberately time the BRAVOS to coincide with the part of the year which is traditionally more quiet giving everyone something to shout about and that way we can announce the winners in time for them to make the most of it.

We’ve learned that the awards are extremely popular and people really do care a lot about the independent venues they visit! It is largely about supporting the independent Sussex based businesses and this is one of the reasons we so love Brighton!

We’ve also understood that it takes a lot of work to make it a success and it is only thanks to our small and mighty RB team that we can make it happen. The BRAVOS are a huge project for us and we couldn’t do it without the energy and encouragement from every single participating venue, our sponsors, our partners and supporters like Fatboy Slim who has contributed his time so generously. Every venue that writes a post, creates a fun video or hands out a card generates votes for themselves and positive energy for their peers. It’s all that energy and mutual support that make the BRAVOS so special and so inspiring. It’s a wonderful celebration of an industry built on hard work.

Perhaps more Chamber members could join in and celebrate their favourite spots?

And a final question, because members love to get to know a bit about the person behind the business, can you tell us about your summer motorcycle trip to Transylvania?

What a lovely question! Yes, I am a motorcycle fanatic and back in 2011 Ivanka and I travelled from the top to the bottom of the world by motorcycle - this was from the most northerly part of Alaska to Tierra Del Fuego at the most southerly tip of Argentina. It was a honeymoon to remember and before we had our daughter and two dogs and it is probably the best thing I have ever done travelling-wise. Ivanka and I were on one bike, a BMW, fully loaded with camping equipment and we rode 45,000 km through 15 countries over 10 months. You can see our journey here on our YouTube Channel. This involved bears, helicopter rides, crossing rivers and deserts and visiting Machu Picchu by motorcycle.

Romania is about the size of adventure I can have these days and I loved it! Bran castle and Transylvania was a week-long trip and was all about going to visit Dracula’s castle and it was my friend Andy’s idea as he always wanted to go. So on the way we went through incredible countries like Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Bulgaria and many more. It was a whirlwind tour with many hours in the bike saddle, experiencing great food along the way, plenty of mountain climbs, truck stops, hospitality, border crossings and the highlight was definitely the castle. What was fascinating about Dracula’s castle was the history of the barbaric royalty that used to exist there years ago. The torture chambers, the battles between nations and the torture devices of yesteryear. Bran castle was made famous by Bram Stoker all those years ago, Bran castle and the tales of torture, were what inspired the story of Dracula to what it is today! I’d definitely recommend you go and visit Romania, if I could compare it to another country I would say it’s a little bit like Mexico as it’s a colourful country, great food, gentle kind people, plus I found it an adventure as it is different to many parts of Europe. 

Nick Harvey is Founder of Restaurants Brighton and the BRAVO Awards. Find out more about Restaurants Brighton here. 

If you want to contribute to the Chamber blog, contact us on hannah@brightonchamber.co.uk