Work has just begun on the site, close to Café Rust, which has been The Set’s home since 2021.
The first permanent incarnation of The Set will be tiny, seating just 12 covers, making it the smallest top-end restaurant in the city of Brighton and Hove.
The site is so bijou that it is exempt from business rates. It will be run by a team of three, with Kenny and Miasik working alongside a single front-of-house staff member, Georgia Fenwick.
Following a complete overhaul, the restaurant is expected to launch in May.
The Set will have counter seating with room for five on each side with a clever split design to allow guests to be served easily, two window seats and a small, semi open kitchen to the rear.
Speaking to Restaurant, Kenny says the space has been carefully chosen to mitigate some of the challenges currently facing the high-end dining sector.
“The site is very small but it ticks all our boxes. A dozen or so covers is perfect for us and will allow us to refine our food, although we’ll still be focused on big flavours.
“It’s not an obvious location for a restaurant like The Set, but we like the area. A lot of our customers live around here,” he says.
Kenny adds that the off-pitch location makes financial sense. “The Set isn’t the sort of place people are going to walk past and nip into for a quick lunch.
“Nothing is cheap anymore, but the rent is roughly two thirds of what it would cost to run a restaurant in a central area of Brighton such as The Lanes.”
It is understood that the total investment into the site is around £150,000, an extremely low sum to get an ambitious restaurant off the ground.
“It has to be inexpensive because we’re only a 10-to-12-cover restaurant. We don’t want to be paying it off for the rest of our lives. We need to be realistic.
“We’ve been saving up and planning for it for a long time. Shared spaces are great, but we’ve always wanted our own place. It seems like a bad time to open a restaurant given the challenges the industry is facing, but it feels like the right time for us.”
A changing menu
The Set will change up its offer throughout the week in a bid to broaden its appeal while making full use of the space.
“We want to give people what they need. We know that doing a full tasting menu five or six days a week in Brighton does not work,” Kenny explains.
From Thursday to Saturday evenings, the restaurant will offer its signature lengthy tasting menu, priced at around £100, showcasing the pair’s edgy Asian-influenced cuisine.
On Sundays and Mondays, the restaurant will be given over to Tony Tsang, the chef behind Brighton sushi pop-up Masu Omakase. On Sundays it will operate as an all-day à la carte sushi concept, while Mondays will feature an izakaya-style offering created with the city’s hospitality workers in mind.
Tuesdays will see the restaurant made available to a local charity initiative, using surplus ingredients to provide food for people in need. Tuesdays will also mark the return of The Set’s ONIGIRI-4-ALL charity initiative, run in collaboration with Tsang.
The Set’s popular MAD (Midweek Affordable Dining) menu, priced at around £45, will return on Wednesdays.
“It’s something that has worked very well for us. We totally appreciate that not everyone can afford £100 for a menu. It will be a place where we can experiment. The big difference compared with the current MAD offer is that it will be more aligned with the main menu,” Kenny adds.
While the team will look to explore lunch at some point, the initial focus will be on dinner service.
The Set launched in 2014 as a pop-up at Brighton’s Cafe Coho on Queen’s Road, before moving to the Artist Residence hotel, where it closed during the pandemic. Around the end of the pandemic, the pair decamped to Café Rust.
Towards the end of last year, the pair launched a crowdfunding campaign for a permanent site which raised more than £20,000 from 175 backers.