Natalia Ribbe: “I want to leave my stamp on Margate”

Natalia Ribbe’s Margate restaurant and wine bar takes its name from Sète (pronounced set) in the south of France. Earlier this year, she made her first trip to the port city, which is just west of Montpellier in the Languedoc.

“We opened about a year ago so it’s all a bit embarrassing,” she says. “The locals were bemused that I had named my restaurant after a city I had never been to. But I’m happy to report it was everything I hoped it to be and more. The place is a real vibe.”

With a natural wine bar to the front and a more recently launched restaurant to the rear serving a modern European menu with a heavy French influence, Sète is not directly inspired by its namesake city.

“I think of it more as a twinning,” explains Ribbe, whose previous restaurant project Barletta​​ took its name from a commune in Puglia. “It turns out that Sète has a lot in common with Margate. It’s a hub for artists and the food and natural wine scene is amazing. It’s also affordable, lots of young people have moved down from Paris.”

Swapping the big smoke for the north Kent coast

Ribbe is well-known in the industry as the founder of Ladies Of Restaurants – a networking group for women in hospitality - and is one of a number of skilled operators to have left the capital to ply their trade in the North Kent seaside town.

She has been part of Margate’s burgeoning restaurant scene since 2019 when she launched Barletta with her then partner chef Jackson Berg. As one of the town’s more vocal advocates, she doesn’t take too kindly to me describing the place as ‘a bit rough and ready’. "Hackney is rough-and-ready,” she points out. “Sure, Margate has some growing to do. But it is a very special place.”

She’s right. The town does have some remarkably good places to eat and drink. Low rents have made it relatively easy for forward-thinking hospitality businesses to set up shop to the point that Margate can now be considered a foodie destination, something that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. But in common with most other seaside resorts, the off-season can be tough.

“Sète is going well. But there are things that keep me up at night. It’s stressful. It’s a tough environment at the moment wherever you are. But we have a beautiful building, an amazing team, and a great product. We are also surrounded by like-minded businesses. I want to bring more people to the town. I have a seven-year lease on this place. I want to leave my stamp on Margate.”

Coming up in New York 

Having grown up in New Jersey, Ribbe is familiar with rainy seaside resorts. She has hospitality in her blood. Her father – who is of German descent – was a hotel manager and moved the family around Eastern Europe throughout Ribbe’s teenage years.

After attending university in Austria, she returned to the US to continue her theatre studies in New York. She didn’t much like auditioning for parts, but she loved treading the boards in restaurants. Her godfather was the general manager of a restaurant in Tribeca called Danube and, at the tender age of 19, she ended up running the floor.

"I had absolutely no business being a maître d' at a Michelin-starred place. But it was so much fun, and it taught me a lot. It was fast-paced and intense. Each night was a performance,” says Ribbe, who went on to work for the (even more frenetic) Blue Water Grill on Union Square.

Culturally stuck somewhere between the US and Europe, Ribbe swapped New York for London in 2012 seeing the UK as a middle ground between the two. She briefly worked at Soho’s Kettner's but soon moved over to Fitzrovia’s Riding House Café, which was at the time operated by Clive Watson and Adam White (the former is no longer involved with the business).

“That restaurant was a real moment in London’s eating out scene,” she says. “It was very New York in its approach. I initially worked as a receptionist, but it was always my intention to get off the restaurant floor. At that time in my life, I felt ashamed being ‘just’ a waitress or ‘just’ a receptionist. I feel very differently about it all now. In fact, looking back, being a waitress at Blue Water Grill was the best job I ever had.”

Leaving the restaurant floor

Ribbe was soon promoted to oversee marketing and events for the group, which at the time comprised Riding House Café and Bermondsey’s Village London and The Garrison. After a few years with Watson and White, she spent five years or so as a freelance marketer and events organiser working with restaurants as well as restaurant-related companies including Tabasco and Magic Breakfast, a charity that provides healthy breakfasts to schools. During this period, she set up Eight Six List, a series of dinners run by up-and-coming chefs and sommeliers, and – latterly – Ladies Of Restaurants.

Ribbe got together with Berg in 2018. Following a string of pop-ups, the pair launched Barletta at Margate’s Dreamland theme park in 2019. Her first encounter with Margate was on a rainy day in February when the town was not looking its best. “It was so depressing,” she recalls. “But I have always been a glass half full sort of person. Although I would also say that opening an ambitious restaurant in an amusement park on the north Kent coast was an odd idea.”

Ribbe admits that she didn’t really understand the Margate market at that point, instead relying on Berg who had local intel having already run pop-up restaurant Xiringuito in the town a few years before. "I was quite naive. You can't be London or New York in Margate.”  

In 2021, the pair moved Barletta to Margate’s Turner Contemporary art gallery, which turned out to be a better fit than Dreamland, which has yet to fully reopen following the pandemic and is now only used for events. In the summer of 2022, they revealed their plans to double up with Sète. But soon after the restaurant launched it came to light that Barletta had been the victim of a £50,000 banking scam that ultimately led to its closure.​​ It was around this time that Ribbe and Berg parted ways. 

Doing everything

All this explains why Ribbe has only just found the time to make the pilgrimage to Sète. Indeed, when Restaurant​ first visited the restaurant shortly after it launched at the tail end of last year, she was serving drinks in the bar and plating – and in some cases even cooking – the food herself (and very nice it was too).

This summer, Billy Stock was employed as Sète’s chef​​ having previously cooked at The Rose Inn to considerable acclaim. Close to Canterbury, the venue made the Top 50 Gastropubs list under his tenure and was also listed in The Good Food Guide.

“There was a small window in which I was losing my mind and I thought that I would be the chef at Sète. Billy and I laugh about that often. Sometimes we’ll be in the middle of a busy service and I’ll say ‘hey Billy, remember that time when I was going to be the chef?’” 

Stock currently cooks largely unaided save for a kitchen porter at busier times. This means the menu needs to be short with Ribbe capping restaurant covers at 35 per service. A number two is currently being sought for Stock, whose dishes include the likes of pâté de campagne with mustard and cornichons; deep-fried sweetbreads with sauce gribiche; skate with butter sauce, caviar and cucumber; and crispy duck leg with braised chicory and burnt orange sauce.

Going au naturel

Margate might be a hotspot for low-intervention wine – other businesses to major in it include Little Swift, Sargasso, Angela’s and Urchin Wines – but shifting the stuff can be an uphill battle.

“It’s not that much of a thing here," admits Ribbe, who says she is constantly having to talk to people about what it is and what it isn’t. That said, it’s an easier sell than at Barletta thanks to Sète's Cliftonville location. The area is around a 10-minute walk from the town centre meaning that most people seek the restaurant out rather than stumbling across it.

"I love the concept of low-intervention wine. It's raw and real and there are some great stories behind the people that make it,” says Ribbe, whose obsession (her word) with the genre started about a decade ago when she started propping up the bar at Hackney’s Sager + Wilde.

“I like to try and find the hidden gems. At the moment, we are mainly working with Uncharted Wines and Sager and Wine. That’s partly because I love those portfolios but also because there are other places in the town that use other suppliers. It’s important we all offer different things.”

Sète operates a try-before-you-buy policy. “I don't want anyone sitting with a glass of wine that they hate in front of them. I have lengthy conversations with people about what they normally drink. If I can get some buzz words out of them, I can filter through my own collection and find something they will like. I also appreciate that the price of some of our wines is relatively high. If people only want to drink our delicious house wine (which is served via keg) for £5 a glass that’s fine.”

Keeping busy

As one might expect given its owner’s background, Sète has a busy calendar of events. Recent ones include collaborations with London’s Bistro Freddie and Ramsgate’s Rakookoo and a number of wine-related events, including one with cult German producer Wein Goutte.

“I never feel like I’m doing enough. It’s different if you are a Michelin-starred destination, but neighbourhood restaurants such as ours need to have stuff going on. Restaurants can stagnate. Plus, I want to see my industry friends. Restaurants are a business, but they should also be fun."

Unsurprisingly given the amount she has on her figurative plate, Ladies Of Restaurants is currently largely dormant, although she is still in regular contact with a lot of her female peers.

In part, Ribbe’s reticence to bring Ladies Of Restaurants back is down to the criticism she has received from some in the industry (mainly, but not always, men) that the organisation is not inclusive enough.

She even briefly changed the name to Good Shift. “I had a bit of a breakdown about it all and tried to change it to make it for everyone. But then I was like ‘Natalia, it’s Ladies Of Restaurants. It’s for women’. Being a woman in this industry is a different experience to being a man in this industry.

Ladies Of Restaurants never excluded men but – as its name suggests – was focused on issues that largely pertain to women. “I miss it," she says. "It feels remiss not to have that space and there is certainly an appetite for it.

"I'm trying to work out what we need as women and that’s not easy because I feel a bit removed from it all. The team at Sète is largely made up of women and we have created a good environment here.”