Momma Cherri's Big House, 2-3 Little East Street, Brighton (01273 325 305).
Meal for two, including wine and service, £50
They were putting up the twinkly lights at Momma Cherri's Big House in Brighton when we got there, and awaiting the arrival of their very own Christmas fairy. Gordon Ramsay, who featured the original Momma Cherri's on his Kitchen Nightmares series back in 2005, was coming that evening to update the show. Charita Jones, the rumbustious Momma of the joint, was planning a trip to the bookshop. 'Got to get myself a copy of his wife's cookbook,' she said, with a laugh the size of Beachy Head. So did Gordon really save the restaurant from bankruptcy? 'Course he did,' she said. 'But I'll tell you why. The moment he was seen cleaning his plate, eating up all my food, that was all the bookings I needed right there.'
Ramsay loved her menu of Southern US soul food - the fried chicken and the hush puppies, the ribs and succotash and the key lime pie. It was the way the colourful - if a little jumbled - place was run that was the problem, and he really did help sort that out. So much so that earlier this year Momma moved to bigger premises - up from 45 seats to 150 - and tomorrow, for the first Christmas Day in years, her restaurant will not be open. She will be taking Christmas Day off, because she can. Still, she has been serving her Christmas menu right up to today, and that's what I'm here for.
When I was a kid we used to have huge Christmas lunches at my house, 20 or 30 people around a makeshift contraption of trestle tables to fit them all in, and a bird the size of John Prescott with which to feed them. Then my mother decided that she'd had enough of all that cooking and for a few years we went to the Savoy Hotel in London on Christmas Day. Curiously, while the grand hotel could get all the details right - the canapes, starters and puddings - what they couldn't do was the main event. Their roast turkey was nowhere near as good as what we got at home. It was effete. It was precious. It was wrong.
So here I am at Momma's and here comes Christmas lunch, on a plate the size of a cross-Channel ferry. We have already pulled our crackers (top joke: Who is the most famous wife in America? Answer: Mrs Sippi) and now we are staring down at a mountain of food. And it's good, mostly because there has been no attempt to gussy it up. Christmas lunch is pagan winter feast-time. Its virtues are visceral, not aesthetic, and if the plate looks picture perfect it ain't being done right. So here are hunks - not feeble slices - of white and brown meat, wrapped in bacon. Here are proper roast potatoes and green beans and a dense gravy, and on the side a toothsome onion, pork and cranberry stuffing. And because this is southern soul food, where the sweet tooth is bigger than all the others, we also get dark, sticky candied sweet potato which, ooh, is more confectionery than vegetable.
To start, there were buffalo chicken wings with a hot and sour sauce which reminded the tongue it was still alive, and an earthy sweet potato, carrot and coriander soup. And of course, at the end came key lime pie and chocolate brownie, both with cream and ice cream. But the main event had made its point. By the time we finished, Charita had been to the bookshop and bought a copy of Tana Ramsay's Family Kitchen and, just to remind Gordon when he arrived that it wasn't a total love-fest, something by Antony Worrall Thompson. She hung some baubles, tested the lights and suddenly, on a deep midwinter's day down by the sea, the place sparkled. It looked just as it had all tasted - like Christmas.
