Michelin Plaque 
AA 1 Rosette Michelin Plaque AA 1 Rosette Le Cordon Bleu, The Shard, Core, Lympstone Manor, The Farm Table — and now, The Galley. A serious London and South-West pedigree, brought home to Topsham.
Han began with a Diplôme de Cuisine at Le Cordon Bleu in London — the foundation that taught him the discipline behind everything that followed. From there he joined Shangri-La at The Shard, then took a stage at Core by Clare Smyth, the three-Michelin-starred kitchen in Notting Hill that has become a benchmark for British modern cooking.
He moved west to Devon and worked his way through the ranks at Lympstone Manor Hotel — Michael Caines's Michelin-starred country house on the same Exe estuary you can see from our upstairs dining room. He left as a senior member of that brigade to take the role of Senior Sous Chef at The Farm Table.
He joined The Galley as Head Chef in 2024. The menu he writes here is built around what comes off the boats at Brixham and Newlands, finished with produce sourced from suppliers within an hour of the door — most of them on Fore Street. Clean, bold flavours; the precision of those kitchens, applied to local catch.
Every element on the plate should speak for itself. The fish is the hero. The sauce exists to serve it. The sides are chosen because they make the fish better — not because they round out the composition for its own sake.
Where Han's Chinese culinary heritage shows up — the tiger prawn wontons, the soy-braised pork belly, the occasional lift of Sichuan pepper in a sauce — it's there to add depth, not novelty.
"The head chef's favourite — pan-fried sea bream with puttanesca and crispy capers — epitomises this philosophy. Deceptively simple: the bream fresh and unadorned, yet complemented by a complex, bold sauce that elevates without overshadowing the fish."DRIFT Journal — January 2026
Han writes the menu each morning after a conversation with Brixham Harbour and Newlands Market. When plaice couldn't be sourced last autumn because of a run of storms, he rewrote the mains section overnight.
That flexibility is, in his view, what separates a restaurant cooking seasonally from one that simply prints the word "seasonal" on a menu.
What Brixham and Newlands landed this morning is what's on the plate tonight.
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41 Fore Street — since 1993 The restaurant trades from a Grade II-listed building on Topsham's oldest commercial street. The view from the upstairs dining room is of the Exe estuary — the same stretch of water the building was first built to look out onto.
We seat forty across two rooms. Read about the suppliers we work with, or see the awards the kitchen holds.
The Galley is run by the Mitchell family. Patrick is manager and co-owner today — following in his father Nigel's footsteps. Nigel bought the restaurant in 2013, after a career that took him from a Covent Garden pub to Padstow's Seafood Restaurant under Rick and Jill Stein. Patrick started here washing dishes on weekend evenings while at school. Now he runs it.
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Bookings open ninety days out. There's always a seat at the bar for walk-ins. Tuesday to Saturday, lunch and dinner.