A small hotel and restaurant on the Quay opposite Ha'penny Pier, in a handsome nineteenth-century brick building that once served as the booking office for the Great Eastern Railway's North Sea steamers. The ground-floor restaurant is the best in town — a focused menu of modern British food with a heavy lean on local seafood (Stour oysters, Mersea crab, North Sea cod), large windows looking out across the harbour, and a quietly serious wine list.
It is not cheap by Harwich standards — main courses are upper-teens to mid-twenties pounds — but it is a properly grown-up dinner, and the upstairs rooms make it a sensible place to overnight if you are catching an early ferry.