When Chinese tourists began flocking to The Regency restaurant a few years ago, the grateful owners were left flummoxed by their new-found clientele.

It turned out an A-list celebrity had visited a few months earlier and fallen in love with the bustling seafood diner, blogging about it and making it “the most famous seafood restaurant in China”, according to one Shanghai family.

More than four years later, there’s no sign this popularity among Chinese tourists is on the wane, and it’s an interesting case of a restaurant being reinvented via the discoveries of others, while more or less staying the exactly the same.

Once home to wealthy banking widow Harriet Mellon, the site was converted into a restaurant in the 1930s, and has become one of the best known and long-lasting in Brighton.

As well as Chinese visitors it regularly welcomes and posts photographs of celebrities of varying fame levels, from men of the moment Roy Hodgson and Ken Livingstone, right down to Asian Dub Foundation and Aswad.

Add to this serious endorsements from big hitters Jay Rayner and Rick Stein and you have a deep restaurant constantly buzzing with tourists and visitors.

For a former fishing village which has surprisingly few seafood restaurants, in a town which is constantly reinventing itself, the Regency really has made an impressive success out of sticking to its guns.

With the unmistakable look of classic seaside resort restaurant, there are no fancy modern techniques going on like its neighbour The Salt Room.

Instead there is a menu of popular fishy favourites, including prawn cocktail, whitebait, scampi, calamari and good old fish and chips – as well grilled fillets and plenty of hot and cold shellfish. For the most part it is served very simply and cooked very well.

And with its Greek-Cypriot owners come a smattering of Mediterranean items which sit well in the menu.

Salty and pungent is always a good way to lurch the saliva glands into action, and few fit this as well as The Regency’s in-house taramasalata.

The oysters are fine specimens, not too much of a mouthful and with an irony vitality.

The crab is a big red beast, well cracked open and simply dressed. Our waiter would only tap his nose when we asked exactly where it was landed but it told it was local.

There’s really no need to mess around too much with fresh seafood – steamed or grilled with some lemon and piquant dipping sauce will do just fine.

And this is why The Gourmand only has himself to blame for choosing the extravaganza hot shellfish platter.

It was a reminder of Tartovsky’s Solaris, whereupon achieving his long-held fantasy, the hero quickly realises the thing he wanted so much had become a living nightmare.

A bit of a harsh exaggeration perhaps, but there was ample justification here why lobster thermidor fell out of fashion and should never be permitted a respectable return.

Succulent, tender and ultimately quite subtle in flavour, the addition of a cheesy jacket to lobster is seen as an act of great heresy by many, and here the Gourmand would have to agree.

While there may be good examples of thermidor somewhere in history, this was not one of them, the mighty tail overwhelmed by goo, the cheese like a Welsh rarebit topping, the sauce overpowered with overzealous nutmeg and mustard powder.

As a result the lobster was all but undetectable, its shell relegated to a vessel for fondue.

There was a similar dismay for the oyster parmigiani, the delicate mollusc overridden with stringy globules of cheese.

Better were the scallops, which were cooked in their shells with the tasty orange roe, and basted in brown better.

But it all added up to a rich, dairy-heavy platter, lacking the freshness which people tend to enjoy shellfish for.

Despite making the wrong choice there is still lots to love at The Regency.

Simple is what it does best, and it doesn’t get much simpler than steamed fish, and the whole seabass was delicately cooked, with a dill and lemon sauce.

Service was friendly and effective if a little rushed and inexperienced at times, dealing with pretty big mid-week numbers.

Its hard to fault a restaurant which has maintained and even boosted its popularity as the world physically changes around it, the i360 literally peering up its doorstep.

To call it an institution feels like an understatement. It's clearly the go-to place for visitors who want a classic fish and chips with a view of the sea.

But perhaps its time to ditch the naff 1980s thermidor in favour of the fresher fare it is best at.