Frieze art fair co-founder Matthew Slotover will open an art-themed boutique hotel and restaurant next month a few minutes’ walk from the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate.
Fort Road Hotel launches on Monday 1 August after a four-year rebuild, which included adding an additional top floor. There are 14 guest bedrooms, and the ground floor and bar feature work by contemporary artists with connections to Margate, including Tracey Emin and Hannah Lees.
The 35-cover restaurant will focus on home-style cooking using locally sourced seasonal ingredients. Chef Daisy Cecil and consultant Gioconda Scott have put together a menu inspired by a trio of great English women cookery writers – the Victorian Mrs Beeton, and Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson from the latter half of the 20th century.
This picks up a theme from Matthew Slotover’s previous hospitality foray – his restaurant Toklas, off the Strand in London, named after Alice B Toklas, the cook and companion to Gertrude Stein, doyenne of the Paris art scene in the first decades of the 20th century.
For the Fort Road Hotel project, Slotover has partnered with property developer Gabriel Chipperfield and artist Tom Gidley.
