Read’s in Kent, one of the Britain’s longest-running country restaurants with rooms, is to close down after 47 years at the end of the month. Owner-operators Rona and David Pitchford, both in their mid-seventies, say that Father Time has finally caught up with them – much as they would like to carry on for another half […]
Chef Robin Read has opened his debut restaurant as owner in his home town of Tunbridge Wells, more 30 years after a work experience placement with the Roux Brothers initiated his career. The Counter occupies a three-storey Georgian building, and follows a successful pop-up hosted by Daily Bread in the nearby village of Rusthall, which […]
Former Jamie Oliver Group boss Ryan Jacovides (left in picture) and chef Tony Rodd (right) have linked up to open a new restaurant, bar and bottle shop in Margate. Pomus opens next Thursday, 16 May, in the coastal town’s The Centre shopping precinct. The pair have both made the move to the Kent coast after […]
A new restaurant and wine bar combining Japanese-influenced food with natural wines opens today (Wednesday 21 February) in a townhouse on the Deal seafront in Kent – with yoga and treatments also available upstairs. The Blue Pelican is the latest venture from Chris Hicks and Alex Bagner, husband-and-wife team behind The Rose boutique hotel and restaurant […]
Chef Robbie Lorraine has swapped a shipping container at Pop Brixton for a Grade II listed Jacobean manor house in Kent in one of the year’s most spectacular changes in workplace scenery. South Londoner Robbie, who has cooked at Chelsea FC among other places, gained rave reviews for Only Food and Courses, the retro-inspired pop-up […]
Chef-owner Dev Biswal is to re-launch his Anglo-India Canterbury restaurant The Ambrette under a new identity as The Cook’s Tale, inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and focusing on locally sourced produce. Dev closed his original Ambrette, opposite Margate’s Turner Contemporary art gallery, earlier this year, saying he wanted to improve his work-life balance after […]
A couple brought together by the chef and writer Rowley Leigh are to open a country farmhouse restaurant-with-rooms near Deal in Kent next month. Updown Farm is a grade II-listed 17th-century farmhouse set in seven acres that has been refurbished in the past four years by Ruth Leigh – Rowley’s daughter – and Oliver Brown, who trained […]
The Salutation, a spectacular country house with restaurant opening in Kent this summer, is hosting a trial-run pop-up with a spring tasting menu over Easter. Built by Sir Edwin Lutyens in 1912 in medieval Sandwich, the Salutation was the first 20th-century building awarded Grade I listing by English Heritage. It also has a 3.7-acre garden by Gertrude Jekyll. […]
⦿ The Observer’s Jay Rayner found himself in heaven at Temper, barbecue specialist Neil Rankin’s “shot at the big time in Soho, with big London money, and bravado and punch“. “Temper is brilliant. I love the fact that you can smell the wood smoke and the rendering meat from the door. I love the way that smell […]
Cerebral foodies will gather at the LRB Bookshop near the British Museum next Thursday, September 22, to discuss the gastronomic debt England owes to French cuisine. Speakers will include chefs Stephen Harris (pictured) of Whitstable gastropub superstar the Sportsman, hailed for his “phenomenal” cooking by the Harden’s Survey, and Alexis Gauthier — one of those debts in person […]