Gourmet Kent: England’s new culinary hotspot

For a long time, Kent’s high-end food outlets flew under the national radar. If eating well was your passion, you’d make regular pilgrimages to The Goods Shed in Canterbury, a daily farmers’ market and restaurant that opened in 2002 and where you can still fill your basket with extraordinarily good local cheeses, meat, fish and seasonal goodies. Or you would lunch at The Sportsman at Seasalter, near Whitstable, where chef Stephen Harris won his first Michelin star in 2008. If you really knew your stuff, you might even book into The West House at Biddenden.

In the past five years, however, something in Kent’s food scene has shifted. From Whitstable round to Folkestone, and inland as far as Bedgebury and Sissinghurst, multiple high-end openings have changed the culinary landscape. The trend is driven, at least in part, by Londoners leaving the city as working rhythms and priorities have shifted. Today, more than a quarter of home buyers in Kent come from London and beyond, bringing greater affluence to the county, and higher expectations, too.

Will Peppitt, Savills head of residential southeast, grew up in Kent and loves both the county and its food. “The high-speed rail link made Kent even more desirable, especially east Kent, because people could then travel from Ashford to Oxford Circus in less than an hour,” he explains. “Once one or two people did it and told their friends, those friends came down for the weekend. It’s become a snowball effect, as more people leave London to buy a Regency terraced house or a detached Victorian villa with an exceptional view.” As a result, Kent is now home to several “small boutique restaurants with half a dozen tables, exquisite food and fabulous service. And there are enough people in their catchment to keep them fully booked.”

Londoners decamping to Kent is nothing new, of course – the current wave is just another phase in a long-running migration, says Will Devlin, chef-owner of The Small Holding in Kilndown, which holds a Michelin green star for sustainable gastronomy and where most of the food is homegrown. “It’s been going on since the 1800s,” he says. “Where we are, in the hop-growing region, people used to come from east London and pick hops all summer as a working holiday.” Many of them ended up moving to Kent permanently.

Alex Bagner owns The Rose, a restaurant with rooms in the coastal town of Deal, which has a thriving arts scene, as well as half a dozen great restaurants and food shops (try the award-winning Black Pig butcher). The author of How to Leave London, Bagner isn’t sure the change in tastes is solely due to the influx of what locals jokingly refer to as DFLs – Down From London-ers. “I think people are getting more adventurous about what they want to eat in general,” she says. She has lived in Deal for five years, and has just opened the Blue Pelican, a Japanese-inspired wine bar on the seafront. One of her favourite local places to eat is Updown Farmhouse, which opened just outside Deal in 2022 in a converted 17th-century house. A brilliant restaurant in its own right, it also brings in chefs from across the country for mini-residencies.

Other highlights include Sargasso, the coastal outpost of east London favourite Brawn, which opened in Margate in 2021, as well as nearby Angela’s and Dory’s, co-owned by a former Goods Shed chef serving up hyper-local and beautifully presented seafood dishes. When nothing but a tasting menu will do, opt for the Bridge Arms, near Canterbury, which gained a Michelin star in 2022, or Hide and Fox, in Hythe.

With Kent’s wine offering also on the up, vineyard restaurants are coming into their own. Along with Chapel Down’s The Swan, near Tenterden, Peppitt loves Squerryes, in Westerham. And, on a warm summer’s day, where better to lunch than the courtyard restaurant at The Mount Vineyard, edged by row after row of grapes ripening in the sun.

Pictures from top: Deal beach at sunset (Unsplash); kitchen views at the Blue Pelican; a roast at the Bridge Arms; and outside dining at Updown