The best restaurants in Kent

Address: Stark, 1 Oscar Road, Broadstairs, Kent CT10 1QJ
Telephone: +44 1843 579786
Website: starkfood.co.uk

The Firepit

Inside the 40-room Cave Hotel, surrounded by golf-course green, the Firepit burns brightly beneath a beamed roof and designer bulbs. The grills and smokers aren’t on display but their effects are on every plate, and decorative fires at points around the room serve as polite reminders that you’re here to enjoy what a judicious charring can do to good ingredients. Influences range from the American Midwest to Asia, so as well as chunks of good meat (smoked St Louis char sui pork ribs, melting from the bone; juicy spiced lamb cutlets with mint and lemongrass glaze), there are delicately cooked vegetables: crunchy sugar-snap peas with beef dripping, charred broccoli with caramelised red onion. The concept is shared plates, with chef John Bingley pairing your choices appropriately, so it’s not all veg followed by all fish or meat, and a good mid-range wine list leans, sensibly, towards big reds. Since opening, The Firepit has rapidly become so popular that even hotel guests have trouble getting a table, so don’t turn up without booking.

Address: The Firepit, Brickfield Lane, Boughton-under-Blean, Faversham, Kent ME13 9AJ
Telephone: +44 1227 752277
Website: cavehotels.com/firepit

The Fordwich Arms

Daniel Smith, his wife Natasha and sommelier Guy Palmer-Brown were all just 26 when they took on this wood-lined pub in Fordwich, England’s smallest town, but given that they came from London’s Michelin-starred Clove Club, they certainly weren’t novices. In less than a year, they’d won a Michelin star of their own, with a memorable combination of elegant, peaceful riverside dining room, superb ingredients and theatrical presentation. Prawns are hand-seared tableside on a block of pink Himalayan salt; glass bell jars full of applewood smoke lift to reveal tiny, tender duck hearts, beneath tendrils scented by Kent orchards. One sauce is decanted via a glass contraption worthy of Frankenstein’s lab, while a creamed potato with Madeira sauce receives a heady lift from aromatic white truffle, grated under the swooning diner’s nose. Palmer-Brown’s wine list keeps pace, from local treats such as sparkling wine from Simpsons near Canterbury to unusual, beautifully matched treats from France to Chile. And the array of cheeses, half of them English, is stupendous.

Address: The Fordwich Arms, King St, Fordwich, Canterbury, Kent CT2 0DB
Telephone: +44 1227 710444
Website: fordwicharms.co.uk

The Wife of Bath, Wye

Named after the 15th-century Canterbury Tale and open since 1963, The Wife of Bath was re-galvanised with a grande dash of Northern Spanish influence in 2016, when Mark Sargeant, owner of Rocksalt Restaurant in Folkestone and The Duke William Pub in Ickham, took the helm and revamped the rooms, drinks and dishes.

Historic high and low beams (watch your heads!) are countered by quirky, contemporary features in the six rooms, each furnished in a manner to make any Made.com fanatic smile, with broad beds to rest and digest, deliciously fluffy towels and robes, pretty teacups, flanked by moustached ceramic oddities, ironic hipster Penguin books and plenty of bronze.

The menus are equally nuanced. Locally sourced pork, fish, poultry and game is ravished, rattled and rolled by flavours from the likes of the Basque Country and Catalunya. Stand-outs include the rabbit and chorizo starter, which arrives ready to hop from a tidy parcel of savoy cabbage, the surprisingly light and tender ox cheek and the not-so-bitter-chocolate tart, served with Sevillano olive oil and Folkestone salt – the latter used liberally on the restaurant’s devilishly silky butter. Make sure to explore the Spanish drinks too: from the rich Bobal de San Juan red to the oaky Alvear dessert wine, this sharp spouse has used all her wiles to smuggle out those better bottles normally kept quietly back in Spain. Becky Lucas

Address: The Wife of Bath, 4 Upper Bridge Street, Wye, Ashford, Kent, TN25 5AF
Telephone: +44 1233 812232
Website: thewifeofbath.com

The Goods Shed, Canterbury

Fresher-than-fresh farmers market, food hall and restaurant

At this stationside cornucopia, excellent stalls of local produce jostle one another beneath triple-height exposed brick, benignly surveyed by the diners on the mezzanine, who have sensibly decided that sucking back a Pink Gin while the experts deal with all those goodies is the best division of labour. Oysters are plump and potent, greens so green they're mesmerising - although you may be distracted by the price-comparison blackboard: can broccoli that costs £1.35 here really be £3.34 in Tesco, and do the supermarkets truly up the price of streaky bacon by £3? The Goods Shed certainly makes the most of that differential, with beautifully cooked fish, game and red meat accessorised by vegetables that can also take prime position - no token vegetarian options here. And puddings are amazing. You'll leave stuffed, possibly tipsy (the wine list is excellent) and happy - particularly if you stop at the Wild Goose bar for a Martini on the way out.

Address: Goods Shed, Station Road West, Canterbury, Kent
Telephone: +44 1227 459153
Website: thegoodsshed.co.uk

Read's, Faversham

An elegant restaurant with stars in its eyes

This beautiful Georgian manor house just off the busy Canterbury Road has had a chequered recent career: in 2012, the restaurant lost the Michelin star it had held for over 20 years, and it hasn't yet managed to claw it back, despite impressive attention to detail and a large kitchen garden that supplies many of the herbs and vegetables. After a drink in the gracious drawing-room (wittily, the bar is in a cupboard), dinner is served across the hall, among the floor-length curtains, period paintings and heavyweight table linen. It is a suitably elegant affair, with charming touches of invention: duck à l'orange here is an array of perfectly pink slices surrounded by tiny mandarins; halibut comes with a chive and Champagne velouté, cheeses arrive in a wicker basket and the desserts (such as a devastatingly pretty chocolate marquise so rich it should have its own bank account) made me want to kiss the pastry chef. The excellent wine list - to say nothing of the minibar that's actually a maxi-bar, with Fever Tree Tonic, spirits and wine in an unpretentious little kitchenette near the airy bedrooms - make an overnight stay an excellent idea.

Address: Read's, Macknade Manor, Canterbury Road, Faversham, Kent
Telephone: +44 1795 535344
Website: reads.com

The Sportsman, Seasalter

Great-value Michelin-starred food beside the sea

The most surprising aspect of Stephen Harris's famed Michelin-starred gastropub isn't the quiet, stripped-back wooden decor or the smiling staff. It isn't even the weird horse painting above the fireplace. It's the prices: the quality of this five-course tasting menu certainly isn't reflected in the £45 tag. Maybe Harris just forages his oysters, served on a bed of seashells, magnificent scallops and salt-baked gurnard (with a bouillabaisse sauce) out of the nearby sea, but somehow that seems unlikely. And anyway, the wondrously rich beef and ox cheek comes from Pontefract. No, the man is just good at his job - and any restaurant with more puddings than savoury options gets my vote: there are six, including unpasteurised cheeses and a Bramley apple soufflé with salted caramel ice-cream that could revive the most jaded post-ox palate. If you do want to overspend, run amok with the well-chosen wine list: there are temptations here that would make bankruptcy worthwhile.

Address: The Sportsman, Faversham Road, Seasalter, Whitstable, Kent
Telephone: +44 1227 273370
Website: thesportsmanseasalter.co.uk

The West House, Biddenden

Offbeat and off-beaten-track Michelin-starred restaurant

Graham Garrett's restaurant, in a 16^th-century weaver's cottage in dinky Biddenden looks like a conventional smart eaterie - at least, until you open the menu. Although by then, you'll probably have tried the pork dripping on homemade sourdough, and that wonderful sensation of beginning a truly superb dinner will be stealing over you. Garrett was drummer in 1970s glam-rock band The Dumb Blondes, but these days the food takes centre stage: he is invariably in the kitchen, barbecuing his own pig collar with salt-baked celeriac, puréeing guacamole that is served, topsy-turvily, with crab ketchup, or fashioning a cauliflower-cheese croquette to accompany the confit chicken wing. The wine list is as exciting as the menu (there's a whole section titled Wilfully Obscure) and the service, usually from Graham's wife Jackie and son Jake, is faultless.

Address: The West House, 28 High Street, Biddenden, Kent
Telephone: +44 1580 291341
Website: thewesthouserestaurant.co.uk

The Milk House, Cranbrook

A posh pub with rooms at Sissinghurst

There are worse places to revive a defunct 16th-century pub than Sissinghurst, famous for Vita Sackville-West's gardens. New Zealander Dane Allchorne and his wife Sarah have added four light, spacious bedrooms, which means you can now take advantage of the bar-top DIY Bloody Mary station the next morning. Smart pub grub is dished up in a large room (separate, sensibly, from the bar) with pale, tasteful decor and a brick fireplace; the menu ranges from posh F&C, aka bitter beer-battered cod with skinny fries, through lemon-roasted spatchcock poussin or lamb in almond milk with an olive crust to puddings such as a fabulous homemade Jaffa Cake - beloved even by those of us who don't actually like Jaffa Cakes. There's a grazing menu too, but it's the wood-fired pizza oven on the terrace that inspires true devotion. Dane's produce may all come from within a 20-mile radius but those pizzas would make a homesick Neopolitan happy.

Address: The Street, Sissinghurst, Cranbrook, Kent
Telephone: +44 1580 720200
Website: themilkhouse.co.uk

George & Dragon, Sevenoaks

Lovely old village pub championing the local and seasonal

This charmingly wonky pub, with its uneven floors and mismatched furniture, has been feeding locals since Tudor times, when Robert Dudley, Elizabeth I's favourite, was lording it in the enormous nearby stately home of Knole. Although it seems a safe bet that smoked garlic chicken Kiev with sprouting broccoli wasn't on the menu then. There are still a fair few old-style touches, mixed with a little spicy modernity: harissa mayonnaise on the burger, wilted bok choi with the roast duck breast. The menu changes daily and the suppliers (local, naturally) are listed; there is a sturdy wooden bar, leather sofa and large working fireplace to warm your cockles in winter, and the George and the Dragon wallpaper is a mischievous touch that almost distracts from the prettiness of the dishes: someone in this kitchen certainly knows how to arrange a leaf of watercress.

Address: George & Dragon, 39 High Street, Chipstead, Sevenoaks, Kent
Telephone: +44 1732 779019
Website: georgeanddragonchipstead.com

The Black Pig, Tunbridge Wells

The spa town's most delicious pub

Julian Leefe-Griffiths started with one of England's oldest pubs, the George & Dragon in Speldhurst; now he's brought the 'so old its new' philosophy of local produce, lovingly cooked, to Tunbridge Wells. 'Pigs, pork and piggery' are always on the menu, with three ham boards (English, Tuscan or Iberian Pata Negra) and lots of other porcine goodies as well as vegetables that are actually grown in soil: none of your taste-free hydroponics here. The food is unashamed pub grub - mackerel pâté, Scotch eggs from those local pigs, steak from Sussex-born cows - but with nice frilly touches such as homemade chutney, butter-bean hummus or wild garlic purée. The wine list is really interesting and mainly from small producers. Food presentation is superb - I thought my artful fold of smoked salmon dotted with romanesco was the prettiest thing I'd seen, until the gargantuan pear and apple crumble, topped with ice cream, arrived in a dinky black chafing dish. The large photographs of foodstuffs are a bit Waitrose, but everything else, from lamps to wallpaper, sends the message that the chef wants you to have an unpretentious good time - and the humanely raised pigs won't have suffered too much for it, either.

Address: The Black Pig, 18 Grove Hill Road, Tunbridge Wells, Kent
Telephone: +44 1892 523030
Website: theblackpig.net

A Casa Mia, Herne Bay

The best pizza in Kent, a stone's throw from the beach

It is a little-known fact that the only English pizza restaurant certified by Naples' Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana is a little place in sweet, unassuming Herne Bay: a short trip, if a long way in other senses, from trendy Whitstable. Upstairs, past the giant hump of the wood-fired pizza oven and several photographs of that quintessential advertisement for Italian cooking, Sophia 'everything you see I owe to spaghetti' Loren, there's a bright, unfussy room where Gennaro Esposito's English wife will bring you crispy zucchini fries, pasta, if that's what you want, and most importantly, superb pizza, light of crust, generous of topping - all those you'd expect and a few, like smoked cheese or chips, you wouldn't. It's reasonably priced to boot and the wine is very decent, with maps on the list so you know where it comes from - a brilliant innovation for the world's most complicated wine country. That light dough means pudding is at least faintly possible, and if there's Italian certification for giant Ferrero Rochers these guys should have that, too.

Address: A Casa Mia, 160 High Street, Herne Bay, Kent
Telephone: +44 1227 372947
Website: acasamia.co.uk

For more information on the region, see visitkent.co.uk

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