TABLE-HOPPING
Our latest restaurant recommendations plus street-food spots from across the UK
Our latest restaurant and streetfood recommendations
CURIOUS BREWERY, ASHFORD
State-of-the-art Curious Brewery is the latest opening from Kent’s Chapel Down winery. A team plucked from the likes of BrewDog, Old Dairy and The Wild Beer Co is making its own beer, as well as running a tap room, bar and restaurant. The latter serves fresh takes on pub grub in a cool, industrial setting, with an emphasis on seasonality and provenance. Head chef Rob Richards, formerly of Fish on the Green in Bearsted, is taking a hyper-local, low-waste approach. Yes, there’s a burger – but the beef comes from a local farm where the cows are fed on the spent grain from the brewery. And yes, there’s fish ’n’ chips – but the batter is made with Curious IPA.
As well as classics-with-a-twist, there’s also a large and varied bar snacks menu to work through. Blistered padrón peppers come with gentleman’s relish and are a mighty match for Curious Apple, a cider reminiscent of the appley white wines of Spain. The salty freshness of ‘popcorn’ cockles and rock oysters with Chapel Down pinot noir dressing reminds diners that they’re close to the coast. Comforting Kentish rarebit with Lord of the Hundreds cheese and apple chutney is a great match for a Curious Brew, while rich, gooey bitterballen are packed with slow-cooked beef with a background bittersweetness from Curious porter.
Enjoy a brewery tour before your meal to get the full picture of everything Curious is doing. Then wander upstairs to taste the fruits of the team’s labour and decide what you’re going to buy in the shop on the way out. curiousbrewery.com
SIREN AT THE GORING HOTEL, LONDON SW1
Siren is the first new restaurant to open at The Goring for more than 100 years. It’s the luxury hotel’s take on casual, which still includes marble-topped tables, a mix of floral and velvet upholstered chairs, plush carpets (hooray for the acoustics!) and a lobster pot chandelier.
Inspired by the hotel’s strong family ties to Cornwall, Nathan Outlaw, the master of modern fish and shellfish cookery, has created the menu. He impresses with everything from the bread (a fist-sized loaf, crusty, warm and pre-sliced, arriving with a puck of seafood-speckled butter and creamy, sea-salty whipped cod’s roe) to crème brûlée with diamonds of gently poached rhubarb. Cuttlefish black pudding to start is genius. It’s surf
’n’ turf reimagined, with soft, spiced blood pudding peppered with bouncy pearls of cuttlefish, a crunchy kohlrabi remoulade, and an apple-tarte-tatin-like, deeply caramelised apple sauce. Specials such as a clattering platter of poached lobster, two types of clams, mussels the colour of amber, and a pleasingly chubby scallop all bathed in a golden garlic, herb and chilli butter are as glorious as they sound.
When it comes to drink, stick to a bottle of aromatic Loire Valley sancerre (Lucien Crochet 2017), whose fresh and flinty flavour marries perfectly with all that shellfish. thegoring.com