The idea that you can find excellent, ambitious restaurant-quality cooking in pubs is not new: it’s been around since at least the Eagle in London ushered in the vexed term “gastropub” in the 1990s there’s Stephen Harris’s award-winning Sportsman in Kent, while Tom Kerridge needs no introduction. Now that does get mixed reviews: we’ve had a few people moan that they’re having lunch and there’s a construction worker sat at the bar having a beer.” “At Fordwich, you can come for a tasting menu, or you can sit with your dog and have a pint at the bar. “It’s important to Tash and me that it stays a pub, and it will always be a pub,” he says.
And, Smith notes, it serves the cheapest beer in Bridge.
Still, it also has a large garden and a bat and trap team – an old Kentish pub game – that plays on Wednesday nights. It was supposed to be less formal than Fordwich, but it too, now has a Michelin star. In April last year, the Smiths opened a second pub, the Bridge Arms, in a nearby village. “You won’t see it in the fridge of any other restaurant or pub locally,” says Smith. The Smiths didn’t, in fact, knock down the bar and even listened to locals who always drink Newcastle Brown Ale. But, even though it has held a Michelin star since its first year, do not call it a restaurant: it remains very much a pub. Under the Smiths, the Fordwich Arms serves some of the most refined and inspired food in Britain: everything from grilled native lobster to their take on a Jaffa cake. We got emails the first week saying: ‘We hope you fail.’ People get very passionate about their local pub.” “People were like: ‘Who are these DFLs coming down to ruin our pub?’ It was quite brutal. “They call us DFLs: down from Londons,” says Smith. Word went round that the Smiths planned to rip out the bar. There’s been a pub on the site for more than a thousand years and the previous landlords of the Fordwich Arms had been there for 25 years. “It was a huge risk to take.”Ī few locals in Fordwich were also less than convinced, at least back in 2017.
“People thought we were mad,” says Smith, shaking his head. He and his partner Natasha, a pastry chef, were both 25, and while they liked going to pubs with their dog, they didn’t know the first thing about running one. Smith was a sous chef at the Clove Club, which had recently been placed 26th on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, and he’d won an OFM Award for Young Chef of the Year in 2016. I t seemed a peculiar decision when, five years ago, Dan Smith told friends and colleagues that he was leaving London to run a pub in a small town in Kent.
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