Holm, South Petherton, Somerset Chef Nick Balfe spent 17 years in London, 10 of them running restaurants, before succumbing to the charms of Somerset and opening Holm in South Petherton, a few miles west of Yeovil. He met his wife while working at Salon, in Brixton Market, “but we were both yearning for a bit of space and security,” and so, two years ago, they moved themselves and their three children to a house opposite the restaurant, opening their new business in November 2021. Holm’s woody, bare-brick dining room offers diners both a tasting menu and a shorter set menu: in terms of developing his dishes, Balfe’s access to local suppliers was, he says, “a game-changer. Being able to buy venison, Old Spot pigs, hogget, more or less at the farm gate, whole animals that I can break down and use everything from: it’s very satisfying. In London, I sometimes felt I was just talking the talk: here I can really walk the walk.” Balfe’s beautifully presented dishes might include treacle-cured sirloin with salsify, or venison from nearby Bagnell Farm, served with swede and winter Savoy cabbage. holmsomerset.co.uk The Fordwich Arms, Canterbury, Kent Compared with the recent flood of chefs from London opening in Kent, Dan and Natasha Smith are practically gnarled old veterans. They took over The Fordwich Arms, just outside Canterbury, in 2017, transforming a handsome, red-bricked old pub – much to the dismay of some locals – into a Michelin-starred restaurant, albeit one where you can still buy a pint at the bar. “To start with,” recalls Dan, “the work-life balance was, well, interesting: we lived upstairs at the pub while we did it up. I remember our two-month-old happily sitting strapped into a car seat in the kitchen’s dry store.” Finding a place in the country had always been their dream. “London was never the long-term plan: we were there for the professional experience,” says Dan: he manned the stoves at the much-fêted Clove Club for five years, while Natasha worked as a pastry chef for an events company. Now, both locals and Londoners – Canterbury is an hour by high-speed train from St Pancras – have discovered The Fordwich Arms, and the critics have been unanimous in the Smiths’ praise: their second pub/restaurant, The Bridge Arms a few miles south, has been equally lauded. fordwicharms.co.uk Updown, Windlesham, Kent Updown, Ruth Leigh and Oli Brown’s winsomely beautiful 17th-century farmhouse, restaurant and gardener’s cottage, may strike visitors as the essence of a rustic idyll but, according to Leigh, building their Kentish paradise took a lot of work. “Actually, some things made our lives more stressful than they were in London. I don’t think we quite realised that a restaurant and a hotel are two separate businesses, and they both took a lot of effort and money to get off the ground.” There are compensations, however. “Picking up our three-year-old from nursery and taking her to the beach, that’s wonderful.” Brown’s menus offer more than a few flavours of Kent (“but we’re not hyper-local, we’re not religious about it”). His harmonious, Italian-inspired menu might include ravioli stuffed with suckling pig and sauced with walnuts and sage; boiled beef and tongue Bavette with beetroot, horseradish and bitter leaves at Ox Barn PHOTO KIRSTIE YOUNG CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM 65
