The Dining Room at the Railway Hotel
Address: Preston Street, Faversham, Kent
Telephone: 01795 533 173
Meal For Two, including wine and service: £55-75
I did not profess undying love to my companion over lunch in this week's restaurant, nor promise to leave my wife in a surge of passion. Dan's a nice enough chap, with an impressive shrubbery of beard, but he's really not my type. Still, I can see how one might do so here, in the right circumstances and in the right company.
The name of the place is pure Brief Encounter, and so is the location. The Railway Hotel stands across the road from Faversham station, a handsome lump of redbrick Victoriana with a simple dining room of sturdy wooden tables and white walls hung with unobtrusive prints. If there is a better place for assignations, for unexpected clinches followed by trains in different directions, I am yet to find it. All it needs is a few puffs of steam, the lonely echo of an engine's whistle and the berry-red tip of a cigarette in the dark for the cineaste's fantasy to be complete. But Alec and Laura never ate this well. Noel Coward might have been quite the bon viveur, but he was rarely so generous to his characters. Here, there is a more giving spirit at play.
The Dining Room, a new venture, is the creature of two young chefs. Anthony North learnt his chops in a series of London restaurants, including under Michel Bourdin at the old Connaught, when they still used to set fire to things tableside. Johnny Butterworth cooked at Bluebird in Chelsea and more recently at the ingredient-led Goods Shed in Canterbury, and it is that influence which is felt most keenly here. There are namechecks for a lot of local foodstuffs - Rochester sweet corn, Graveney cobnuts, Canterbury foraged leaves - and though this can sometimes feel like a rustic version of It-girl label fetishism, here it is right.
This is not to say all the cooking is assured. There are clunky moments, and an occasional heavy hand on the salt. Then again, pricing at lunchtime is so low - just £12 for two courses, £15 for three - that you would have to be a right old misery to complain. The menu is short, with three choices per course at lunch rising to a heady four choices in the evening, which makes things easy.
Some of the menu writing is unnecessarily florid. I had no idea what they meant by the 'potato melange' listed as accompanying the local seared mackerel, and I was none the wiser when the dish arrived, for it seemed merely a perfectly acceptable potato salad, with the addition of courgette and that local sweet corn. The mackerel was so crisp on the skin side I had to check on the other to make sure it hadn't visited the deep-fat fryer, but no. It had simply met a seriously hot pan, the sort of punishment mackerel understands.
Shards of confited Barbary duck may have been a little dry, but they worked well with an apple salad, and we both liked very much the accompaniment of tiny dressed leaves, apparently foraged by a local chap who is only happy when his hand is in a hedgerow. A plate of roast duck breast, just the right side of pink, came with a little spiced roast pear and a tidy triangle of rosti made with both sweet and standard potato, the sugars from the former adding a fine hint of caramel. Seared hake came with what was called a white bean and chorizo fricassee, but it was a little too soupy to deserve the name. Still, the flavour was good and once the flakes of fish had slipped away from the bone it made for a fine, homely stew.
We finished with a bright passion fruit jelly (which could have done without the seeds) and a damson and plum crumble, with a topping that included those Graveney cobnuts. In the evening, pricing is by the dish, and wonderfully eccentric. There are no round numbers here: it's £6.29 for the mackerel and £14.21 for the duck; £5.47 for the passion fruit jelly and £5.62 for the crumble. Apparently a waitress made a cock-up while typing it out and they decided to stick with it.
The wine list is more ordinarily priced - there are very few bottles over £25 - and also very ordinary in general. Shepherd Neame, which owns the pub, has been forward-thinking in allowing young chefs to cook in its pubs, then insists that they stick with the pre-ordered lists of often dull wines. It makes absolutely no sense at all to do this. Alec and Laura might have settled for something mediocre during their brief encounter, but the rest of us demand something a little more interesting with our trysts.
