Two pints of lager and a Michelin star: why gastropubs are roaring back
It 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. 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. 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. “People thought we were mad,” says Smith, shaking his head. “It was a huge risk to take.”
A few locals in Fordwich were also less than convinced, at least back in 2017. 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. Word went round that the Smiths planned to rip out the bar. “They call us DFLs: down from Londons,” says Smith. “People were like: ‘Who are these DFLs coming down to ruin our pub?’ It was quite brutal. We got emails the first week saying: ‘We hope you fail.’ People get very passionate about their local 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 Jaffacake. 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. The Smiths didn’t, in fact, knock down the bar and even listened to locals who always drink Newcastle Brown Ale. “You won’t see it in the fridge of any other restaurant or pub locally,” says Smith.
In April last year, the Smiths opened a second pub, the Bridge Arms, in a nearby village. It was supposed to be less formal than Fordwich, but it too, now
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