EATING OUT

An old-fashioned Kent boozer serving up stunningly modern food? Tom is in heaven…

There’s much to love about The Bridge Arms, a place that mixes old-fashioned boozer with resolutely modern restaurant. So while the pub is all ancient beams, parquet floors and framed photos of days long past, the dining room – high-ceilinged and flooded with light – is daubed in discreet Dijon yellow. Staff are young, bright and brimming with delight, while the menu is every bit as thrilling as a new Jack Reacher.

All this doesn’t come as a complete surprise. It’s the second opening from Daniel and Natasha Smith, the team behind The Fordwich Arms a few miles down the road. While my friend Zeren gets stuck into a wine list filled with decently priced lovelies, I dive deep into the menu that’s the very essence of midsummer England. There are grilled potato flatbreads with blobs of fresh ricotta, clean and lactic, plus soft, gentle confit garlic with a scattering of mint and flowers. Lobster, immaculately cooked, comes with a subtly curried shellfish sauce, surrounded by curls of courgettes and carefully dressed Isle of Wight tomatoes.

Then, more tomatoes, this time hugging a cool, creamy ball of burrata, mixed with tart peach,

It’s so luscious and succulent that the table turns silent

shaved and cubed, and a few fronds of dill. There’s a wonderful acidity to the dish, the sort of understated precision that wears its art lightly. Just like crab tart, where the flakiest of pastry struggles to contain a brownmeat hollandaise with exactly the right amount of grunt. A spoonful of caviar adds depth, cubes of apple and cucumber lithe bite. A scallop is almost Japanese in its purity; a little lemon and garlic, and lots of butter, yet never rich or heavy. As with everything, there’s an innate culinary intelligence, and elegant technique too.

And that’s just the starters. We share a Josper-cooked, monolithic monkfish tail, a piece of fish so pearlescent, luscious and succulently beautiful that the table turns temporarily silent. Dipped into Bearnaise sauce, it’s every bit as mightily meaty as the rack of Blackface lamb, and a lozenge of slow-cooked breast, that we move on to next. Both bleat with ovine vigour.

Oh, then a roast leg of suckling pig, with gleaming crisp skin and tenderly seductive flesh, that we order, well, just because it’s there, and we adore this place, and it’s past three on a hot summer’s afternoon. And quite frankly, it would be rather rude not to.

About £45 a head. The Bridge Arms, 53 High Street, Bridge, Canterbury; bridgearms.co.uk