The West House

The setting may be a heavily-beamed 16th-century Flemish weaver's cottage at the heart of a Kentish Weald village, but West House is firmly grounded in the contemporary world when it comes to cooking - hardly surprising when you learn that chef-patron Graham Garrett made his bones in the kitchens of Nico Ladenis and Richard Corrigan. With space for just 30 or so diners beneath the oak rafters, this is an intimate dining room, sparsely furnished with wide floorboards, bare wooden tables, buttery leather seats and funky food-oriented art on white walls. Garrett has a passion for local ingredients and cooks with a big-hearted generosity that is a long way from unrefined, and likes to see luxury produce alongside the more peasant end of the spectrum. Well-conceived dishes aim at full-on, clearly-defined flavours and endlessly entertaining textural contrasts. The menu reads like a shopping list, giving little away regarding treatments of the individual components in each idea: warm haddock carpaccio might arrive with bacon dressing, pickled rock samphire and pea shoots, for example, or there may be a simple Jerusalem artichoke velouté with Rye bay scallops. Next, slow cooked Gloucestershire Old Spot pork belly could share a plate with prune, chorizo and cauliflower purée, while brill fillet sits alongside sherry-glazed parsnip, chestnuts, black cabbage and rosemary butter. For dessert, perhaps a playful deconstruction of a Crunchie bar involving white chocolate honeycomb parfait and dark chocolate sorbet.