It feels churlish, when all of Britain is apparently thinking of moving to the country, to bring attention to lovely, rural parts of the country you might not have heard of, but Bodiam in East Sussex is very pretty. And yes, I know the last thing residents of bucolic, semi-anonymous villages need is some gob at the Guardian blowing the whistle about their freshly painted gastropub: when I wrote about the Fordwich Arms in east Kent a couple of years back, one local channelled an Orwellian two-minute hate session directly on to Basildon Bond paper. Most enlivened, he was.
Regardless, I must tell you about The Curlew, a restaurant by Will and Matt Devlin, the same brothers who opened The Small Holding in Cranbrook on the Kent-Sussex border last summer, which I reviewed at the time. The Devlins seem to have honed the formula for painting big, barn-like pubs in tasteful, taupe shades, festooning them with flowers from their farm, then offering the locals lovely things without a jot of pretension.
They deserve a bit of smoke blown up their trouser legs for everything they and their excellent staff have achieved in the past 12 months, too. It’s not easy to do clever, complex, locally sourced dining in rural places without coming across as overly earnest and saintly. Many fail, because they turn the whole thing into a bit of a slog. Not that it isn’t adorable to be given a rolling lecture on arable crop rotation and beehive maintenance over 17 courses, but sometimes I just wish to eat. The Curlew, on the other hand, has 10 different locally made gins on its spirits menu, to have in your aperitif with warm, freshly baked tarragon focaccia with sweet apple balsamic. They act as if these little things are no big deal, but they really are, as is their selection of English sparkling wines, of which I’m a big fan; Dermot Sugrue 2014 is now my brand new favourite.
On a very warm, midweek August evening, with only a handful of customers in and joys such as smoked mackerel and bronze fennel paté, and crispy duck farm salad on the menu, my two hours at The Curlew was almost as lovely as this job gets. Good, diligent, passionate yet unobtrusive service. Tables spaced so gloriously far apart, I felt a bit like I’d bought the pub. A little, sedate birthday dinner for an older matriarch in the far corner involved a surprise brownie and lots of family stories and laughing. For a short while, everything felt quite sane in the world, which is precisely the point of hospitality.
While The Small Holding has a set menu, The Curlew’s is a single-sheet, ever-shifting, à la carte affair divided into plain-speaking groups: snacks, meat, fish, vegetables and “whole”. When they say “whole Creedy Carver duck”, they really do mean it, gizzard fans: you get everything but the quack laid out on a slate. Despite Charles’ protests, I steered us instead towards the monkfish tail, which came with a heavenly jug of curried butter sauce. We ate this with a delicious, earthy bowl of spelt steamed in stock with fresh broad beans and peas and a side of baked squash. The cooking is precise, balanced and generous; if The Curlew has a signature dish, it’s the miso roasted cod, which tastes of blissful umami caramel and comes topped with samphire and the rather ominously named leaf salty fingers.
Pudding was a warm cherry bakewell-style tart with clotted cream. The cheese selection, if you’re a fan, is possibly the most highfalutin offering being served in Great Britain today, though I am willing to be advised otherwise. That evening, it included Golden Cross goat’s cheese, Lord London, Winterdale Shaw, Mayfield, Burwash Rose and Sussex Blue, and it came with some warm, just-baked buttery digestive biscuits, crackers, a tiny loaf of fresh bread, quince preserve, pickled walnuts, leaves, truffled honey and some homemade chutney.
After all that, you’ll need a lie-down, and we stayed at Meadow Cottage just down the road, which changed my mind about B&Bs: it offers spotless, modern, white rooms, gorgeous gardens and they’ll make you chipotle beans on toast for breakfast. I know we have our moments, but Britain is really rather brilliant.
• The Curlew Junction Road, Bodiam, East Sussex, 01580 860531. Open lunch Thurs-Sun, noon-2.30pm, dinner Thurs-Sat, 6-8.30pm. About £40 a head à la carte, plus drinks and service
