One of the perils of living in a seaside resort such as Deal on the east coast of Kent is that, eventually, London will find you. One minute, you can pop out to Londis in your dressing gown, drink Gold Blend and have no real opinion on nuno felting, then a shift will occur. One of those incomers will paint over a pebble-dashed terrace with Farrow & Ball Arsenic, open a gluten-free macaron kiosk, and the game will be up. For Kensal Rise and Hackney people, that’s like leaving jam out for ants. Soon, you’ll be knee deep in nocellara olives, spoken-word performances and places like The Rose on Deal high street, a recently tarted-up pub, restaurant and boutique hotel.
Any implication that the plutonium-grade revampment of The Rose from rough-and-ready, 200-year-old, old-school boozer to chic magnet for mini-breakers is “an improvement” will doubtless cause the locals umbrage. Nevertheless, it now serves rhubarb mezcal cocktails, tiny bowls of Marcona almonds, wild nettle soup and ox tongue on beetroot. For £200, without dinner, I stayed one Friday night in a bric-a-brac-stuffed room painted in jarring shades of burgundy, turquoise and navy, with a velour curtain in place of a toilet door and a communal Nespresso machine in the corridor. I do not like anyone in this world well enough to forgo a toilet door, while if you speak to me at a communal Nespresso machine at 7am before I have drunk the Nespresso, I will unapologetically hammer you to death with a Muji indoor shoe.
Downstairs, the dining room is thankfully less aesthetically busy. There’s an open kitchen, so you can watch the chefs flap, plus a bar to sit up at on stools and order a “Hedgerow Cobbler” made with sloe gin, raspberries, blackberries and elderflower while you nibble very good deep-fried olives stuffed with anchovy. The front-of-house are warm and kind, and there are plenty of them. This goes a long way. Executive chef Rachel O’Sullivan, of Polpo and Spuntino fame, was the name that flavoured all the opening coverage of The Rose last year, but on the evening we visited, she was certainly not present, and the menu seemed a skeleton version of the delicious, complex list I’d seen on Instagram.
We chose three of the five starters, beginning with good, home-blitzed taramasalata served with slightly past-their-best radishes. A plate of steamed asparagus appeared, topped with a ladle of gritty, brown and not particularly pleasant walnut-and-anchovy butter. “Hot smoked salmon with pickles and creme fraiche” turned out to be a piece of baked, but now almost cold salmon that was hot neither in flavour nor temperature. And the smoked prawns advertised on the specials board had run out by the time we sat down at 8pm, despite there being only a handful of other diners.
By this stage, it had occurred to me that The Rose’s food was clearly not good enough to schedule a special trip to Deal around. But, by God, it feels as if it ought to be: a monumental number of moodboards and Mr & Mrs Smith audience-focused marketing has led to this point, where punters now travel miles and pack overnight bags to dine here. But those who do will find very little to write home about.
A main course of hugely overdone smoked haddock arrived with a handful of salty samphire and similarly assertive pangrattato breadcrumbs; the accompanying “soft egg” was at least soft, although I realise I am giving credit here for someone in the kitchen being able to boil an egg. Our other main course of crisp lamb shoulder was fine in a “Sunday roast leftovers” way, but it came on a pulpy bed of skordalia (Greek garlic and potato mash) that was so bland, I argued blindly that it was polenta until we re-examined the menu.
We stared at the pudding menu: a chocolate mousse, a panna cotta and a “mess” – as in a crunchy, creamy thing flung into a bowl, not someone chucking napkins about willy-nilly. All of these are puddings contestants choose on MasterChef when they either cannot cook or are being strong-armed into making a pudding. The mess involved stewed rhubarb, pistachios, whipped cream and chunks of honeycomb instead of meringue, and came in a glass dessert bowl. Just like Eton mess, then: after three spoonfuls, I would happily not see it again until next summer.
Because of all this, I am now ever so slightly put off moving to Deal and opening a reiki healing centre or mead brewery. The locals will be joyous.
• The Rose 91 High Street, Deal, Kent, 01304 389127. Open Weds-Sun, lunch noon-3pm (4pm Sun), dinner 6-9.30pm. About £30 a head, plus drinks and service.
Food 5/10
Atmosphere 6/10
Service 7/10
