The Goods Shed, Canterbury: a pilgrimage worth making – review

It was one of those Sundays in Cambridge when I found myself in urgent need of a treat. The idea of a pub Sunday roast fills me with a dark Weltschmerz, but I remembered people had been saying remarkable things about The Goods Shed in Canterbury for as long as I could remember. It’s a bit of a pilgrimage, but the sky was the colour of cornflowers and there’s a button in the car that puts the roof back.

It really is an old railway goods shed. Battered, stripped Victorian brick and the tracks passing by the windows. Now the inside is a food hall, or whatever the bohemian term for that is, with a restaurant on a sort of elevated dais along one wall. It was my first sighting of the endangered stripped pine table in the wild and in a restaurant habitat since some time in the late 1980s.

A cleansing starter of Wigmore, a soft-rinded English cheese, sliced thickly and laid across a kind of salad of celery, radishes and shallots; though it was not the rough tumble of vegetation that “salad” implies. Instead, the vegetables bathed, half submerged, not in a cold soup, nor a dressing, but a sort of limpid chilled broth of lovage. God knows I will never do one of those ridiculous post-exercise ice baths but I can imagine the combination of therapeutic cooling and shock is precisely what this starter was giving.

As you can tell, I’m a man in tune with his body and, after consuming a dish of such virtuous purity, it told me in no uncertain terms that I needed raw meat. More precisely, an elegantly composed beef tartare, with sliced Paris brown mushrooms on toasted rosemary focaccia with anchovy butter. Please go back and reread that last sentence. If it doesn’t arouse you, our relationship has withered.

All the fish at The Goods Shed is landed nearby on the Kent coast, so it would have been crass not to order a classic whole sole, particularly one enrobed in a beurre blanc studded with crabmeat.

Though we were a mere net’s throw from Dover this was instead a megrim (or “witch”) sole, a fish so strangely repellent of visage that it was historically consigned to cat food — a criminal waste, as it’s every bit as bewitching as its more attractive relative, and when cooked correctly has a slightly softer texture. It was cooked correctly.

The monkfish was vast. Tanned so dark on the surface and so hugely muscular within, it looked like a slice through Arnold Schwarzenegger’s thigh. It came, unlike the ex-governor of California, with a smattering of sweet, tiny mussels and lightly anointed with aioli. There was a generous amount of seasonal asparagus with which I must now take issue.

The fish was raw at the bone and the asparagus was, as is the British middle-class orthodoxy, almost entirely raw. It is my stated and firmly held position that fish should be raw at the bone, but that asparagus should be cooked. These statements are correct and I will not be taking further questions on the matter.

I’m going to say something now that I know I shouldn’t. But, honestly, I think chef bros are often weak on dessert. They’re so deeply focused on the big proteins, Sabatiers swashing and tats bulging over the fiery pit. Dessert is too often some sort of phoned-in chocolate afterthought or it’s fearlessly, iconoclastically savoury. It’s like they missed a memo. The diner deserves ludic whimsy, excess and sweetness. You don’t get that if it’s half-arsed, or it’s got bloody miso in it.

The chef behind the pass in the open kitchen has facial hair, muscular forearms and the tribal blackwork of an honest-to-god chef bro, which frankly instils The Fear. Yet these desserts challenge my prejudice. First, a sorbet with some strawberries on the top. My tongue tastes wine and my sinuses flood with the scent of elderflower, which, in itself, would melt down the pleasure centres of the brain and rob the mind of adjectives. But the wine he’s chosen is Westwell Ortega. A local white, but not a dessert wine. Tart, floral, fragrant and emphatically Not Sweet. Let the elderflowers supply the sweetness. Ortega is here with the grown-up complexity.

I’ll take off one-tenth of a point for failing to notice that when strawberries freeze, they lose their heady scent. But once defrosted for 30 seconds on the side of my plate, I realised they were some of the best I’ve ever eaten. There may be a Viking at the pass but this kitchen produces desserts that reduce the sensitive princess inside me to choking sobs.

Then there was an almond tart, texturally sublime and not, as they occasionally are, gritty. The crème fraîche was sharp and the raspberries had been macerated in the sweat of angels . . . or maybe a light syrup. The combining of moist cake, cream and cooked fruit is so firmly in the canon of Modern British that it’s almost a cliché. Walnut cake, whipped cream and apple sauce. Moist chocolate cake, mascarpone and cherries. Yet this triumph of our cuisine, one of our vanishingly few remaining beacons of national pride, has no name.

I know English lacks a word for “charcuterie”, or, come to think of it, even “cuisine”, and we have to nick it, shamefaced, from the French but we managed to dream up Eton mess, summer pudding, Ecclefechan tart and Colin the sodding Caterpillar. Surely to God we can come up with something.

. . . and breathe. Now the weather’s cheered up a bit, I reckon you should gather a small band of friends and, from every shire’s ende/ Of Engelond, to Caunterbury wende.

Follow Tim @TimHayward and email him at tim.hayward@ft.com

Follow @FTMag to find out about our latest stories first and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen