'Rooms with a restaurant' is how Updown Farmhouse modestly bills itself. But that’s doing the farmhouse located near Deal a real disservice. Yes, the restaurant is a total babe of venue (especially if you choose to eat outside in the beautiful, heated pergola) but the rest of Updown, the hotel-y bit, should not be taken for granted.
Nestled within seven acres of genuinely magical land, Updown offers four comfy bedrooms, each one uniquely designed and spacious, featuring king (or superking) beds. There's also the Gate House, a self-contained cottage by the vegetable patches that has two bedrooms (and a room with bunkbeds), and a charming and secluded Gardener’s Cottage (in which we stayed) which has its own kitchen and living room area. All of it, including the communal lounge and library areas, is unified by a kind of friendly stylishness that puts Updown firmly on the comfortable side of cool.
Anyone desperate for an old-school country pub visit could make a break for The Five Bells Eastry, a traditional boozer with a cosy vibe and great community spirit, but to be honest the quality of the food and drink on offer at Updown means you’ll struggle to find anything that compares in the whole region. The menu, as you’d expect is seasonal, focused on local produce and ever-changing. Roasts are served on Sundays. It’s all very elegant, very accomplished and - crucially - very delicious.
The owners, Oli Brown and Ruth Leigh, have done a bang up job transforming and restoring what was a dilapidated (but striking) 17th-century farmhouse into a properly idyllic, rural bolthole. Everything about Updown occurs in that precise, hard-to-achieve place that exists somewhere between well-run and relaxed.
