Saffron Walden is idyllic on a summer’s day, like a Ladybird Classic version of how Great Britain whiles away its balmy weekends: strolling on grassy heaths, browsing antique stores or buying small-batch preserves from the jolly market. Obviously, having watched a lot of Midsomer Murders, I suspect that, behind closed doors, Saffron Walden is in fact a virulent bed of deceit and deadly avarice, but on the surface it is plain gorgeous. Just off the main shopping area sits Church Street, a pretty thoroughfare with yet more antique showrooms, Grade 1 historic houses and, since late last summer, Chater’s, a space that does almost everything in a low-key but deftly curated way.
It’s a sort of fancy cake counter/general store that sells lovely things such as bars of Land chocolate, Perelló olives and bottles of their own-label Vault Aperitivo vermouth. It also has tables where you can eat a bakewell tart or an eccles cake and sip on a cortado, or have provolone on focaccia with piquillo peppers for lunch, or, come evening time, get properly stuck into their range of vermouths, as well as homemade pastas and a range of small plates: burrata with orange zest, steak tartare and chickpeas with paprika, for instance. That’s not to say you can’t drink the vermouth earlier and order the cake nearer bedtime – the mood seems very much to say: do what you like, as long as you’re nice while you’re doing it.
Max and Máire Chater have been around the London hospitality scene for years in many guises, making their names in the city’s bars and restaurants, distilling their own gin, leading walking tours around the finest drinking joints, moving into vermouth and now, along with Dan Joines, formerly of, among others, Sorella and Darby’s in south London, combining all their skills in this pretty, white-brick space in a town that’s the polar opposite of edgy east London. Even so, Chater’s definitely has about it a dose of urban industrial chic – it’s a large, airy room with few adornments aside from those nicely spaced tables, though on a Saturday lunchtime it felt very much like a cool oasis of calm.
Don’t look for bells and whistles, though. There aren’t any. It’s all so perfectly curated that the quality really does speak for itself. The menu is an ever-changing single sheet, which when we visited featured fresh, warm focaccia with burnt butter that tasted like caramel, posh olives served in their tin with a fork to help yourself, and cubes of pecorino dressed with local honey and ground coffee. Yes, cheese dressed with coffee – and in Saffron Walden, too! – but it worked, with the bitterness sitting comfortably alongside the sticky milkiness, like a chewable espresso martini, but with less chance of you leaving your bra somewhere. There was also a house pork terrine with apple, fennel, figs and apricots, plus very good butter beans in an oily, garlicky dressing topped with whiffy yet delicious Ortiz tinned sardines. The vibe is simple, sometimes laughably straightforward – and always delicious.
The menu at dinner gets a little more complex – featuring the likes of scallops with elderflower and pine, cumberland sausage, leeks vinaigrette and gilthead bream crudo – but not much. If this place was closer to home, I’d pop in all the time just to see what they’d sourced recently and what the hell they’d decided to serve it with, such as the salami from Sunday Charcuterie in Suffolk that comes with sourdough made in town by the Mini Miss bakery.
One thing Chater’s is very good at, though they don’t make a fuss about it, is homemade pasta. Forget spaghetti, penne or farfalle: here they make luscious fat worms of bucatini and serve them in a really very decent cacio e pepe sauce. It seems that almost everyone is trying to do cacio e pepe these days, and it often tastes like gritty macaroni cheese, but the Chater’s version was the real deal and had a delightful, peppery kick. We also had a bowl of short, ridged bullets of radiatori in vodka and mascarpone sauce that was the very epitome of comfort food.
We didn’t really need dessert after all that, but they had a bakewell tart, of sorts, which was really just one big, thick layer of moist frangipane studded with the odd boozy cherry almost as an afterthought (ie, the correct dimensions for a civil bakewell tart), as well as a huge, warm milk-chocolate cookie that was beautifully sticky in the middle. Charles drank a can of Vault Aperitivo negroni while I sipped a blackcurrant-leaf spritz and neatly finished off the bakewell, wondering if I possibly had room for an eccles cake, too, because it came with Lancashire cheese. Chater’s promises little and completely overdelivers. It’s possibly quite weird for Saffron Walden, but I’ll take weird over boring or leaving hungry any day.
Chater’s 17 Church Street, Saffron Walden, Essex, info@chaters.co.uk. Open lunch Weds-Sat, noon-2pm; dinner Thurs-Sat, 6-11pm. From about £22 a head for three courses, plus drinks and service
Grace Dent’s new book, Comfort Eating: What We Eat When No One Is Looking, is published in October by Guardian Faber at £20. To pre-order a copy for £16, go to guardianbookshop.com
