It seemed a peculiar decision when, five years ago, Dan Smith told friends and colleagues that he was leaving London to run a pub in a small town in Kent. Smith was a sous chef at the Clove Club, which had recently been placed 26th on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, and he’d won an OFM Award for Young Chef of the Year in 2016. He and his partner Natasha, a pastry chef, were both 25, and while they liked going to pubs with their dog, they didn’t know the first thing about running one. “People thought we were mad,” says Smith, shaking his head. “It was a huge risk to take.”
A few locals in Fordwich were also less than convinced, at least back in 2017. There’s been a pub on the site for more than a thousand years and the previous landlords of the Fordwich Arms had been there for 25 years. Word went round that the Smiths planned to rip out the bar. “They call us DFLs: down from Londons,” says Smith. “People were like: ‘Who are these DFLs coming down to ruin our pub?’ It was quite brutal. We got emails the first week saying: ‘We hope you fail.’ People get very passionate about their local pub.”
