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3 hours ago
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Fête in Chelmsford has made a big splash on the Essex food scene, snapping up local plaudits for this quaint, neighbourhood restaurant in a cobbled courtyard. Quaint isn’t a word I use often, but nor do I eat at many places with a spacious upstairs bar area that doubles as a yoga studio. Go for the spice bag potatoes with tropea onions and roast chilli, stay for the 45-minute flow yoga with Amanda.
Actually, scrap that: do not even dream of pulling shapes after eating too many spiced onions. Leave it a couple of hours. Still, whatever it is that chef Tobias Godfrey and his co-owner and partner, Laura Day, are offering, the locals are clearly loving it, because on a Friday night a couple of weeks ago, the place was orderly bedlam. Word has clearly spread that Fête was last month named runner-up restaurant of the year in Essex Life’s 2025 food and drink awards, and ladies wearing Friday-night tops were dining in droves and ordering rounds of matcha margaritas and maple martinis.
Fête’s road to taking the Chelmsford dining scene by storm has been largely ignored by nearby trendy London, which is a scene that celebrates only itself. Essex is only a few miles away, but the great and the good are scarred by too many stories of local restaurants boasting helium balloon arches, bottomless brunches, walls of plastic greenery and Gemma from Towie drinking Aperol spritz, not to mention too many old-fashioned, and definitely “old hat” country pubs serving venison on celeriac puree to lads with new hair from Turkey. The cool, metropolitan crowd avoid these places unless a London chef takes the helm.
For what it’s worth, I love both these aspects of Essex, which may explain why I was so pleasantly jollied by Fête’s eclectic menu, where Taiwanese chicken bao sits side by side with Kashmiri scallops, and where duck-fried rice with kimchi and mac and cheese with guanciale nestle cosily together on the small plates menu, all casual like, as if they aren’t from entirely different continents.
Perhaps Fête, which is open all day, and serves this lengthier, more complex menu on Friday and Saturday evenings, has caused such a stir because it absolutely dares to be different, focusing on big, hearty, pan-global flavours, rather than any narrow theme. For so-called “small plates”, the portions are whopping, too, and we ordered far too much. Take the bowl of pale, wobbly, balm-like burrata laden with figs and hot honey, which also featured generous amounts of pistachio and layers of beetroot, and came with a slab of sourdough toast. Next up, a giant-sized beef tartare, made rather strangely with wholly unnecessary mayo, that had a great, acidic bite of capers and cornichons, and turned up on another big slice of bread. Godfrey clearly sets out to throw as much flavour on a plate as possible, so this tartare also came with crispy kale and wobbly egg yolk.
The idea of that duck-fried rice proved irresistible and was, again, ridiculously generous, and came topped with a fried egg, kimchi, XO sauce, chilli and kimchi furikake. One cannot doubt Godfrey’s devotion to taking his customers on a whistle-stop tour of the entire culinary cosmos, but hang on to your hats for the gear changes when your battered sausages with mustard are followed by a Taiwanese bao with a side of winter tomatoes in cashew cream. There’s something so endearingly adventurous and devil-may-care about this menu that makes me love the place.
The front-of-house are jolly, friendly and, above all, clearly happy. The kitchen zings with an enthusiasm that speaks of a bunch of mates having the time of their lives, and who can’t quite believe that their dream of serving scallops in Kashmiri curry alongside a French-style vegan courgette cassoulet is actually paying dividends, and that they’ve become the hottest place for miles around as a result.
Is the cooking perfect? No. By doing so much on every plate, there are flaws, and tweaks to be made, if you’re being picky. A piece of kingfish with burnt butter, preserved lemon and capers, for instance, was overcooked and the mega-chunk of beef tartare wasn’t hugely balanced. Yet I was still smiling by the time we were handed the dessert list and its banana parfait, sticky toffee pudding and house sorbet, before opting for the chocolate fondant with honeycomb and burnt butter ice-cream. Sure, by this point, we’d eaten far too much, but we still found room for this piece of hedonism.
Fête is a welcome slice of unpretentious hospitality happiness. The only way isn’t Essex, but if it were, I wouldn’t complain.
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Fête 10-13 Grays Brewery Yard, Chelmsford, Essex, [email protected] (no phone). Open Tues-Thurs & Sun 9am-4pm (last orders; 3pm Sun), Fri & Sat 9am-9pm (last orders). From about £25 a head; dinner from about £40 a head, both plus drinks and service
