‘Supper’ is a word that wears slippers. It pads in softly, smelling faintly of toast and compromise. Dinner is all elbows and ambition; lunch is transactional, a meeting in a mouth, but supper is what happens after the world has finished showing off. It’s a word that suggests something taken on a tray, eaten with the TV noise loitering in the background and the dog hopeful at your heel. No one has a power supper. You endure a working lunch, you host a dinner party, but supper is what you have when the day has had its say and you’re left with hunger and honesty.
The word itself feels buttered, doesn’t it? A little soporific, a little indulgent. It belongs to nursery rhymes and boarding schools, to chipped plates and things on toast. Yet it can be surprisingly elastic: from evening cocoa to a late, louche feast that insists it’s only something light. Supper is modesty performing a quiet striptease. Even at Hampton Manor, at Kynd, out in the garden, set within the Victorian greenhouses. Supper here is to be cherished as much as any other meal, save for brunch, which is clearly a made-up phrase for the lazy.
Supper is the word that Hampton has chosen to run with to describe the cheaper evening offer at the Manor, and it fits snugly like thermal underwear or clothes after Christmas. On paper two courses for £45, three for £55. While little choice of what to eat could look like a compromise, here it is that louche feast, one with generosity and skill that leaves the waistline bulging like a suitcase with ill-advised optimism. Supper is what I choose, and is what I shall mostly focus on, whilst Sophie eats from the dinner menu. It is a reflection of our personalities, but also of her love for the more expensive things in life.
Before I get onto that meal; snacks. Two hashbrowns with dressed crab from the dinner menu, somewhat overshadowed by a bowl of blistered Jerusalem artichoke skins with a kind of hummus – but not really a hummus – of the blitzed flesh with harissa, its furtive, quiet sweetness marched into the sun by North African heat. The starter transforms the grainy Corra Linn cheese into something silky and light with the addition of whipped cream and a firm wrist, with a veloute of chicken stock and herbs, and a little mound of pickled onions. It is balanced and delicate, impossible not to love and gone in seconds with the help of their sturdy bread. I love the bread here.
The main event is beef short rib that arrives with its sleeves rolled up. A slab of bovine intent, all sinew and promise, built for the long haul. It’s been cooked slowly, so that the meat does not so much as capitulate, collapsing from the bone at the nudge of a fork. It has been rubbed in coffee so that the bitterness has stitched into the bark, with a glaze of Pedro Ximénez; treacle-thick, raisined, and glossing the rib with a lacquer that catches the light. The result is an excess of smoke, sugar, and beefiness. I didn’t finish it. It’s huge. Instead I take the leftovers home and make a bastardised reuben with pickles, grueyere, and the unnecessary garnish of a fried egg. It felt right to drag something so perfect out to the second day. The dessert is a paupers cake, which Google tells me is a dairy free recipe from the Depression era of the 30’s. It’s great, maybe not quite as great as the beef, but equally as generous. What’s unquestionable is that £55 for these three courses is phenomenal value in a period of time where little in life is.
And the rest of the meal? Sophie loved the just cooked scallops in the lightly curried carrot sauce, and adored her main of seabass with its velvety bisque that could have placed her anywhere within the Mediterranean. We both loved the excess of elegantly made cocktails, and the carefully chosen wine by Stef and the rest of the excellent team. I’ve waxed lyrical enough about the manor plenty of times before and this is no exception. Kynd feels at home, totally at ease, and the perfect foil for its sister restaurant on the other side of the garden. It is meals like this that make me remember exactly why I fell in love with food so hard.
9/10
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