Awards at present

2008 AA Restaurant Guide
2AA Rosette Award for Culinary Excellence
2005-2006
2006-2007

2008 Good Food Guide
Good Cooking, showing sound technical skills and using quality ingredients.



Hengist Reviews

A restaurant named after a Saxon chief doesn't sound a likely spot for romance. But step inside Hengist's glittering interior and you'll be instantly seduced.
Terry Durack, Restaurant Critic Of The Year

Published: 26 June 2005

Stick a candle in a Chianti bottle, put Piaf on the sound system, and you're a romantic restaurant. No, you're not. You're about as romantic as St Valentine's Day, a sanctioned, official 24 hours in which we must be nice to our loved ones, only to revert to form - the not-listening, the dropping-of-socks, the "what's for dinner?" - the very next day.

Stick a candle in a Chianti bottle, put Piaf on the sound system, and you're a romantic restaurant. No, you're not. You're about as romantic as St Valentine's Day, a sanctioned, official 24 hours in which we must be nice to our loved ones, only to revert to form - the not-listening, the dropping-of-socks, the "what's for dinner?" - the very next day.

A truly romantic restaurant is one that transports you both to a parallel universe, like Hengist in Kent. How good it is to enter a place designed to subtly alter our mood, enable us to talk intimately, and most importantly, make us look five years younger.

I had thought the most romantically inclined restaurant in Britain was Thackeray's, in Tunbridge Wells, where the former home of William Makepeace has been transformed into a glowing den of candlelight, gold leaf and roses. The food, from former Criterion and St Martins Lane Hotel chef Richard Phillips, is precise, pretty and sparkling with flavour - and now also sparkling with a Michelin star.

Since then Williams and his partners have gone on to acquire Frobisher's, an upmarket bar in Maidstone and most recently, Hengist. As if Aylesford, often said to be the oldest village in England, isn't romantic enough already. Every window is mullioned, every street is narrow, and every vacant lot is an ancient graveyard.

Much money and effort has been spent on the restoration of Hengist (named for the Saxon chief), and its landscaped gardens. The interior is enticing, a world in which ornate chandeliers glow from within glass cubes, candelabras shimmer behind white voiles, and walls are softened with suede. Stone stairs lead up to a collection of small fantasy lands: one dining-room themed with crystals and modern crystal light installations, another in high-gloss black lacquer.