Fete, Chelmsford, Essex: ‘It absolutely dares to be different’ – restaurant review | Grace Dent on restaurants
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.Fête 10-13 Grays Brewery Yard, Chelmsford, Essex, hello@fetegraysyard.co.
uk (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
UK watchdog raises competition concerns over Greencore-Bakkavor deal
Greencore’s £1.2bn deal to buy Bakkavor is under the spotlight after the competition watchdog said the tie-up between Britain’s biggest sandwich maker and its rival could harm competition.Greencore struck a deal in April to buy its rival Bakkavor, which supplies pizzas, salads and other snacks to leading supermarkets such as Tesco, Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Asda.Together the companies said they would create a UK convenience food business with a combined revenue of £4bn.However, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has said the deal could result in a “substantial lessening of competition” within the market for supermarket own-label chilled sauces
AI can help authors beat writer’s block, says Bloomsbury chief
Authors will come to rely on artificial intelligence to help them beat writer’s block, the boss of the book publisher Bloomsbury has said.Nigel Newton, the founder and chief executive of the publisher behind the Harry Potter series, said the technology could support almost all creative arts, although it would not fully replace prominent writers.“I think AI will probably help creativity, because it will enable the 8 billion people on the planet to get started on some creative area where they might have hesitated to take the first step,” he told the PA news agency.“AI gets them going and writes the first paragraph, or first chapter, and gets them back in the zone,” he said. “And it can do similar things with painting and music composition and with almost all of the creative arts
Supermarkets tell Reeves tax rises could push food prices higher
Food prices in the UK could climb even further if the chancellor raises taxes on supermarkets at the next budget, the industry has warned.Supermarket bosses, including those at Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons, have said in a letter to Rachel Reeves that households would “inevitably feel the impact” of potential tax rises on the sector.“If the industry faces higher taxes in the coming budget – such as being included in the new surtax on business rates – our ability to deliver value for our customers will become even more challenging, and it will be households who inevitably feel the impact,” they wrote in the joint letter.“Given the costs currently falling on the industry, including from the last budget, high food inflation is likely to persist into 2026. This is not something that we would want to see prolonged by any measure in the budget
Does your boss have the right to time your bathroom breaks when you work from home? | Gene Marks
How long does it take you to go to the bathroom? And does your boss have any right to ask?According to a recent story in the New York Post, one manager warned workers of the company’s “five-minute rule” which required work-from-home employees to “notify the team” if they stepped away from their desk for any reason, including to use the bathroom.“This helps us stay aligned and ensures nothing is missed. Thank you for your co-operation,” the manager said in an email shared online by an irate worker. Not surprisingly, this policy did not go over very well with some.“5 min?” one commenter wrote
Trump sanctions have swift impact but will world stop buying Russian oil and gas?
Donald Trump’s stated mission to broker peace in Ukraine could come down to this simple question: can the US president convince the world to stop buying Russia’s fossil fuels?Last week, Trump imposed sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil, in an effort to damage Moscow’s ability to fund its war machine.Tom Keatinge, the founding director of the Centre for Finance and Security (CFS) at the defence thinktank Rusi, said: “The US has been more effective in 24 hours than the EU has been in the last six months. Trump is willing to say what many others are too timid or too diplomatic to say out loud. For the longest time people have been calling for Trump to pull out the sanctions hammer. It could be very significant
Peer trying to derail UK smoking ban discussed bill with relative at tobacco firm
A member of the House of Lords who is trying to derail the generational ban on tobacco sales discussed the legislation with a family member who is “very high up” at British American Tobacco (BAT).Lord Strathcarron is proposing amendments that would scrap the central provision of the tobacco and vapes bill, originally proposed by Rishi Sunak’s government.If the bill is passed in its original form, the UK would become only the second country to implement a so-called generational smoking ban, making it illegal to sell tobacco to anyone born after 2008.Strathcarron’s proposal is to simply raise the legal purchase age from 18 to 21.The change proposed by the peer, who in a recent speech in the Lords described cigars as “harmless”, mirrors BAT’s lobbying position
Lord Taverne obituary
Would a written constitution save Britain from the far right? | Letters
Keir Starmer shares post-punk passion and revisits musical past
Reform MP’s remarks about TV adverts were ‘racist’, says Wes Streeting
‘We have to book bigger rooms’: Green membership surge causes novel problems
Companies that donated to Labour awarded £138m in contracts, study finds