There’s something so endearingly adventurous and devil-may-care about this menu that makes me love the place
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.
