Apicius (Cranbrook Kent) via High Weald Landscape Trail

Restaurant: Apicius
Trail: High Weald Landscape Trail  map OS136

• Eating: divine, been there many times and never less than stellar
• Hiking: 12.21mi, 4.5hrs on the march, rolling hills, and in good weather there's spectacular shires scenery
• Wildlife spotted: aside from domestic animals, two grey rabbits, two hawklike somethings circling over Goudhurst, and between Goudhurst and Cranbrook so many pheasants you almost had to kick them out of the way
• Nature's bounty: blackberries aplenty through late summer and early autumn (elevation appears to mean that different bits of the brambles fruit at different times) and still plenty are out and ripe for this hike in mid-October.  There were things that looked like redcurrents which we didn't try... and we have too much to live for to try the mushrooms that were growing but they were fist-sized.  It's bad manners to eat the apples in the orchards and they looked mainly like cooking or cider apples anyway.
• Muddy boots factor: on the trail, more than usual this time-- had rained recently, I guess--but not too bad... we were mostly alright with just trail shoes rather than full boots
• Muddy boots tolerance: we usually bring more elegant shoes to change into for the resto, but Faith (the maitress d') knows our foibles so isn't shocked if we leave the boots in the cloakroom to dry.  I must remember to roll up trouser legs a bit when hiking so you don't get mud on the inside of the cuff.

The first time Apicius came on the radar was-- appropriately enough, given that it is now kicking us off in blogging--a bit of internet ephemera by an anonymous eGullet contributor called Gareth.  The story that caught the eye was this:
It won my "restaurant anecdote of the year" award last year as Faith Johnson (the Chef's wife) who does front of house told us about one of her regular lunch tables which comprises 4 women putting the world to rights over half a case of Bordeaux. Two of these ladies spent the war in SOE, one at Bletchley Park and one in the French Resistance. One day Faith ventured to comment on their prodigious capacity for claret and was told in no uncertain terms by Madame de la Resistance "I am not an alcoholic, I am a drunk. Alcoholics attend meetings."
Well, that sounded promising if that's the target audience.  Mrs. read several more reviews, all absolutely unanimously unwaveringly glowing--and this was long before they got their Mich star.  So how do we get there?  We don't own a car; no train station in Cranbrook.  Then we spotted the trail symbol on the map.  This was in 2006-- our first real experiment in hiking to lunch, but we had done plenty of hiking previously, and plenty of lunching.  That time, we were a little late getting started for a 2pm Sunday lunch, and had to give up at the pub at Goudhurst... taxis are so thin in this part of Kent that a fellow at the bar volunteered to give us a lift, he was going that way.  In 2012, we're more prepared.

Alarm goes off at 6:30am, which Mrs. finds to be a little early and promptly rolls over again.  I myself need breakfast before this sort of hike (more than one breakfast ideally) so made porridge and coffee for one, and pushed Mrs. out of bed in time to catch an 8:08 train at Charing Cross.  I don't think she'd put up with this if there wasn't a lunch at the end of it, with a 2pm reservation.  Charing Cross is not a promising place to start a culinary adventure: at that hour of a Sunday morning, since the only place open at that hour is a Delice de France hole-in-the-wall... Mrs.'s first breakfast and my second set us back £11.18 but then we did have ~very~ large coffees.  By chance, this was the same day as the Royal Park Half, and lots of participants were streaming into town off the early trains, ready to run in spandex and dayglo.  I've never run the RPFHM and I'm sure it's a lovely run, but it's also a £45 entry fee, and I thought it was a little amusing that all the dayglo spandexers who were coming off the trains were on a course that is less than a mile longer than our course, and only slightly cheaper than our day out will be.  And they won't eat as well.
Train runs to time and we get to our jumping off point of Paddock Wood at 9:08am.  There's neither paddock nor wood in sight, but the main road from the station leads due south, past a couple of cafs (definitely not cafés, these are definitely cafs) and a Costa, all of which open and the high street bustling at this early hour.  The sun is out but it's autumnal crisp and (after setting out clothing, map, etc. the previous night) I find I had forgotten both sunglasses and gloves.  The main trail is below town, so the first mile or so is just following the main road out of town, but it gets very rural very quickly, at least to our Londoner's eyes, and we gawp at a couple of birds we can't quite identify, on an oast (traditional Kentish building) top.

At exactly a mile from the train station (on the GPS, which we're bringing on this hike for the first time) just after a school playing field, a set of steps

and onto a footpath that starts to feel like we're hiking properly on the dew that's still left although the fog has burned away.  The path here follows the outside of the playing field fence and we've done this path several times, so I'm tapping notes into the blackberry with one hand and rechecking the map in the other as the dew gets into my shoes (and thinking I should have worn full boots after all) and what ho, there's a large-ish horse in the field looking at us from thirty yards away.  "There's a horse," I say to Mrs. who lets me know it had been watching us as we walked all the way round the field and I had been to preoccupied to notice... then between the amusement of this exchange and watching about two dozen sparrows flocking in a hedge, Mrs. walks straight past the narrow snicket between two houses on Chantler's Hill that we should be taking.  "We always do that," she says, and in truth we always do do that on this path.

Through the snicket leads at 1.3mi via a kissing gate onto a disused golf course-- or at least I assume it's disused, as the grass is very yellow and nobody's golfing.  There are a few sheep grazing in a gully over what must have been a water hazard... surely they don't let sheep out if people are golfing, do they?  At 2mi another kissing gate lets us into an orchard (with more oasts in the background)

The orchard owners are apparently very tolerant of hikers and fell runners (we passed several runners who hadn't gone up to London for the Half who were running on the trail) but perhaps a little too tolerant as there are many paths through the orchards, and we always get a little bit spun around and never quite follow the thin green dotted line on the Ord Survey map.  At the exact middle of the orchard, we stop for a map check and Mrs. tells me "we always do this" as we give up on the map and take a path that looks roughly right.  A few minutes later we stumble out onto an A road on the outskirts of the village of Brenchley, only about a quarter mile from where we should be.

Brenchley is the picture-postcard version of what a Kentish village should be, almost the cartoon version of a Kentish village, with terracotta-tile-sided cottages and half-timbered Tudor houses
and we marched quickly past the Rose and Crown (apparently now converted to houses) and the Bull Inn (sadly shut at 10:15am, though they gave us delicious pints when we did this hike aiming for a dinnertime sitting) to the almost comically where's-the-movie-camera beautiful triangular village square.  There's a small church and atmospheric churchyard

and this is where you join onto the main High Weald Landscape Trail.  Since it's a main national trail, it'd be tempting to say you can't miss it, but the first steps out of the village square/triangle are a half-hidden path where you climb into a bush beside the fishmongers.  It's 3mi already hiking and we've only just joined the main trail, but the next stretch is along walled gardens and very quick walking, and very atmospheric

with a smell of autumn leaves as you rustle along.  If that's too poetic, though, at the end of the tunnel of foliage there's the first proper bramble of ripe blackberries and--two breakfasts already be damned--it's 10:30 and I'm hungry again, and tuck in to the very sweet ripe berries as Mrs. walks ahead a bit, down and up a fairly steep hill, so I'm sure I'll catch her up.  Passing a small lake in a copse, there are signs out referring to wilful damage and trespassing (path is public, sides are not) and I can't help wondering what it is about the fencing with three strands of barbed wire across the top that someone found ambiguous.  Apparently the police were notified.  As we top the first serious hill of the day, we look over fenced fields where further signs suggest that the livestock bite and kick and therefore we should stay to the path.  That particular morning, the kicking livestock were clearly positioning themselves far enough away that they could get a good run up for the promised kickings, as we saw none of them.  Along a small road with cottages and back into the orchards, it's harvest time

in another set of orchards.  We notice and debate the smaller, separate trees in the mix (one has lots of smaller cherry-sized yellow fruit, another looks like unripe cherries, another what would be called in Canada crabapples) leads down towards a lake by a wood.  This is another traditional muddle spot, though you can hardly miss the lake that's marked and I think we're finally benefitting from having done this trail before that we take the right path with only a minimum of muddle.  It helps that we're talking about planning for the next few hike/dining days: we're booked into the Hand&Flower in Marlow in a month, as we walk along a bit of the path where the landowner has helpfully fenced off both sides of the path with electric fencing

so you can't make a wrong turn, and we've been talking about the large number of very good restos in the Welsh Marches which might be combined with Offa's Dyke Path which we've started calling Offa's Lunch.  Perhaps for summer 2013, but we don't actually conclude on anything, cheerfully chatting plans as we cross the road at 4.5mi into Sprivers.  We've never had time to visit the lovely house on the grounds-- indeed, it's not clear whether you can-- but there's always a flock of very polished-looking black faced sheep on the lawn and the property has a lovely calm atmosphere.  The fields immediately around and after Sprivers are hop fields, for the local beers that are common and delicious in Kent, with some still on their poles and some hop vines harvested and pulled down.

I took one of the buds (left over, on an already-harvested vine) between my fingers and crushing it brought out a wonderful floral bitter smell... but also brought out a sticky resin which stuck to my fingers and there still is a bitter-smelling smudge on our OS map.  On the far side of the fields, there's a keyhole in the hedge that doesn't look like it belongs to a main national trail, but that's the way onwards.  Somehow that makes it feel all the more Alice-in-Wonderland... we're still marvelling at the sunshine and warm day, let alone anything else.  At 5.5mi, there's a little stretch by a chicken farm where somehow the posts with the waymarkings always seem to be twisted the wrong way, or fallen over on the ground.  It's the bane of hiking that there's still a few farmers out there with "Git Orf Moy Land" tendency... and while that is what it is, it's always made very little sense to me that they might muck up the waymarking.  Surely if they want us orf, we're more than  happy to go and we'll git orf ever so much faster if it's clear which is the right way orf and the sign pointing us orf is still standing.  Best to be charitable: perhaps the waymark posts were attacked by Kentish termites.  Past hikes, we've gotten very lost at this stretch and spent quite a while admiring the chickens (a variety of breeds, some quite exotic-looking) but this time we're careful, knowing "we always do this" and hold straight on until another keyhole in the hedge drops us out into a five-way fork in the path at 5.68mi from the start, and from here, we don't get lost again-- but cresting a small ridge, Mrs. can see Goudhurst on a ridge above the trail... and the climb looks daunting (or so Mrs. grumbles), but once you get going it goes quickly, and the steepness is a wonderful excuse to stop and look back over the countryside we've walked through:

More importantly, as we march up the high street, this is our first official break, at just shy of 8mi and just over three hours hiking-- it's traditional to stop at the Star&Eagle in Goudhurst for a drink, and you can see I'm in a bit of a rush to get there (with backpack).

I maintain we should have caught the train a halfhour earlier (so I could have a full pint rather than the half I'm permitted) but this opinion doesn't get a lot of sympathy.  As we set off, we're now properly hungry and Mrs is setting a sharp pace down the hill the other side of Goudhurst and through the fields.  There must be a pheasant hatchery somewhere nearby, as the fields are thick with them, in groups of up to a dozen and very careless of humans-- we weren't carrying guns nor were we intending to hunt, but with a bit of a run we could probably have grabbed a couple in hand.  If they stay that naive, they won't last the season.  At about 10mi, we cross a road near Glassenbury and run across a large group of teenage hikers, just tucking into tinned fruit by the pathside-- we don't attempt to evangelise; they'll come round to our way of thinking when they're older.  We also pass an oldfashioned looking armoured car rusting on the side of a field, its machinegun turret pointed out into the field, presumably against the pheasants who were massing there.  The last stretch is through a group of woods which on a previous hike were absolutely carpeted with bluebells, but looking very autumnal today and we march straight through under orders of Mrs. who is now firmly in the lead.  At 10.65mi, we climb out of the ex-bluebell forest onto the A229, cross and walk up the high street, and at 13:55  and 12.2mi we're changing our shoes and sit for lunch.  The GPS calculates that the walk burned 1273 calories, which seems an excellent excuse.

Mrs now takes over for the serious bit ...

Mr.'s starter of deep fried smoked haddock brandade, quails eggs, aoli and tapenade was the most interesting starter we've had at Apicius. Although it did create a slight fug in the dining room, from the deepfryer. The oiliness of the mackerel offset by the potato in the brandade; the crispiness of the shell combined with the smooth eggs and the bite of the tapenade and aoli to cut through; overall a balanced yet challenging dish. My foie gras was (close your ears if you are an opponent of gavage) delicious, but slightly ho hum, with the pain epice soaked in too much oil and the crab boudin blanc slightly too bland. However, these are very minor quibbles as we expect so much from Tim's cooking.
Mr. won the starter course by at least a length, but the mains gave me a resounding victory. The scallop and smoked bacon brochette was superb. The scallops absolutely perfectly cooked, sweet and tender and given extra depth by the bacon. The linguini smooth and tasty - I have no idea how Chef managed to make linguini have such depth of umami flavour. Mr.'s Romney Marsh lamb was very good; in most other restaurants this dish would have stood out. However against the precision and depth of the scallop dish, it appeared merely competent. 
I chose a Fleurie to match the mains - Gamay is not a usual match to lamb, but Mr. likes it, and Fleurie can also have white grapes added (though the French, being what they are, never admit to this on the label) so it was also a worthwhile partner to the scallops and bacon.
The third course was a tie: Mr. had a fabulous deep chocolate and coffee terrine and I had generous servings of six different English cheeses, including 'Admiral Collingwood', a medium hard cow's cheese with a rind washed in Newcastle Brown ale. Accompanied by a further glass of Brouilly: again from Beaujolais but further south, so warmer and more fruit-forward than the Fleurie.

With that, and now something past 4pm, the restaurant was kind enough to roll us into a taxi to the train station back to London, where we managed not to fall asleep until we were actually on the train.  And very good luck we were going to the railhead at Charing Cross.

Next month: Ten miles & Hand & Flower.

Other people's reviews (historical): 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/restaurants/3342228/Restaurant-review-Apicius.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2005/aug/06/foodanddrink.shopping2

• Train: £8.45 each, day return, from zone 2 boundry, with discount for an annual tube pass (which I used to think was the height of staid middleagedness, but now find rather practical)
• Map: already had it
• Second Brek: £11.18
• Carbohydrate Energy Drink on trail: halfpint of bitter, halfpint of shandy, £3.90
• Meal: twocourse £29 w/cheese £9, threecourse £31.50, two glasses of champagne £16, Fleurie £29, glass of Brouilly to go with cheese £5-- tip 12.5% makes that £131.06
• taxi from restaurant back to train £14.50

All in cost: £177.54

[spot to insert the GPS trail when I work out how to export it from my Garmin and onto a map]