Exceptional fine dining

Chapter One offers exceptional food in a stylish setting. An extensive list of carefully chosen wines and delicious cocktails. Impeccable service with meticulous attention to detail.

At Chapter One we've created a first-class dining experience that's contemporary and cosmopolitan - inspired modern-European cooking making the most of fresh, seasonal ingredients. In the restaurant, you'll receive a fine dining experience with regularly changing menus offering outstanding quality and variety.

Our Brasserie offers an alternative lunch and dinner menu of favourite dishes like steaks, burgers and fish and chips with a more relaxed, informal ambience. Serving lunch Wednesday to Saturday and dinner Wednesday to Saturday.

Open five days a week, Chapter One, regarded as one of the best restaurants in Kent, is a sophisticated yet relaxed place to meet, dine and enjoy. We look forward to welcoming you soon.

Read what the critics say

As far as modern fine dining restaurants go, Chapter One is a touch out of the ordinary – being neither a voguish urban townhouse nor a rustic country retreat. In truth, its location on a busy road connecting the Kentish towns of Bromley and Orpington is rather inauspicious. But rest assured, the food is anything but.

Harden's 2022

Intelligent cooking and spot-on service- AA Inspector.

With its additional options of the relaxed brasserie and popular terrace, Andrew McLeish's upmarket venue has wide appeal. The more formal restaurant sets a refined tone with its crisp linen tablecloths and vibrant gastronomic artwork on the plain white walls. Deceptively spacious with wood floors, dark blue furnishings and pale blue panelling, the decor is contemporary and comfortable.

Long established and well supported by the locals, the ambience is chatty and friendly, with well-drilled waiting staff in formal black waistcoats and aprons. Whether you go for the carte, or the wallet-friendly menu du jour, McLeish strikes an inviting balance between assured modern European cooking and the desire to offer value. There is an obvious understanding of classic techniques and the dishes are finely tuned favourites rather than trying to reinvent things for the sake of it. Seasonal ingredients from a network of high-end suppliers mean that the menus change all the time, depending on what’s best at the time and what arrives in the kitchen. Chicken and girolle mushroom ravioli with onion Lyonnaise, chicken and celery jus makes for an arresting starter, as does treacle-cured salmon with soya sesame dressing and chargrilled spring onions. Main courses bring further evidence of intelligent flavour combinations, perhaps tandoori monkfish with curried cauliflower purée, sautéed spinach, roasted cauliflower and cumin sauce or roast guinea fowl, potato gnocchi, hispi cabbage, roasted sweetcorn and smoked guinea fowl jus. Desserts continue the form with an indulgent peanut parfait, double chocolate brownie, Kentish raspberries and raspberry sorbet or a poached blackberry and passionfruit mille-feuille with blackberry sorbet. And if there’s still room, the English and French cheeses with fruit toast, Lavroche crackers and spiced apple chutney is hard to resist. Time a visit, perhaps, with one of the restaurant’s popular gourmet evenings.

AA Restaurant Guide 2022

"On top form again" – chef Andy McLeish has run the kitchen at this culinary beacon near Orpington for more than 20 years, and purchased it with a business partner five years ago. Long an "outstanding destination” on London’s southeastern fringe, it is now "absolutely humming – both food and service very good and the tables well spaced”. "You’re always assured of a top food, service and ambience experience, for lunch or dinner".

Great British Chefs 2022

Recent renovations have only increased support of this "busy and buzzy" local venue that does the old-fashioned things supremely well.

Good Food Guide 2021

Andrew McLeish's relaxing venue sees crisply linened tables and gastronomic prints set a refined tone. He has struck a nigh perfect balance here between assured contemporary cooking with plenty of surprises and a pressing need to offer value.

AA Restaurant Guide 2020

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