“I don’t think there’s anything more glamorous than sitting at a sexy bar, drinking a well-made Martini,” says Ruth Leigh with a smile from the plush banquette seating of Bar Vita. The new venue is part of Updown Farmhouse, the restaurant with rooms she opened with partner Oli Brown in Kent in 2022.
Together with Brown, Leigh has designed a sleek space behind Updown Farmhouse’s award-winning restaurant. It melds the historic features of the 17th-century stable building (think tarnished brick floors and soaring wooden beams) with lacquered wooden panelling, deeply veined marble, and pink plaster walls hung with contemporary art. Pad up the newly carpeted stairs and there’s a mezzanine snug that Leigh mischievously refers to as “the naughty corner”.
Despite being deep in the Kent countryside, Bar Vita manages to feel both subterranean and urban, as though you could just as well be sipping a cocktail from a bar in a Milanese backstreet.
“We love hotel bars. We wanted to do a proper, grown-up bar pretty much since we opened. Somehow, we’ve always managed to do a strong cocktail offering without really having a good bar to do them from, but now I’m wondering how I ever lived without a glass chiller,” Leigh says, proudly brandishing a perfectly frosted Martini glass.
Bar Vita’s signature Martini blends East London vodka with Dolin dry vermouth and comes served with a smoked eel and Perello olive Gilda. It’s a thing of beauty. “We’ve obsessed about these Martinis,” Leigh says. “We’ve found a way to batch them and keep them at –15 degrees Celsius with the glasses. So if you sit down and order a Martini at the bar, you get it in 10 seconds – because if you order a strong drink, you presumably don’t want to wait 10 minutes for it.”
Ten minutes’ drive inland from Deal, Updown is set across seven acres of sprawling grounds, with woodland and extensive kitchen and flower gardens. On a balmy day, sitting under the restaurant’s rambling vines eating olive oil-sodden focaccia, it’s easy to feel transported to a Tuscan trattoria – which is why the menu and wine list has always skewed Italian. Bar Vita follows suit, proffering a drinks menu that takes its lead from Rome and Milan’s glamorous bars, with drinks focused around Italian liqueurs and amari (herbal liqueurs) like Campari.
There’s a sophisticated upgrade on the Espresso Martini, which is made with amaro to add coco and herbal notes, and Updown’s much-loved fig leaf-infused Negroni. Leigh describes the Clementine Shakerato cocktail as “Campari with gin and a little bit of freshly squeezed clementine juice. It’s my dream drink.”
Bar Vita offers a selection of snacks to soak up those Shakeratos, with charcuterie boards; truffle crisps; pizzetta of potato, fontina and rosemary; and cacio e pepe croquettes with mozzarella.
The opening comes hot on the heels of the house’s newly unveiled heated swimming pool. It feels like a logical next step for a property that is fast outgrowing its initial iteration as a restaurant with “a few rooms”, cementing its evolution from an overnight getaway to a self-contained retreat and go-to destination for visiting Londoners.
Bar Vita at Updown Farmhouse
Updown Road, Betteshanger, Deal CT14 0EF
Hours:
Daily midday–late
