FAMILY VALUES: Sevenoaks' supper club Three Sisters
Sevenoaks start-up supper club Three Sisters offers a dining destination built on happiness
Set in a stunningly-converted farm building and blessed with views over a deer park in west Kent, a once-a-week supper club has commandeered the Friday evenings of local food-and-drink purists.
Under its curved, festoon-lit corrugated roof, Three Sisters (@three.sisters.sevenoaks) is pioneering something of a life-first hospitality operation. Run by Tom Duffill and wife Becky, the perma-pop-up has set down roots at Chart Farm on the outskirts of Sevenoaks.
Working at some of the UK’s best restaurants for 15 years, Tom cut his teeth with mentor Anthony Demetre and Will Smith at the Michelin-starred Arbutus before stints at the Galvin brothers’ Bistrot de Luxe and La Chapelle and eventually as the dining director of Thomas’s at Burberry (plus a hell of a lot more).
But after Covid shut down the restaurant industry, cash was tight and, coupled with the birth of his third daughter, it was time for Tom to reassess.
“I was like ‘I’m happy to go do anything, I’ll go stack shelves if I need to, and just be happy to be working’,” remembers Tom. “My wife said ‘Why don’t you use your skill set and try to do something that you’re interested in?’. And so I literally started doing some ‘dining-at-home’ packages. At first I thought ‘I’m not really into this, this isn’t meant for me’. And then it just kind of went a bit bonkers.”
“... you kind of wonder when the bubble is gonna pop every single day and then it doesn’t…”
In the midst of lockdown, the word started spreading through social media, with the dining-at-home packages offering a weekly, cost-effective restaurant experience that could be delivered direct to your door.
Tom and Becky set about preparing a Saturday set menu using local producers and growers that was oven-ready… it even had breads, treats and cocktails.
“We started with nothing, cooking in our house, which very quickly escalated into creating an industrial mini-kitchen at the back of the garage,” says Tom. “We were buying fridges from eBay and bits of equipment. And I’m lucky my father-in-law’s an electrician. We were putting this whole thing together and it just went from nothing to not having any capacity to do more.
“We were both doing deliveries on a weekend and it was actually really good fun. It was stressful at times, with lots of late nights, because obviously being food you can only start it a couple of days before.”
After 18 months, Tom left the London commute and unsociable hours behind and took the plunge to do it full-time.
“Running your own small business, you kind of wonder when the bubble is gonna pop every single day and then it doesn’t and it keeps going and you’re like ‘Are we actually working for ourselves now?’,” says Tom. “I said to myself ‘Right, I’m gonna do this for 12 months. If it works, fantastic. If it doesn’t, it gives me time to see the other side - the industry would have recovered, those jobs in the right positions becoming available instead of just taking anything’. And so that’s what we did.”
Tom began working with the nearby Chart Farm, which supplied top restaurants such as The Clove Club in London and The Fordwich Arms in Canterbury with quality butchered meats as well as venison from its estate.
It wasn’t long before a conversation began about the vacant space on the farm that was being underutilised, and the idea of having Three Sisters based there was an opportunity for both parties.
SUPPER CLUB
Like the famous nose-to-tail-style cooking that Tom undertook at Arbutus, waste was not an option and, with the new space providing the opportunity to expand the already-flourishing home-dining slice of the business, surely there was more that could be done.
“We’re very aware that the biggest cost of running a restaurant is labour,” says Tom. “So how do we keep ourselves going? How do we make this work in a space that hasn’t got any passing-by trade - you have to make a decision to come here. It’s destination. So how do we do it?”
“So we decided to open on a Friday night - there’ll be a set menu, we’ll fill the room and we’ll still do our dining at home on a weekend.”
The Friday night Supper Club has now been open for almost a year, with monthly-changing menus that flex depending on the seasonal produce that is available. Visiting Three Sisters is designed to be a memorable experience, with five courses of high-quality dishes, plus a few snacky treats, as well as a hand-picked drinks list. The menu for each supper club is announced on social media and through the emailer - something all self-respecting foodies should be on if they want to get a spot at dinner.
“We try to hold it to about 35 guests,” says Tom. “That’s a really comfortable number for me cooking and with one more in the kitchen helping, and then a couple of guys on the floor as well.
“It’s five courses. And then we always throw a few other little bits and pieces in as well, like on arrival. For instance, at the moment we’re doing this little snack that I really loved - this whipped cheese Stracciatella, with these little fried doughnuts and smoked ham, like a little cheese-and-ham sandwich. So, so delicious!”
The space has a theatre kitchen at one end with a serving bar, which adds to the vibrant atmosphere.
“When people arrive, the whole idea is it’s a little bit of a mix at the beginning. Nobody sits down on their seats. We encourage everybody to hang around and they’ll have a drink or aperitif and quite often they might see people they know or they’ll talk to other people.”
The guests sit at 7.45pm and then work through the menu, with the aim of having dessert on the table by 10pm.
“The idea is, because we’re a bit in the sticks, and people have to get a taxi or they have childminders, we’re just aware and try to be conscious of people,” says Tom. “I want to create a restaurant where you sit down, it’s casual, it’s relaxed, there’s good music, there’s good food, there’s good wine and it’s affordable as well.”
But while ‘having someone standing over your table sweeping it’ is not what people want anymore, Tom is uncompromising on the quality that has to be on offer when people go out to eat.
“It cannot be something you can make yourself at home. Because why would you go out?” he says. “Everybody’s getting really interested in food now. Look at all the TikTok and YouTube videos you can watch and learn from and produce really good results.”
The food is, of course, the centre of the evening, and Tom’s menus change like the weather… quite literally.
“Maybe it sounds ridiculous, but if it’s blowing a gale outside you can’t go putting on a lovely tomato dish or something,” he says. “You’ve got to be seasonally appropriate.
“The focus is always on what works with what - like if I had amazing pork, well, what do pigs eat? They pick up the apples, they forage, they like botanicals and nuts and seeds - seeds at the time of the year when pigs are slaughtered traditionally. We’ve got cobnuts from down the road, which work amazingly.”
Provenance is paramount, working with what is on offer at Chart Farm and the local suppliers.
“The first step of what we do is, I will go see the butchers,” says Tom. “They’ll show me some bits, they’ll get unusual things. They might have some amazing Longhorn beef that they got from a guy down in Canterbury. It could be their own deer, it could be sheep from literally 500 metres down the road.
“Two weeks ago, we had amazing wild ducks from a shoot just around the corner and they were insane. So we did a dinner built around zero wastage of the duck. We made parfait from the liver and the hearts, we had a main course with the breast and we confited the legs with a beautiful little bitter-leaf Italian salad.”
Of course, dish variations are expected at times. For example, the fresh fish is sourced from Rye Harbour and the day-boat catch dictates what makes the menu.
“They’ll drop us a text and it turns up the next day at about four o’clock in the morning. Last week they didn’t have much because the weather had been bad, but they had a mackerel that was just unreal. We made this smoky, peppery base and we had some Iberico ham left over, so we rendered down all the fat, put it with peppers, olives and capers and a really good olive oil. That’s what excites me, when things like that come into the kitchen.”
Last summer, Three Sisters grew again, adding a Saturday daytime cafe-style session to the space.
“We’re really into coffee in a big way,” says Tom. “So we opened on a weekend for coffee to try to encourage people to come and collect the dine-at-home packages - instead of us doing delivery. And that’s blown up to the point that we have about 140 people coming for coffee and pastries and Viennoiserie.”
While Three Sisters is looking to potentially open a bakery on-site, and maybe extend the cafe days, Tom never loses sight of why the business started in the first place.
“It’s cool. It’s a great thing to have and it works for us,” he says. “We could do a lot more, I’m sure. But we’re doing this because we’ve got three young children under the age of nine - three girls, hence the name. And this gives us the opportunity to be around more. It’s a business that works with our family life. And that’s pretty much our ethos. So that’s where we’re at, at the moment.”
