The Goods Shed

Produce taken from the next stall

The blackboard changes with what the market gives. Luke Frankie, Chef at The Goods Shed in Canterbury West, Canterbury, works in a railway shed where the kitchen can draw from the counters beside it rather than from a distant order sheet. His route to that pass was built through service rather than a single doctrine: training at Jamie Oliver’s flagship Old Street restaurant Fifteen, then time as Chef de Partie at Dock Kitchen in Ladbroke Grove, Sous Chef at Spring at Somerset House, Head Chef back at Dock Kitchen, and Head Chef at The Drapers Arms in Islington from 2017. He came to The Goods Shed as Head Chef from 2022.

That sequence matters here because the room asks for judgement at close range. The house began in 2002 as a farmers’ market and restaurant hybrid inside a converted Victorian railway goods shed by Canterbury West station. In 2025 it marked its quarter centenary, still working from the same premise: Kentish produce, independent suppliers, and a kitchen close enough to the stalls for the day’s decisions to stay visible. Frankie’s own register, Anglo-French in training and British in comfort, fits a place where a crab tart with crab oil mayo and watercress can sit beside Sunday lamb roast or onglet steak and ale pie without losing its line.

A blackboard tied to the market

The method is not hidden behind a long menu. The restaurant works à la carte from a daily blackboard, with about five choices per course and no tasting menu. Around 95% of ingredients are reported to come from the on-site market stalls a few feet away, including vegetables from Kentish farms, fish from the fishmonger, bread from the ovens, meat from the butchery, cheese, charcuterie and wines. The kitchen’s discipline is therefore partly selection, partly restraint.

The cooking named around the house keeps to direct techniques: grilling, roasting, purées, tempura, butter sauces, pickling, and the careful use of fat and acidity. Grilled squid with lemon and green sauce reads one way; cold roast pork with anchoïade, fried capers and pickled cucumber reads another. A pork chop with cauliflower purée and sauce keeps the plate close to British appetite, while brandade fishcake with butter sauce, caviar, rocket and salmon roe pulls comfort into a sharper register. Frankie’s own dishes, roast pumpkin with brown butter, hazelnut and crispy sage among them, show the same preference for familiar forms made specific by texture.

The pass inside the shed

The room carries the work without polishing it smooth. Scrubbed wooden tables sit under the old shed structure; candlelight comes on as the market quiets; the open kitchen pass keeps the movement of the station in view. The atmosphere is rustic because the building has not been disguised. It is a former goods shed, with a market’s noise and a restaurant’s concentration sharing the same roof.

That proximity shapes the meal. A diner can see produce before it becomes mise en place, then see the plate leave the pass. The counter, the butchery, the fishmonger and the bakery are not background decoration; they are part of the working system. The place has one current award, and stalls, bench, pass, table, all inside the same Canterbury shed.