Photograph: Emma Guscott Photography/The Guardianĭon’t look for bells and whistles, though. Good chickpeas and paprika feature among the small plates offering at Chater’s.

Even so, Chater’s definitely has about it a dose of urban industrial chic – it’s a large, airy room with few adornments aside from those nicely spaced tables, though on a Saturday lunchtime it felt very much like a cool oasis of calm. Max and Máire Chater have been around the London hospitality scene for years in many guises, making their names in the city’s bars and restaurants, distilling their own gin, leading walking tours around the finest drinking joints, moving into vermouth and now, along with Dan Joines, formerly of, among others, Sorella and Darby’s in south London, combining all their skills in this pretty, white-brick space in a town that’s the polar opposite of edgy east London. That’s not to say you can’t drink the vermouth earlier and order the cake nearer bedtime – the mood seems very much to say: do what you like, as long as you’re nice while you’re doing it. It also has tables where you can eat a bakewell tart or an eccles cake and sip on a cortado, or have provolone on focaccia with piquillo peppers for lunch, or, come evening time, get properly stuck into their range of vermouths, as well as homemade pastas and a range of small plates: burrata with orange zest, steak tartare and chickpeas with paprika, for instance.

It’s a sort of fancy cake counter/general store that sells lovely things such as bars of Land chocolate, Perelló olives and bottles of their own-label Vault Aperitivo vermouth.

Little nectar cafe