Amid all the bunting and hoopla of the platinum jubilee back in 2022, you may well have missed that Colchester, Britain’s oldest recorded settlement, got an upgrade from town to city status. And, as we all know, no true city is complete without at least one fancy restaurant that serves the likes of duck liver mousse on lattice tuiles. Well, in Colchester, Kintsu takes that slot.
Or at least it did until May 2025, when chef Paul Wendholt abruptly shut up shop, citing financial pressures. The name Kintsu plays on the term kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing pottery with gold, silver or platinum or, more commonly, of embracing imperfection and making something pleasing out of bad luck. So it’s rather fitting that Wendholt, a two-time winner of the Essex Chef of the Year gong, managed to reopen Kintsu just four months later, and a year on is now offering eight courses, plus a few extras, for £90 a head in a Grade II-listed building, albeit one that’s down a back lane beside a multi-storey NCP car park. The setting will win no beauty contests, but when a man is so determined to cook dinner, it feels churlish to ignore him. Come for the secure parking, stay for the treacle-cured Dingley Dell pork from nearby Suffolk and the Colchester cherries with amaretto.
‘Cooked precisely’: Kintsu’s Suffolk bass with courgette, chorizo and XO sauce.
Even the very idea of a tasting menu will deter some customers: too faffy, too fiddly. But here, from the first warm-up snack – whipped Montgomery cheddar in a fluted tartlet casing under a blanket of crunchy yeast and yet more cheese – even the hardest of the “I just want me dinner” brigade might find their hearts softening. This is followed by that duck liver mousse-topped tuile with glossy, amber beads of onion gel piped on top and a fat, postage stamp-sized chunk of bread pudding piled with ricotta, lemon, and raw peas and shoots. Style as well as substance.
Hunks of warm sourdough arrive, clearly fresh from the oven and reminding you how sweet and fragrant sourdough can be, especially when it’s spread with glorious Fen Farm butter. A plague upon all that hard, spongy nonsense served up and down the land as a plinth for scrambled eggs. While we work our way through these opening snacks, Lionel Richie’s Dancing on the Ceiling plays in the background, and the bread turns up to Shattered Dreams by Johnny Hates Jazz. By the time the Braxted tomatoes arrive, we are deep into Living in a Box territory, which feels about right for a Saturday lunchtime in a listed barn. Why can’t all restaurants play mid-1980s chart music?
‘The strongest course’: Kintsu’s Herdwick lamb with turnip and mint.
Those first course tomatoes are a rhapsody of very good fruit arranged strategically on silky whipped pecorino with a wicked green basil oil. It is 1pm on a Saturday and we are on one of only two tables occupied. The minimal staff – two in the kitchen and one on the floor – couldn’t be lovelier, ferrying thick, chunky and squat Cornish crab tarts that look almost like mince pies. There’s lots of brown meat layered under the white, and very good, crunchy pastry. This is good, thoughtful, clever cooking that errs on the side of tasty rather than flippant. I wish more people were here to taste it, but they are probably all at a bottomless brunch somewhere, eating ethylene-ripened avocado mush on fumaric acid-injected bread that tastes of old flip-flops. More fool them.
We, meanwhile, are having wild Suffolk bass, its skin all crisp and blistered, cooked precisely and served on a foamed sauce flecked with chives and beads of orange oil. Next up, that treacle-cured pork, which is hot, juicy, pitch-black around the edges, and comes layered with sweet raw and cooked apple. At this point, a third booking arrives, which is great for Kintsu but curtails my enthusiastic crooning along to The Closest Thing to Heaven by the Kane Gang. The strongest course comes next in the form of Herdwick lamb, and features a moist, well-seasoned medallion with a dark, rich jus, tiny nests of shredded turnip, and yet more lamb, roasted, pulled and compacted on to a metal skewer, and topped with cream and shredded mint.
Kintsu’s cherry dessert ‘doesn’t look much on the plate, but it is utterly fabulous’.
A pre-pudding of yoghurt, raspberry and lemon resets the mouth. Then an inventive dessert of Colchester cherries, both cooked and preserved, and served on something biscuity, something creamy and something with a whiff of amaretto. It doesn’t look like much on the plate – a collapsed Jenga of dessert ideas – but it is utterly fabulous. We pay the bill over slices of homemade fig-leaf fudge that I would happily hand out in boxes at Christmas. Or eat alone on the sofa.
Kintsu is a huge example of a small regional indie doing its very best in rather weird times. Use these places or lose them. Right now, Kintsu is open: beautifully restored, with shimmers of gold.
Kintsu 11a North Hill, Colchester, Essex, 01206 574361. Open lunch Fri & Sat, noon-1.30pm (last orders); dinner Weds-Sat, 6.30-8pm (8.30pm Fri & Sat; last orders). Tasting menus only, five courses for £65 or eight for £90, both plus drinks and service