Sorrel Restaurant by Steve Drake

A Market Town That Earns Its Place on the Serious Dining Map

Dorking sits in the Surrey Hills about 25 miles south of central London, and for most of its recent culinary history it has been easy to overlook in favour of the county's better-known dining corridor running through Ripley and Send. What changed that calculus was the arrival of Sorrel, when Steve Drake left Drakes in Ripley and brought his ambitions to a 300-year-old former schoolhouse on South Street. That decision quietly repositioned Dorking inside a conversation that had previously excluded it: the question of where serious Modern British cooking happens outside London.

The Building Sets the Register

The physical environment at Sorrel does something that many purpose-built fine-dining rooms fail to achieve: it makes ambition feel earned rather than announced. The Grade II-listed structure carries its age with visible confidence, low ceilings, exposed beams, standing timbers. On the ground floor the atmosphere is cosy without tipping into rustic affectation; upstairs, the beams divide the room into three distinct zones that give even the intimate dining area a sense of spatial variety. This is the kind of building that existed long before anyone thought to serve hand-dived scallops inside it, and that history provides a useful counterweight to the technical precision of what arrives on the plate.

The restaurant takes its name from the owner's favourite herb, a detail that functions as a small editorial statement about where culinary priorities sit: flavour and seasonal produce first, architectural grandeur or brand identity second. That orientation shapes everything that follows, from the menu structure to the approachability of the service.

How the Menu Works, and Which Format to Choose

Two formats run concurrently. The multi-course 'Discovery' tasting menu is framed around a journey structure, 'departures' and 'journey's end' bookend the main sequence, and is designed to show the full scope of what the kitchen is doing. A three-course option, also framed by the same opening and closing nibbles, suits the Friday lunch crowd and provides a more contained way into the restaurant's cooking. Both are built on the same produce sourcing and technical approach; the difference is depth of sequence rather than quality of execution.

The tasting format is the more revealing choice, partly because the 'departure' snacks, apple and curry meringue is one documented example, signal how the kitchen thinks about contrast and restraint before a main course arrives. The closing 'journey's end' section, which has included jasmine and lemon bonbon alongside miso fudge, closes the meal on a sweet-savoury register that is consistent with the broader Modern British direction of the cooking. At its main sequence, the kitchen has paired pork belly with mussels, raw broccoli, and piquillo pepper; treated guinea fowl in a 'coq au vin' style with parsley root and chocolate; and centred hand-dived scallops around crushed apple, turnip miso, Ortiz anchovy, and turnip leaf oil. Dessert positions have included grapefruit with shiitake, coffee, peanut, and passion fruit, a combination that reads as deliberately confrontational on the page and resolves more coherently on the palate.

The Gastropub Revolution, Applied to Market-Town Fine Dining

What Hand and Flowers in Marlow demonstrated in the pub format, that technical ambition could sit inside an unpretentious physical environment and reach a wider audience without diluting the cooking, has a parallel in what market-town restaurants like Sorrel have done with local institutions. The former-schoolhouse format, the beamed rooms, the regional provenance of the produce: none of this is window dressing. It is a deliberate argument that the hierarchy between London and the rest of the country in terms of serious cooking is more permeable than it once appeared.

Sorrel's position in the Opinionated About Dining rankings, #467 in 2025, up from a recommendation in 2023 to #407 in 2024, provides a measurable signal of that upward trajectory. For comparison within the broader category of destination restaurants at this tier, consider hide and fox in Saltwood, Midsummer House in Cambridge, or further afield, L'Enclume in Cartmel and Moor Hall in Aughton.

A Kitchen in Transition

Steve Drake, who built Sorrel's reputation across its first seven years, has stepped back from the kitchen to concentrate on other projects. Alex Payne, previously at the Tudor Pass in Egham, has been appointed as the new chef-patron. The substantive question is whether the sourcing approach and menu philosophy carry forward under new leadership, or whether Payne uses the transition as an opportunity to recalibrate the kitchen's direction. Given his background at another Surrey destination property, there is reason to expect continuity in the emphasis on regional produce and technical detail, but the transition period warrants attention from anyone planning a special-occasion visit..

The Wine List and Service Register

The wine list is described as contemporary and evolving, designed to track seasonal flavour shifts rather than serve as a static reference document. By-the-glass options are documented as accessible and plentiful, which matters in a tasting-menu format where pairing flexibility across courses is more useful than a single bottle commitment. Service operates at a considered pace that allows dishes to be absorbed rather than processed, staff explain what arrives with informed detail but without the didactic quality that can make high-format restaurants feel like attendance at a lecture.

Planning Your Visit

Sorrel operates Wednesday through Saturday, with Friday offering both lunch (12 to 4 pm) and dinner service, and Thursday and Saturday running dinner only (6 to 11 pm). The restaurant is closed Sunday through Tuesday. It sits at 77 South St in Dorking town centre, accessible from London via a direct Southern Rail service to Dorking station, which places it roughly 50 minutes from London Bridge, a meaningful logistical advantage over country-house restaurants that require a car.

For those making Surrey a wider dining itinerary, the county has a broader tier of serious cooking that extends to Gidleigh Park in Chagford and, at the more theatrical end of destination British cooking, The Fat Duck in Bray, Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons in Great Milton, and Restaurant Andrew Fairlie in Auchterarder. For Modern British cooking in a city context, Opheem in Birmingham and The Ledbury in London represent different expressions of the same broad ambition.