Frank's Mussel Bar: Inside West Malling's 500-Year-Old Former Bakery

West Malling's High Street has a 16th-century building still doing, in spirit, what it was built for 500-odd years ago: feeding people. Frank's Restaurant and Mussel Bar, at 53-57 High Street, occupies a Grade II* listed hall house that spent generations as a working bakery. Today it's known for a menu built almost entirely around one dish, served more than 20 different ways: mussels.

The building is a probable late-15th-century open hall house, with a late-16th-century chimneystack inserted and its front rebuilt in brick in the 18th century, according to its Grade II* listing held by Kent County Council's Historic Environment Record. Its 1952 listing describes it under its former trade - "premises occupied by Brigg's Bakery and L. Brewer, Confectioner." Upstairs, original features survive including jowled posts, arched braces and two octagonal crownposts, which the listing says are of "high quality" suggesting "this building has some specialised original use." Embedded in the base of the left-hand ground-floor wall is the top of West Malling's own medieval stone market cross, carved with a crucifixion scene - a piece of the town's history built into the wall of the building that came after it.

Before it was Frank's, the same address spent some years as a branch of Café Belge, a small Kent chain built around Belgian beer and mussels - 80 beers and, by one account from 2004, fifty different ways of serving mussels, brought to the table in enamel pots with the lids doubling as a bowl for empty shells. Even then, reviewers noted the Tudor beams and pub-style carpet were inherited from the building's past, since nothing structural can be changed without listed-building consent. The chain's branding is long gone and the name has changed to Frank's Restaurant and Mussel Bar, at the same address and the same phone number - but the one thing that has stuck across both eras is the mussels.

Frank's serves mussels cooked more than 20 ways - from a classic mariniere to curry, garlic and chilli, or bacon and blue cheese - alongside a shorter menu of other mains, in a dining room still built around the building's open fireplace and exposed beams. It's open for lunch and dinner Monday to Saturday (closed Sundays), and has built up a strong following locally: more than 600 Google reviews average 4.6 out of 5, and the restaurant's own website cites a four-star review from the Telegraph.

Source: Frank's Restaurant and Mussel Bar, Kent County Council Historic Environment Record