Four of the best dog-friendly places to eat in and around Canterbury

At Café des Amis, we can eat duck with a Mexican mole and Parmesan mash, provided our dog accompanies us to the summer terrace. At the Dog at Wingham, the restaurant itself is open to him, including the part of our evening devoted to trout, smoked cockles and a rather serious wine list. These are consequential differences when choosing somewhere to eat. A dog-friendly address may give us a whole restaurant, a small café table or a seat whose usefulness expires with the weather.

Our four choices cover those different appetites and arrangements. There are two central cafés where breakfast warrants more attention than we generally give it, a long-established French-Mexican restaurant for a fine day, and a village pub whose kitchen makes the journey beyond Canterbury worthwhile. Between them, they allow us to plan a morning's wandering, an outdoor lunch or an evening spent over several courses, with the dog beside us.

1. The Dog at Wingham

Canterbury Road, Wingham, CT3 1BB.

We step into the Dog with a lead in one hand and the prospect of a proper dinner ahead of us. Oak beams and an inglenook belong to the old building; the menu belongs very much to a kitchen with ambitions. We settle the dog beneath our table and consider pigeon with black garlic, torched mackerel with blackberries and a venison dish involving considerably more than a piece of venison. Dogs are welcome throughout the restaurant, bar and garden. The booking advice actually asks people who would prefer to sit away from dogs to say so. It is a small reversal of the usual negotiation, and an unusually persuasive one.

Head chef Charlie Kendall-Smith began washing up at fourteen, learnt his trade in kitchens rather than at college and joined the Dog in its most junior kitchen position. Within three years he had worked his way to the top, taking over as head chef at the beginning of 2025. He knows the work behind each plate from the bottom of the kitchen hierarchy upwards. His enthusiasm for British cheese turns up early. We split the £7 bread board, which puts a milk bun made with smoked Maldon salt with Godminster vintage cheese alongside black-treacle bread and focaccia with Arbequina olive oil. We divide the bun before moving on to the darker bread. At £3.50 each, this gives us a less expensive start than committing to two separate starters.

The trout on the autumn menu is our choice. ChalkStream sources its rainbow trout from farms on Hampshire's Test and Itchen rivers; here, the £30 fish course adds herb-crushed potatoes, a velouté with smoked cockles and keta caviar, a type of salmon roe. We draw a piece of fish through the sauce. The cockles bring the sea into a freshwater fish dish, and their smoke gives us something further to consider alongside the roe's saltiness. For something heavier, the £38 rack of venison is accompanied by braised venison ragù, a duck-fat potato fondant, caramelised parsnip, morcilla, blackberry and chard. Morcilla is Spanish blood sausage: its presence makes the dish's richness easier to understand than the French vocabulary alone. We favour the trout when the bread board and pudding are already part of the plan. The venison is for the evening on which game is the whole point.

The wine list gives that decision some room. A 125ml glass of Alain Geoffroy Chablis costs £12; a bottle is £59. We choose the smaller measure with the fish, keeping dinner possible without buying a bottle to suit only one plate. Kent has a substantial presence, including Chapel Down, Gusbourne and Heppington, and the English sparkling wines begin at £15 a glass. These are restaurant prices, which makes it useful that the bar also keeps Harvey's Sussex Best and offers alcohol-free cocktails. One of us has the drive back to Canterbury ahead, so those alternatives are welcome. We pull our feet back to give the dog more space and return to the fish.

The bill deserves an equally attentive reading. A £15 pigeon starter, £30 trout and £12 banoffee tarte Tatin make £57 before bread, drinks or the discretionary 12.5 per cent service charge. The £22 burger or fish and chips offers a lower-priced main, though we come here for the more distinctive cooking. One menu heading requires a little care: the £6 ‘Dog Treats’ are a trio of sweets for humans. We end with the £9 Son of a Gun affogato instead, pouring espresso over Tahitian vanilla ice cream with coffee liqueur. This is a restaurant where even the shortest pudding has acquired an extra drink.

Book for the meal you mean to eat. The autumn à la carte runs at dinner Monday to Friday and at lunch and dinner on Saturday; other services have their own menus. There is parking behind the pub, but drivers should allow for its limited size. Some restaurant areas accommodate wheelchair users, although the building has no accessible toilet. Tell the team about space or access needs when reserving. For a dog comfortable lying through a sustained dinner, the breadth of the welcome is the Dog's decisive advantage: we can choose between the trout and the venison without first asking which part of the restaurant we are allowed to sit in.

2. Café des Amis

2 Westgate Grove, Canterbury, CT2 8AA.

Three of us take our dog to the terrace, within sight of the Westgate, and put our water bowl beside a chair. For a visit with a pet, Café des Amis depends on the season: the terrace welcomes dogs in that season, while the restaurant admits assistance dogs only. That should determine the reservation before anything else. The pleasure here is an outdoor table close to the Stour, a frozen margarita and food which has been making Canterbury happy since 1988. We have no ambition to turn the visit into a test of our dog's tolerance for November.

The name belongs to Emmanuelle Betham, who is French; the Mexican food followed her and her husband Bill's travels in Mexico. Bill was already a chef, with Paris, Sydney and Durban behind him, when they opened the restaurant. That history explains a plate we might otherwise find puzzling. We order the duck breast with mole, mango salsa and Parmesan mash, £22.50. It is an unembarrassed meeting of the two sides of the business, with the richness of duck and cheese occupying the space around a sauce made from three kinds of chilli, tomatoes, spices, fruit, nuts and dark chocolate. To call this simply a chocolate sauce would be rather like describing a Christmas pudding as something containing flour. Chocolate is one contributor to the mixture, and the rest of it matters.

We draw some mash through the mole before returning to the duck. The dish gives us a useful way into the restaurant's appeal: mild potato gives the sauce room to register. Bill and Emmanuelle still own the place, and the same freedom extends across the menu. Salmon comes with vatapá, the Brazilian preparation involving prawns, coconut, nuts and ginger, while the lamb stew takes its cue from the Yucatán, using achiote, garlic and citrus. Achiote is a seasoning based on annatto seeds; here it belongs with orange and lime in a dish that offers a different direction from the duck's dark sauce. The recurring combinations of fruit, chilli and rich meat or fish make the menu easier to navigate: choose the mole for its darker sauce, the lamb for citrus and the salmon for coconut.

At the other end of the table we assemble fajitas. The shared portions are priced for two: £32.50 for mushrooms, £44.50 for duck or lamb, and £40 for the pan-fried chicken breast. This is the more sociable way to eat, involving tortillas and separate decisions about each mouthful; it also occupies more of the table. With the dog beside our feet, we keep the lead clear of the chair legs before beginning. For a less elaborate lunch, pulled-pork enchiladas with mole, rice, beans, salad and guacamole cost £16.25. That is a useful way to explore the sauce if a duck main and a succession of extras would stretch the budget.

The frozen lime margarita is £11.50, made with gold tequila, triple sec and lime. We choose it without the optional extra chilli: there is enough going on in the food. Someone more interested in wine can drink Domaine Gayda's Flying Solo Grenache Blanc for £5.75 a 125ml glass or £26 a bottle. Monday to Friday, the 5–6pm happy hour halves the price of frozen cocktails, beer and wine by the glass; it does not cover every drink on the list. The weekday set menu, available from noon until 6pm, costs £24 for two courses or £29 for three. These overlapping offers make a late lunch a particularly sensible use of an afternoon, provided the terrace is in service.

Churros and dulce de leche, £8, finish our meal: fried pastry to draw through thick milk caramel. Mole, tortillas, tequila and caramel have taken us through a full meal with the dog alongside us. Book specifically for the terrace, check that it is operating and retain another plan if the weather changes. The limitation is substantial; within it, Café des Amis gives us an unusually distinctive meal at prices that still allow an unplanned pudding.

3. The Refectory Kitchen

16 St Dunstan's Street, Canterbury, CT2 8AF.

At the Refectory Kitchen, we put breakfast before sightseeing. The room has exposed brick, wooden chairs and a substantial old fireplace, with a stove occupying the opening and logs stacked around it. It is a small place, which becomes immediately relevant as we fit ourselves, the dog and our belongings around a table. Dogs are welcomed indoors, but a café can be friendly without possessing an inexhaustible supply of floor. We keep the dog close and take a moment over where his lead will lie before opening the menu. The practical reward is breakfast together under a roof, beginning at eight in the morning.

Brothers Dan and Graham took on a sandwich shop here in 2003, then turned it into the Refectory Kitchen nine years later. The progression is still visible in what the kitchen chooses to make itself. There are housemade beans with the cooked breakfast, house-smoked salmon and, most interestingly for our purposes, merguez sausages. The name ‘Green Eggs and Lamb’ promises a small literary joke. At £13.50, the actual plate makes a more substantial offer: the sausages with scrambled eggs, sourdough, zhoug and pickled red cabbage. We order it, along with coffee, and move our bag away from the dog as we settle into the meal.

Merguez are the spiced lamb or beef sausages of North Africa; here, the dish's name gives the meat away. Zhoug is a Yemeni chilli-and-herb sauce, commonly green with coriander. Putting the two together takes breakfast towards a different set of flavours while leaving its basic comforts intact. We gather sausage, egg and a little cabbage on the fork: the richness has both a sharp accompaniment and a green, pungent one. That is a more convincing alteration to breakfast than merely making every component bigger. It also gives us a reason to choose this café rather than stop at whichever window first advertises eggs.

For a sweeter appetite, the £16 Stateside brings a homemade waffle, smoked streaky bacon, a sausage patty, scrambled egg and maple syrup. The contrast is clear enough to settle a divided table. One plate uses pickles and herbs to interrupt the fat; the other actively invites sweet and savoury to mix. We keep our coffee unsweetened beside it. A vegan meal has been thought through separately, too: the £13.50 harissa tofu scramble includes avocado, pomegranate, coconut yoghurt and sourdough. The pomegranate and yoghurt give the spicy tofu its own accompaniments, making it a complete plate worth considering on its own terms.

The housemade hash brown, £2.60, is the extra to consider if breakfast is standing in for lunch. After noon, the £16.95 cauliflower bhaji burger offers a substantial vegetarian alternative: the fritter comes with pickled red cabbage, mango ketchup and coriander yoghurt, plus hand-cut, triple-cooked chips. The sweet mango and sour pickle take a familiar fried snack in a different direction from the usual cheese-and-burger-sauce treatment.

There is a firm limit to how much planning the Refectory will entertain. It takes no bookings, accepts no groups larger than six and will not divide a larger party between tables. Opening hours are 8am–3pm daily; the separate breakfast menu runs to noon on weekdays, with all-day brunch and a noon–3pm lunch menu alongside it. We finish our coffee, gather the lead and make room around the table again. Come early if waiting with the dog will be difficult, and choose another stop for a large group. For two people and a dog who can settle in a small room, the sausages, homemade accompaniments and early start make a compelling breakfast before Canterbury gets on with the day.

4. Kitch

4 St Peter's Street, Canterbury, CT1 2AT.

Off St Peter's Street, Kitch gives us a table with the dog and a coffee to begin. The café's small rooms make choosing a seat part of the visit; a large dog needs a different calculation from one who folds neatly under a chair. There is seating upstairs as well as downstairs, so mention the dog, and any difficulty with stairs, before being shown a table. Dogs are welcome inside. The question is how comfortably we can all fit, particularly when the café is busy. For the moment we draw the lead in, let the dog settle at our feet and give the food our attention.

Kitch's enthusiasm for wholegrains and natural ingredients might lead us to expect an austere morning. The menu soon dispels that fear. Banana and Biscoff oats sit near lemon-meringue pancakes, and one version of avocado toast can be ordered with chorizo. The interesting part is the range of meals available to people who eat differently from one another. Eggs can give way to turmeric tofu; a club sandwich can exchange chicken and bacon for roasted courgette and sweet-potato falafels; even the béchamel has a plant-based counterpart. For a mixed group, those substitutions greatly widen the choice of a meal we can all look forward to.

The Croque Pardon, £12.45, appeals partly for its name and mainly for what is inside it. The sandwich combines garlic-roasted courgette and spinach with béchamel, grated cheese and mustard, using malted bloomer bread. In the vegan version, soy béchamel and vegan cheese do the structural work. A croque relies on its sauce to turn bread and filling into something worth a knife and fork, so making that sauce adaptable matters. We cut through ours, keeping the accompanying salad within reach. The courgette gives us a vegetable filling substantial enough to warrant the treatment, and the mustard offers a reason for the richness. We can see why this particular sandwich merits a version for people who cannot eat the original dairy ingredients.

Our other savoury choice, the £12.65 fishcake Benedict, has little interest in restraint. Homemade sweet-potato and salmon fishcakes support poached eggs, avocado and hollandaise, replacing the usual bread beneath an already generous assembly. We take this as the more indulgent brunch choice; someone wanting a restrained lunch should read past the word salmon. For £11.95, the turmeric-cauliflower sandwich supplies hummus, tomato chutney, homemade pickles and salad. The hummus and pickles give it both a creamy filling and something sharp, an attractive balance for a vegetable sandwich.

To share, something from the sweet end of the menu: the £11.45 banana-bread bowl. Homemade banana bread comes with berries, banana, plain soy yoghurt, peanut butter, gluten-free granola and maple syrup; the whole dish is listed as vegan and gluten-free. We work a spoon through the yoghurt and bread, leaving the granola to contribute its own texture. This is an elaborate breakfast, and it should be chosen as one. The £10.45 oats, available warm or overnight, are hardly a token-priced alternative. A couple ordering the Croque Pardon and fishcake Benedict reaches £25.10 before drinks or extras, a fair indication of where Kitch sits in the city's café spending.

The advantage becomes clearest when we consider everyone at our table. A vegan can order a complete savoury breakfast, someone else can have bacon and eggs, and our dog remains with us indoors. The menu also marks many dishes as having gluten-free versions, although anyone with an allergy needs to discuss the actual preparation and cross-contact requirements with the team. Kitch suits a small party willing to spend a little more on choice, particularly when dietary needs would otherwise make picking a café laborious. The Croque Pardon earns our attention because it preserves the pleasure of a proper hot sandwich while giving more people a way to order it.