North Yorkshire could be the UK's next great food break—here's why

I’m standing on a quiet country path in Hovingham, North Yorkshire, sniffing a pungent handful of wild mustard. Josh Overington, chef-proprietor of the village’s fine-dining restaurant Mýse, which also runs foraging courses, tugs me another treasure from the foliage — a tuft of citrussy fireweed.

The young chef, born in the nearby market town of Pocklington, explains that elderflower can be used to infuse a fermented kombucha drink. Pineapple weed — its taste akin to its namesake fruit — adds sweetness to a dessert. The shoots of an Alexander plant, “a forgotten vegetable” brought to Britain by the Romans, is nice stir-fried with seafood, says Josh, as he peels back its succulent layers.

Using foraged — and pickled or preserved — herbs to flavour British, and often Yorkshire, produce is a strong suit for Mýse. Its 18-course tasting menu features a marinated shrimp dish made with piquant salted rhubarb, and an earthy Jerusalem artichoke ice cream laced with nectar-sweet birch sap syrup from the historic Castle Howard Estate, nearby.

Mýse’s innovative use of the Howardian Hills’ larder is part of a vibrant local food scene — one of six Michelin-starred restaurants in the county, it’s a short drive west of Malton, Yorkshire’s self-styled culinary capital and home to countless artisan producers. All reasons why The Good Food Guide named this 79sq-mile National Landscape, along with the North York Moors town of Helmsley, its most exciting food destination in 2024.

Eager to explore further, I follow undulating roads around the town of Masham, on the fringes of the Yorkshire Dales, to reach the castellated Swinton Park Hotel. The Georgian property’s Manhattan-size estate is a rich source of meat, trout and game, while its four-acre kitchen garden provides around 35% of the produce for its two restaurants, plus Bivouac Café and Swinton Cookery School.

“We’re spoilt for choice,” says bearded Scot Struan Macintyre as we stroll the garden. Executive chef of Swinton Park’s Samuel’s Restaurant at the time of my visit, he’s since moved to the Grantham Arms in nearby Boroughbridge. “We get beautiful salad leaves, figs, kale, edible flowers and everything in between. It’s our job to make the most of it.” A recent ‘estate-to-plate’ delivery included a 70lb haul of asparagus, Struan tells me, as we pass straw bales planted with potatoes and hotel baths repurposed as plant containers.

Sustainable water usage and plant diversity have taken priority over aesthetics while transforming the plot from a tangle of thistles to an edible Eden. “We couldn’t get it in neat rows, like the Victorians, without huge amounts of labour,” says head gardener Dame Susan Cunliffe-Lister, whose son Mark, the 4th Earl of Swinton, runs the estate. “And, actually, this has worked much better,” the smiley octogenarian adds, plucking me a bonbon-sweet strawberry. “We grow unusual things like Siberian kiwifruits, Saskatoon berries and mashua, a climbing nasturtium with peppery tubers. Our garden is full of bees and butterflies.” Beside us, a mass of purple-hued chive flowers is abuzz.

Later, in the hotel’s contemporary restaurant The Terrace, I taste these pom-pom-like blooms — served in a tempura batter, with a punchy garlic emulsion. The next course is equally innovative and infinitely richer: a silky duck liver and Madeira custard, presented with a granola of toasted oats, sweet-dried cherries and a buttery, duck fat brioche.

Game is ubiquitous across the heathered North York Moors. The next day I drive east past fields bristling with red-faced pheasants, and after 30-odd miles reach The Star Inn at Harome — which is, appropriately enough, Michelin-starred. “My dad would shoot game, and local butchers and fishermen would swap meat, crab and lobster for the day’s shooting,” says the Star’s gregarious chef-patron Andrew Pern, as he shows me around the thatched 14th-century property. “We were surrounded by this brilliant pantry.” A farmer’s son and former rugby player raised near Whitby, Andrew started helping in the kitchen aged nine, when his mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. “I used [American chef] Robert Carrier recipes to make things like pheasant fricassee and woodcock terrine. A lot more appealing than having my hand up a sheep’s backside,” he says with a laugh.

After training in classic French cookery, Andrew honed what he describes as a “rich man, poor man” approach, adding luxurious touches to humble Yorkshire recipes and ingredients. A prime example is the way he transforms seasonal North Yorks Moors game into a ragout, with embers taglioni, Yorkshire blue, pickled ox tongue and garden lovage.

I sit fireside for a potted duck rillette starter, packed with juicy gooseberries and served with toothsome rounds of malt bread with black cherry ketchup and sticky treacle walnuts. For mains, I relish the sweet and briny flavours of a perfectly seared North Sea turbot fillet — topped with a plump poached langoustine, crispy calamari and a rich cockle- and mussel-flavoured sauce — and start to feel distinctly envious of the locals who get to eat here regularly. Over a fantastic finale of apple crumble and Yorkshire rhubarb tartelette with stem ginger custard, I learn more about the Grade II-listed inn’s storied walls.

After a 2021 fire that made national news headlines, The Star had its smoke-damaged ‘Mouseman’ furniture — wooden pieces featuring life-sized carvings of mice — restored by artisans related to their original craftsman, Robert Thompson, who refurbished the pub in the 1930s. Earlier chapters in the inn’s history feature visits by the 17th-century English Civil War leader Oliver Cromwell, as well as mead-guzzling monks en route to nearby monasteries.

My next stop, 10 miles west, faces the gothic ruins of one: 12th-century Byland Abbey. Its namesake Abbey Inn is the most affordable of three celebrated restaurants owned by chef Tommy Banks. I check in to one of three homely guest rooms before heading just over a mile northwest to its sister restaurant-with-rooms, the Michelin-starred Black Swan at Oldstead, to tour the regenerative no-dig market garden that supplies the menus at both properties. “We’re seasonal, but not how you might imagine,” says Alice Power, The Black Swan at Oldstead’s charismatic head chef. “There’s the time of abundance when there’s lots growing; the preservation season when you’re squirrelling away as much good stuff as possible; then the hunger gap when you lean on those preserves.”

Later, we visit the family’s preservation and fermentation stores, its shelves heaving with infused vinegars and honeys, and muslin-topped jars of miso. Alice shows me bags of green strawberries — salted in a similar way to Japanese umeboshi plums so they might “bring bright flavours” during the darker months — and opens hot cupboards to reveal caramelising ‘blackened’ apples.

During the 12-course tasting menu at The Black Swan — which also holds a Michelin green star, in recognition of its sustainable practices — I see this produce come to life. A brioche-like appetiser with fermented onion and silky chevin goat’s cheese packs a punch, while neon-green, garlic-drizzled nasturtium sits atop a surprising savoury porridge made with fermented grains, barbecued leeks and oozy confit hen’s egg. Standout sweets include a cooling yoghurt palate cleanser topped with blackcurrant leaf juice and frozen spruce tips — sweet, sour and zesty, all at once — and an elderflower sorbet, sprinkled with granita, which sings of the Yorkshire countryside.

The next morning, I take a bumpy utility vehicle ride across the Banks’ family’s Oldstead Grange Farm, which has a phenomenal vantage point over the pretty patchwork of fields that make up the Vale of York as well as the Kilburn White Horse, a 318ft-long figure cut into the hillside. I see real animals, too — including a herd of Dexter cows, whose flavourful beef goes into the Abbey Inn’s signature juicy burgers, and woolly Mangalitsa pigs, dubbed ‘the Wagyu of pork’ for their highly marbled meat, up to 20 times more expensive than a regular pork cut.

Livestock farming runs deep in this county’s DNA. My last stop is the market town of Malton, where animals have been bought and sold since the 18th century. Its former meat market The Shambles is now full of antique stores and independent boutiques. At the end of this lane, the deep melodies of a brass band reverberate as I reach a food market in the town square, its stalls brimming with thick-crusted pies, local cider and the wensleydale cheeses so beloved by animated national treasure Wallace.

Around the edges of the square, a shop window full of taxidermy game catches my eye — Derek Fox Butchers, run by the same family for more than 185 years. Once, game dealers like this would have raced to get the first grouse of the season down to London — but today some of the finest restaurants in the country are on their doorstep.

Four restaurants to try in North Yorkshire

1. Pignut & The Hare
Tom and Laurissa Heywood closed an acclaimed restaurant in Helmsley to reimagine Scawton’s 12th-century inn-with-rooms, and the couple’s ‘wastage course’ — made using offcuts — has become their trademark. All ingredients are ethically and locally sourced, so Yorkshire chicken, brill caught by small-scale fishers, and foraged or home-grown vegetables and herbs all make their way into this signature dish. Tasting menus from £65 per person.

2. The Abbey Inn
Dexter beef burgers, hogget shepherd’s pie and rare-breed charcuterie from the Banks’ farm are some of the standout dishes at this 19th-century inn, its cosy rooms and nooks hung with old Yorkshire maps. Linger over a pint of Masham’s Black Sheep Best bitter, or try soft drinks and cocktails — like a rhubarb and lavender negroni — made using harvested and preserved ingredients. Mains from £25.

3. The Durham Ox Inn
The prime Yorkshire chateaubriand is a Sunday favourite at Crayke village’s 300-year-old hilltop inn, which has stupendous views over the Vale of York. Eclectic dishes like ham hock terrine with Easingwold piccalilli and gruyère-topped queen scallops are on offer in the wood-beamed dining room, while for afters try crêpes suzette with Ryeburn of Helmsley ice cream. Evening mains from £17.

4. Samuel’s Restaurant
The floor-to-ceiling windows of this elegant dining room look out onto the Swinton Estate — the source of seasonal ‘fur and feather’ game, plus kitchen garden produce. A mussel starter might come with a moreish Yorkshire cider and smoked pancetta sauce, while the Nidderdale farm chicken — featuring a roasted breast and chicken leg croquette, topped with black garlic ketchup — is a standout main. Finish with the gin-infused Yorkshire strawberry trifle. Evening mains from £32.